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Help me narrow down my choices for an Alaska Bush plane.

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akschu

Member
Joined
Apr 12, 2007
Messages
7
Location
Big Lake, Alaska
Group,

I am looking to build a kit plane and I know pretty much what I want it to do, but there are a few options so I need help narrowing it down.

Design goals:
Inexpensive to fly. I would like ~5gph.
Light weight. Fabric.
2 Seat side by side. (Much better for my wife)
Good useful load. (It may see a 1/4 of a moose or gear)
Good STOL performance.
Good documentation and support.
Decent cruse (yes I know it's a trade-off, but would like 100+ mph)
Option for floats.
Tail dragger.
Foldable wing so that I can store it in my garage if we have a wind storm.
Try to keep it in the $40k range complete.

From what I can tell this narrows the list down to aircraft using the 912s rotax, or jabiru. There is the kitfox, justaircraft, airdale, and rans (if I can convert to tail dragger).

Now I've talked to a lot of locals and am finding that airplanes are worse than cars when it comes to opinions. It's basically the ford/chevy argument but worse. In a single day I had someone tell me that the kitfox is junk and the justaircraft was a nice airplane, and someone else tell me the exact opposite.

The problem I'm running into is how to discern what to buy. Talking to people seems useless because everyone has an opinion formed by one airplane they saw 10 years ago.

To try and sort this out my wife surprised me with tickets to Oshkosh this year so I'll be able to look at everything, but even then I'm not sure what I'm looking at because this is my first airplane.

So the question is, which airplanes do you guys (being much more up to date on the market offerings) think about the airplanes mentioned, and do you have any suggestions on how to narrow it down and what to look for when I get to Oshkosh? Any thoughts on how to not go into overload with I get to Oshkosh?

Thanks for any help you can send.

schu
 
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