I’ve been interested in airplanes since I was a young kid. Maybe because my father was an aerospace engineer.

So I read about Burt Rutan and his VariEze and Long-EZ kit plane canard designs and dreamt that some day I would grow up and build one. But life took me more in the direction of math and computers and away from airplanes for the most part. I still occasionally dream about getting a pilots license and maybe even building a kit plane. Now, this dream seems to have evolved with my land development projects, so now I dream of one day moving out of the big city and buying a large plot of land out in the provinces where we can build it out so that we can live entirely off grid. And maybe build a little airstrip to fly back to Bangkok once a month to buy groceries, eat at restaurants, and otherwise enjoy the benefits of an urban environment.

The experimental kit airplanes I’ve always dreamed of are ones like the Long-EZ and the Kitfox. But the Kitfox, which is a short runway kinda plane still needs something like 1500ft (450m) of runway, so if we round it up to 500m, then a 500m x 20m runway = 6.25 rai. In a reasonably nice and still somewhat convenient area in the provinces, this might cost about 2 million THB/rai, so at 12.5 million THB for a hobby runway, we can basically forget that idea. 🙂

But that was until this weekend.

We took a little trip out to Ratchaburi, and as I normally do in the car on road-trips back from the provinces, I began dreaming about how cool it would be if we could fly a small GA (general aviation) aircraft back from our trip. So I began whittling away the time looking back at the planes I won’t be landing and taking off from the airstrip I won’t be building. That was when I stumbled across the SuperSTOL. Introduced in 2012, it makes the dream of low cost STOL (short take-off and landing) experimental kit airplanes a reality.

Here is a video of a competition winner flying a SuperSTOL in 2016:

This guy lands the plane in 27ft (~8m) and looks like he takes off in about the same. It is almost cartoonish to watch.

I know I won’t be doing this kind of thing myself. I certainly can’t build a runway on the assumption that I can literally pull off precision award winning flying every take-off and landing. But it is still pretty amazing to consider that this is even possible in such a plane. It looks like this guy takes off and lands an airplane in a patch of ground smaller than a normal helipad.

This is made possible by some interesting leading-edge slats on the wing and what looks like ATV shock absorbers and balloon tires on the landing gear allowing the plane to practically fall out of the sky onto the runway without damaging itself.

This article from Flying magazine suggests the normal takeoff distance is 275 feet and landing distance is 100 feet. Those numbers assume you have a clear approach (like a body of water), which is plausible if you buy the land with this purpose in mind. So at 300 ft (90m), a 90m x 20m runway comes out to about 1.1 rai, or about 2.2 million THB. Not chump change, for sure, but no longer totally implausible. (Cheaper than the price of the plane.) And given the fact that the SuperSTOL can land in a field, this land can be dual use for grazing animals, etc.

And for my own future reference, I stumbled across this page written by a guy who imported a very similar aircraft to Thailand:
http://thaiaerosport.com/import-airplane-thailand

The plane he imported is the Highlander. This plane is built by the same manufacturer as the SuperSTOL, and is actually the kit plane that the SuperSTOL was derived from. He makes it seem like importing the plane was a relatively straightforward process, at least by Thai bureaucracy standards. (We’ve dealt with worse bureaucratic exercises in the course of our regular business operations here.) And one of the most interesting datapoints in the article is that the import duties into Thailand on aircraft is only 5%. Compared to the 100-200% on automobiles, this is downright affordable! Nothing here to rule out this idea.

Okay, so maybe all of this is still pie in the sky. I’m just dreaming about numbers on the page at this point, with no real plan to actually do any of this. But big plans have always started with big dreams. I’ll give it a few years to percolate through my brain, and see if life takes me in that direction or not. But even as a dream, this new generation of STOL planes makes the dream just a little bit easier to dream about. 🙂