>airplane called the Cessna Caravan. It's an awesome plane, it can carry a (figurtive) ton of weight, it's fast, it's reliable, it can land on primitive fields, it has a long range, and it is incredibly well established wrt regulations, and processes.
that reminded - for the last 70+ years all over USSR/Russia that role has been carried out by this plane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-2 . They have been trying to modernize/replace it, and any good deep modernization or replacement project of it ends up along the lines of Cessna Caravan, though no deep modernization/replacement has succeeded yet because it is very hard to beat that combination of price, simplicity, ruggedness and utility. And i have hard time imagining what can successfully replace it in general. May be a range of smaller autonomous VTOL UAVs for much smaller payloads can take a bit of market from it. For passengers though nothing comes to mind, at least until electric planes get similar range and carrying capacity. I don't see blimps taking any of such a role though.
that reminded - for the last 70+ years all over USSR/Russia that role has been carried out by this plane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-2 . They have been trying to modernize/replace it, and any good deep modernization or replacement project of it ends up along the lines of Cessna Caravan, though no deep modernization/replacement has succeeded yet because it is very hard to beat that combination of price, simplicity, ruggedness and utility. And i have hard time imagining what can successfully replace it in general. May be a range of smaller autonomous VTOL UAVs for much smaller payloads can take a bit of market from it. For passengers though nothing comes to mind, at least until electric planes get similar range and carrying capacity. I don't see blimps taking any of such a role though.