It's the Quest Kodiak, the lastest and greatest thing for the backcountry flying that missionaries do. A larger airplane than the Cessnas it will replace, it is designed to carry more cargo to the same remote airstrips the smaller planes have been using for years. It can seat 10 with a useful load of almost 3500 pounds. It has a thousand mile range and a takeoff ground roll of only 700 feet.
MAF (Mission Aviation Fellowship) plans on replacing 12 of their 54 planes with Kodiaks starting early next year. New Tribes Mission and Wycliffe Bible Translators have similar plans.
It's designed by Quest Aircraft Company, a company founded in part by a pilot from MAF, for the purpose of developing this plane for missionaries. For every 10 airplanes sold, the company intends to donate one Kodiak to the organizations that invested in them.
So Sean Cannon, what do you think. Will this plane be everything it's advertised to be? Will you be flying one anytime soon?
2 comments:
So the answer to your questions...yes, I do think it will be everything and more that they say it will be. In Ecuador for instance where we will be, they did a large study to see which airplane is more expensive to operate, the Cessna 206, or this new fire breathing dragon with 750 horsepower called the Kodiak. Well the findings were impressive. The Kodiak, on paper, is the same cost to operate as our 206's, at least for the type of flying in Ecuador. We are supposedly integrating our first Kodiaks in Papua, Indonesia because we are already have the most Turbine Cessnas there, the 208 Caravan. So will I ever fly one? I hope so. But it will probably be some time, like at least until my second term, which would be like 2009-10. Anyway the possibilities are exciting. Good job on the info. How did you find out about the Kodiak?
There was a nice little article in Christianity Today. Everything else I needed to know I learned from Google (Hey that sounds kinda like a book title, hmmm.).
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