Do you ever see any whales? Yeah it is whale season at the moment. In all my flying I've
never seen a whale from a plane so it's your lucky day i just spotted a pod over here. Are
you kidding? Really? Yeah! Good morning today on the channel just for a change we're in queensland
yes i'm up here on the gold coast for a bit of a family holiday the weather has been atrocious
but the weather's a lot better today so i've decided to drive about 20 minutes north of
where we're staying on the gold coast to a place called heckfield airport visit an
old friend of mine someone i've flown with before in this channel and also to try out
one of his new toys this is a new aircraft for me something something i've never flown before
all right errol you have to pay me like 20 grand to wear this shirt as well to advertise the bush
cat on youtube it's not cheap so i'm back at heckfield airport last time i was here errol
it was right before covid yeah aeryl showed me the sling tsi which is an excellent aircraft but
at the end of the video do you remember you said to me oh we've got this thing called a bush cat
and i should try and fly the bush cat we didn't have time to that day but today we're going to
be flying the bush cap you can go low you can go really slow you can basically land anywhere
it takes only about 60 to 70 meters for a takeoff and you can land it in about the
same distance so so these are the alaskan 26 inch tyres you can even go up to 32
i do think that for 29 inches i really have a nice one this type of tire very low pressure
in only about 0.4 psi but it will allow you to land on almost anything
as you can see it's uh low tide at the moment you guys have had so much rain recently haven't you
down here being two inches above sea level this airfield gets uh a lot of water yeah but you've
got nice big fat tires on this thing that's the thing yeah just fail over there really
just plow through the mud you're all right thanks for watching 22 28 entering rolling
two eight i think it's one thousand foot over here uh you are strapped in uh doors closed
everything selected look good yeah yep all good
85 82 turning base runway 2-8 touching
that's a pretty steep angle of climb there that is it yeah take the flaps away and there we are
back to the cruise that's cool what airspeed were you climbing it there that was pretty slow trying
to aim for like 30 knots 30 knots right we've got the two of us 55 liters of fuel yep thousand foot
a minute at 30 knots yeah that's incredible yeah 30 knots my aircraft would be back down on the
ground again in a field somewhere dude i can't do that you were the first guys that i know of in the
world that actually fitted an inflight adjustable propeller on them so we used the air master with
airmaster prop system with the whirlwind blades so it gives you a little bit more takeoff performance
and slightly more in the cruise but it's a dirty airframe so you're not going to get that much
speed out of it but yeah comfortably you're going to do about 85 to 88 knots in the cruise
there's cruising along doing 65 with the doors on we can go up to 85 knots okay we're burning
20 liters an hour between 17 and 20 liters an hour with a 100 liter fuel tank best fuel gauge ever
yep oh yeah that's so good isn't it you can literally just see it there yeah no dip stick
required well did you want to play it i'd love to first of all it's all yours all right throttle on
the armrest um so it feels a little heavy on the controls very effective so you don't need
much input which is uh quite fast i don't like the lighter ones where it's a bit like i love a
diamond don't get me wrong they're great aircraft but they're quite light on the controls yeah it
feels like you you're too twitchy to fight that's right yeah small movements make big movements for
the aircraft but um but actually quite like it that you have to move the aircraft directly
through the air i actually prefer that it feels a lot more stable i'm not i mean i'm sitting there
doing this thing yeah yeah so large rudder as well you'll feel uh you can really work the run on it
i'm a serious pilot i don't use the rudder what are you talking about i don't even know what
those pedals are for so if the engine you put an engine in for five thousand you say
do you mind saying how much an aircraft like this might actually cost if someone was interested
if you built one like this with a second ant engine you're probably looking about eighty
five thousand dollars totally completed if you're going to fit a brand new engine you're looking at
just over a hundred thousand dollars factory built for you around about 135 for 85 thousand
dollars you can have a whole load of flying fun 85 000 is like my annual maintenance on the series
it feels like it sometimes anyway do you ever see any whales yeah it is well a season
at the moment um i see all the boats are there should be a couple whales jumping uh
but now they're a bit far so it's your lucky day i've just spotted a pod over here
are you kidding oh this is this will be a big moment for me not just here oh my god yes
thank you thank you so much oh my god this like this has changed the whole video this
is just gonna be about the whales now it's nothing to do with the plane oh my god
okay seriously you don't understand how big a deal
yeah it's not the usual tail splash uh it doesn't matter it doesn't matter it's just the fact that
there's actually whales down there and i've seen them thank you so much thank you so much
oh you don't understand what that means to me literally like 20 years up in the air
oh man i've never ever seen that with my own eyes that's brilliant thank you for work as well
and i should be getting the uh the eddies off the buildings yeah that's the hardest thing
about doing youtube aviation is holding the camera still at moments like this
and this is q1 that's where we're staying oh really yeah so my wife should be in
there at the moment hopefully filming this i just told her that it will be coming past
it runs on mo gas because it's a rotax engine what sort of um range can you get
so we've got 95 liters uh useful you can and and generally if you look at about 17 liters per hour
you can expect to get almost five hours of endurance about 500 nautical miles
which is which is pretty decent you know i mean we fly to air shows with it and you know
like narrow mine he's about three and a half hours flying from here no problem at all yeah yeah
yeah look at the size of some of these boats there's a lot of money around here as well
isn't it there really is yeah all right can i take the controls one more time thank you okay
yeah next time uh we'll take the doors off look on play up here again
yeah that'd be fun actually basically land it and get the drone out or something yeah i'll
get some aerial stuff definitely all right there is your aircraft may i take us home
you will see there are two bushcat aircraft behind us the tail dragger which is the one we're flying
today but there's two options there's a tricycle here as well yeah the tricycle geared version has
got nice big wheels as well so just as capable of airport first of all they're extremely easy
to bolt you need very very basic tools however if you ask me which one to me looks more sexy
of course it's for tails it looks like it's got the wheel in the right place yeah
yeah i hope you got some good shots oh i just wish we had more time ah that's so funny honestly i
think i think i got a few shots on here but i got definitely got bits on the phone but to be honest
it's just the experience of seeing it yourself you know it's one thing to capture it on a camera but
the fact that we're up here in a small plane on our own
we can just circle around that under our own steam that's the special bit
you