Why drive for hours on end when you can fly and have more fun? (Answer: Cuz it costs $3.5 million!)
- The Kodiak 900 is a fast utility turboprop airplane that just got its FAA certification last July.
- It seats up to 10 people or it can be rearranged to carry things like dirt bikes.
- Starting price is a cool $3.5 million.
No matter how large and impressive your high-end sport utility vehicle is—even if it’s jacked up on 37s and has a really cool roof rack—it will not compare to a Kodiak 900.
The Kodiak 900 is a fast utility turboprop airplane able to take off in less than 1200 feet—that’s three football fields—and that can fly as far as 1300 miles (1129 nautical miles) on a tank if you keep the speed down to 180 mph (156 knots) at 12,000 feet. If you fly at the plane’s maximum speed of 242 mph, or 210 knots, you can go 1115 miles between fill ups. You can configure it any number of ways, from seating for 10 people and all their luggage but no motorcycles, to two people, two motorcycles and camping gear for a week. You can take off with as much as 8000 pounds of fuel, passengers, and cargo for a weekend retreat—or to make a quick exit, should civilization go completely south.
The Kodiak 900 is a new way to look at fun and utility. You could even use it commercially, or for an NGO operation like Doctors Without Borders or UNICEF or the Red Cross, which often have to land in short spaces with lots of supplies.
The Kodiak 900 can still land on grass or gravel but it might land on pavement the most.
Kodiak
It’s similar to the Kodiak 100 that has been in production since 2007, but more upscale.
“To put it in car terms, since you’re a car reporter, the Kodiak 100 is like our Jeep Wrangler. It’s built as a bush plane. It’s designed to land anywhere, go anywhere, but it still has some refinements of a modern-day luxury utility airplane,” said my pilot for the day, Mark Brown, chief demo pilot and director of sales and marketing for Daher Aerospace, which makes the Kodiaks. “This Kodiak 900 is more like a top tier luxury SUV, let’s say a Cadillac Escalade. There’s some heritage of being able to do off-road type stuff; you can still land on grass, you can still land on gravel, but you’re not landing quite as short. The Kodiak 100 can land on a gravel bar in Alaska, it really doesn’t even need to have even a runway.”
So take your pick, Alaska gravel bar or semi-civilized runway. Either one would be fun.
Parked at Airport in the Sky on Catalina Island, just one of the places you can go in your Kodiak 900.
kodiak
For my purposes, I showed up at Van Nuys Airport, a facility that has more Gulfstreams, Citations, and Dassaults per square foot than anywhere else in America. Parked there between a G650 and a Falcon 8X was the small but rugged-looking Kodiak 900, the pitbull of airplanes. I met pilot Brown, who gave me a walkaround of the 900.
There is a single turbine powering the five-blade composite propeller. It’s a Pratt & Whitney PT6A-140A that makes 900 hp, 150 more hp than the Pratt & Whitney PT6A-34 in the Kodiak 100. The 140A and 140AG are the engines of choice in similar planes like the Cessna Grand Caravan EX, Air Tractor 502XP (the world’s funnest crop duster), and Thrush 510P2+ (another powerfully fun crop duster). The engine is good for 4000 hours between overhauls but that can be extended to 8000 hours—or 12 years—depending on the operation, according to P&W literature.
“With more than 230,000 flying hours accumulated and a perfect record of reliability, the series is the new benchmark in its class,” Pratt & Whitney says of its PT6A-140A.
Likewise, the wing structure of the Kodiak 900 incorporates cuffs to prevent stalling, as well as other design factors that prevent spins. In fact, the same basic design idea was used in the wings of the ICON A5 I got to fly a few years ago, where the pilot yanked back the stick and held it in place with that craft’s Rotax engine at full throttle to show that you could not stall that plane.
Behold the dash: a veritable Christmas tree of electronic screens. The avionics includes the Garmin G1000 NXi integrated avionics suite, GFC 700 autopilot, dual GPS, and on and on. Check out Kodiak.aero for the full list.
Kodiak
So I felt very safe as I climbed up the ladder into the 45-inch-high door sill on the co-pilot’s side. Once strapped into the four-point harness, I beheld the dash: a veritable Christmas tree of electronic screens. The avionics includes the Garmin G1000 NXi integrated avionics suite, GFC 700 autopilot, dual GPS, and on and on. Check out Kodiak.aero for the full list.
The turbine spun to life without hesitation, and before I knew it we were lifting off on runway 16L and into the skies over Los Angeles. To avoid the controlled air space around LAX, we headed northwest to Pt. Dume at 7500 feet. There, the plane turned itself left and aimed straight for the Airport in the Sky atop Catalina Island. The Kodiak 900 was relatively quiet (though, come to think of it, I never removed my headphones) and pleasantly vibration-free. Unless I rested an elbow on the windowsill I didn’t feel any vibration at all.
This was livin’.
In about a half hour Brown switched off the autopilot and brought the plane down seamlessly—in a crosswind, no less—onto the mountain-topped 3200-foot runway at Catallina’s Airport in the Sky. A little taxiing and we were soon parked and eating the local-specialty buffalo burgers like wealthy plane-owning plutocrats.
The Airport in the Sky wasn’t getting a lot of business that day and as such is an example of the peace and solitude you’ll get with a plane like this. It’ll take you to places where there are few, if any, people. Throw a dart at a map and fly there; chances are you could even have the place all to yourself, wherever the dart lands. Hot in the summer? Fly to the mountains. Cold in the winter? Fly to the desert. Go skiing in Jackson Hole. Go sunbathing in Palm Springs.
Suffice it to say, if I had the means, I’d buy me one of these.
All too soon we were firing up the PT6A-140A and climbing back up to 7500 feet, where, even before we got there, the autopilot took over. Looking down I saw a pod of dolphins frolicking in the ocean. Or maybe desperately trying to evade killer whales. Hard to say. If I’d owned this plane I could have flown down to investigate. The FAA doesn’t care how low you fly over the ocean.
Pilot Mark Brown makes it look easy. Maybe it is?
Kodiak
Passing back over Pt. Dume I got to take the controls. (Yipee!) It’s slower to respond than smaller planes I’ve flown, like the Cessna 172 and that ICON A5, but it was quicker at the stick than the Ford Trimotor I flew once. You have to time your movements to assume a delay, then execute with confidence. The yoke was stable and a little isolated in feel, as were the pedals, but I don’t have enough seat time to really compare. I’m going to assume the controls were perfect.
I was glad Brown was there to take over as we got closer to Van Nuys’ Runway 16R, the longer of VNY’s two runways. Brown landed farther down and in what seemed like just a couple hundred feet, though it was probably longer. The propeller blades change pitch on command and with the blades blowing forwards instead of back it was like a big air brake.
All too soon after landing and climbing out I realized, sadly and suddenly, that this was not my airplane. Brown was flying off to Chino and then to Scottsdale to meet with potential owners, guys who could come up with the $3.5 million starting price to own one of these. Even if I sold the house, cashed out the retirement and college funds and robbed a couple liquor stores, I couldn’t come up with that kind of dough. But maybe you can.
There are a lot of YouTube adventure-types driving around the West in those converted Sprinter vans thinking they’ve got it made. Ha! The way you have it made is to get one of these. Even checking the internets for prices on Cessna Grand Caravans, they’re almost as much used as this newly designed and manufactured airplane is new. You can get a used Kodiak 100 float plane for around $2 million. Or you could get a highly used Cessna 150 two-seater from $40-50k. You can get a paraglider for $3000. Southwest Airlines to Vegas is under 300 bucks. Life’s full of compromises.
Mark Vaughn Mark Vaughn grew up in a Ford family and spent many hours holding a trouble light over a straight-six miraculously fed by a single-barrel carburetor while his father cursed Ford, all its products and everyone who ever worked there.
Keyword: Kodiak 900 Is the SUV of the Skies