Microlight Aircraft of New Zealand - Skycraft Scouts (1)

 

Although I have postulated that Pete James’ McCullough powered Easy Riser was the first microlight to fly in New Zealand, in 1978, it is possible that an early version of the Skycraft Scout could lay claim to be the first microlight to fly here.  It would be great if someone out there with a very long memory could shed some light on our first Skycraft Scouts.

The Skycraft Scout (also sometimes called the Wheeler Scout) was designed in Australia by Ronald Wheeler of Sydney who put a motor on his earlier design Tweetie hang glider in 1972.  Wheeler was a yacht builder and he used yacht fittings and sailcloth in his design.  This was well before John Moody put an engine in his Easy Riser in the US in 1975.   Scouts had 2 axis controls for rudder and elevator and used a form of wing warping for control of the roll axis.

The specifications for the Scout Mk 3 are as follows:  length 17 feet 1 inch, wingspan (5.20 metres), wingspan 28 feet 9 inches ((8.77 metres) and the wing area was 109 square feet.  It was a very light machine with the empty weight being just 130 pounds (55 Kg) while the MAUW was 310 pounds ((141 Kg).  The Scout Mk 1 started off with a 14 HP Pixie Major engine but the Mk 3 had increased power with a 21 HP Robin engine as well as other improvements.  With 21 HP the cruising speed was 47 mph and the stall speed was 20 mph.   

Because of their small fuel tank they were around the patch flyers and that is probably why we don't have photos of many of them (and thus the following posts will have quite a lot of lists).  

What we do know about Scouts in New Zealand was that they were imported by a Dunedin firm L M Wright and Company and they reckoned they sold around 80 examples of which about 50 were registered.  Of course before 1982 microlights did not have to be registered in New Zealand.  So there were a whole lot of unregistered Scouts out there, some of them potentially before 1978 but we really don’t know.  The first examples were registered in March 1982.

This is a Tweetie hang glider flying in New Zealand,

and you can see that Ron Wheeler didn't have to do much to it to turn it into a Scout!

Of course the Scout is a single seater microlight which produces its own problems for people learning to fly one.  I remember a friend of mine telling me of his early experiences in flying a Scout at low level with his instructor shouting directions to him while riding a motorcycle alongside!

One unregistered Scout that I know about was flown at various locations on the Otago Peninsula in 1989.  This Scout was around when Geoff Williams was building and flying the last of his series of unregistered homebuilt aircraft. 

The Otago Peninsula Scout getting airborne from Blueskin Bay in 1989

 This picture was captioned “the Scout crashing again(!) at Hoopers Inlet”

Interestingly there has been a recent mini resurgence in Scout restoration with Ross Brodie at Rangitata Island restoring and registering ZK-FJI in February 2023 and at Wanganui Jonathan Mauchline has restored and registered 3 Scouts being ZK-RWW, ZK-JJN and  ZK-SLF (the last two were previously unregistered ones).