The most LEGENDARY BUSH plane ever built!

A self-taught engineer with no formal aviation qualifications built one of the most capable aircraft ever made in five months and one week, in his garage, without a team, without a factory. That aircraft could take off in less than 80 feet and climb at 4,200 feet per minute. This is the story of Draco and the man who built it. And to understand Draco you first need to understand Mike Patey, because the aircraft and the man are completely inseparable. You cannot explain one without the other. And the thing about Mike Patey is that his background is not what you would expect from someone who builds record-breaking aircraft. He does not have a degree from a prestigious aerospace engineering program. He was not hired out of college by Boeing or Lockheed. He started with a decking company. Mike Patey is a self-taught engineer, pilot, and entrepreneur from Utah. His father, Jim Patey, was an aircraft mechanic with the United States Air Force. From the age of eight, Mike was around aircraft restoration and repair in a way most people never are. He got his first flight lesson at eight years old. He dropped out of engineering school later in life, not because he could not keep up, but because, by his own account, it was too slow for him. The world around him simply did not move at the pace he needed to move at. At 15, he and his twin brother Mark started a deck manufacturing company called Deckit. Think about what it takes to run a manufacturing business with over 200 employees when you are not yet an adult. The operational discipline, the problem solving, the ability to figure things out faster than the situation changes around you. Those are exactly the qualities you need to build an aircraft in five months. Within a few years of starting Deckit, it employed over 200 people. By the time Draco was built, Mike had already built 12 aircraft, not kits assembled from a manual. Aircraft he designed, engineered, and fabricated himself. Each one was a step forward from the last. Each one taught him something that fed into the next. And he documents everything on YouTube, which is how Draco eventually became famous far beyond the aviation community. People who had never thought about experimental aircraft were watching a man build things in his workshop and genuinely could not look away. The story of Draco begins in 2006 at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, which is where a lot of aviation stories begin. Walking the flight line, Pati stumbled across a Wilga. For those who do not know the type, the PZL Wilga is a Polish high-wing monoplane designed in the 1960s specifically as a short takeoff and landing utility aircraft. Tough, practical, versatile. It was designed to tow gliders, serve as an air ambulance, operate from unprepared strips, and go wherever a small conventional aircraft simply could not. The original Wilga could take off in around 400 feet and land in 280. That, by the standards of its era, was genuinely impressive. But what made it special was not just the numbers, it was the philosophy. Every part of the design was oriented around the question, what if there is no airport? The one Pati found at Oshkosh was not for sale. He bought it anyway. The aircraft was serial number one of only 24 Wilga 2000 models ever built. Pati recognized what he had found and he was not going to walk away. He flew that aircraft for years, loved it, and got deeply familiar with both its extraordinary strengths and its limitations. He started taking it places that other pilots would not take it. Remote strips in the mountains of Utah and Nevada, high altitude backcountry airstrips, where a standard aircraft's performance margin would make the approach genuinely unpleasant. The Wilga handled it, but Pati was always pushing at the edges of what it could do, and he knew exactly where those edges were. The limitation that eventually led to Draco was the engine. In a Wilga 2000, that engine was a Lycoming 0540, a conventional piston flat six, producing 300 horsepower, fine for the original role. Not fine for what Pati wanted to do. He wanted to fly into remote mountain locations at high altitude with heavy loads in conditions that pushed everything to its limit. He wanted to take four people and a week's worth of gear into a valley at 14,000 feet density altitude and land in a field that was not a runway. And he wanted to be confident that if something went wrong, the aircraft had enough performance margin to get him back out. And then the engine failed in flight. When your engine fails over backcountry mountain terrain, you think carefully about what you would do differently. Pati thought about it. He sat with the question of what he actually needed from an aircraft. He needed an engine that did not stop. He needed performance at altitude because the places he wanted to go were not at sea level. He needed a payload that let him carry real people with real gear. And he needed takeoff and landing performance that would get him in and out of places that were not designed as airstrips. His answer was to build a different aircraft entirely. The build took five months and one week. That is the number that stops people when they first hear it. Because the aircraft Pati built in those five months is not a simple machine. It is a complete engineering transformation of the donor airframe. For comparison, Cessna's development timeline for a new aircraft model typically runs several years. Pati took five months, largely alone in his workshop, and produced something the world's most sophisticated aviation companies had not built. There is a line in plane and pilots coverage of Draco that captures Pati well. He dropped out of engineering school because it was too slow for him. Not because he could not keep up, because he was already ahead of the curriculum. That detail matters when you are trying to understand how someone builds a turboprop-powered STOL aircraft in five months. The answer is not brute effort alone, though there was certainly that. The answer is that the person doing the building thinks in a way that most formal processes are too slow to accommodate. The starting point was a Wilga 2000, the very last one ever built, coming off the production line in 2006 just before the factory stopped. Pati sourced this airframe and immediately started taking it apart in a way that would have horrified the people who built it. The engine came out first. In its place went a Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A28 turboprop producing 680 shaft horsepower. The stock Wilga engine produced 300 horsepower. Pati's replacement produced more than double that. The PT6 family are among the most reliable turboprop engines ever built, with a track record across decades of bush and utility aviation worldwide. De Havilland Twin Otters have been running them for 50 years. Cessna caravans running routes into remote communities across Africa and Asia. The PT6 has a reputation built on operational record in exactly the kind of environments Pati was designing for. Reliability was the entire point. This engine needed to go to places where there was no alternative if something went wrong. It needed to be an engine that simply did not stop. That engine drives a 102-inch four-bladed propeller. The diameter is eight and a half feet. You hear Draco long before you see it. Now, the PT6 installation was not just bolting a bigger engine onto an existing firewall. The firewall itself had to be redesigned. The engine mounts fabricated from scratch. The entire nose section reworked. Pati designed everything in computer-aided design software and fabricated many of the components himself. Carbon fiber parts replaced aluminum wherever weight savings could be made without compromising structure. Pati was doing stress calculations by hand and in software, checking everything against the flight loads the aircraft would experience. This is not guesswork. It is the same fundamental engineering that a certified manufacturer would do, just being done by one person in a workshop in Utah rather than by a team in a hangar in Wichita. The wing was completely rebuilt. The cord, the front-to-back width of the wing, was increased by a full foot compared to the standard Wilga wing. More cord means more wing area. More wing area means more lift at low speeds. And for a bush plane, more lift at low speeds means shorter takeoff runs, slower approach speeds, and the ability to land on surfaces that would be genuinely dangerous in anything else. Leading edge slats were added. Large flaps on the trailing edge. Draco could fly at speeds that would cause most aircraft to stop flying altogether. The fuel tanks were integrated into the main gear legs. It freed up fuselage space for payload, lowered the center of gravity slightly, and kept the handling consistent as fuel burned off. Massive bush tires for rough surfaces, rocky riverbeds, alpine meadows, desert playas, anywhere that was approximately flat and approximately solid. And then there is reverse thrust on a turboprop. On touchdown, Patey could immediately reverse propeller pitch and use engine thrust to actively stop the aircraft, rather than relying on brakes alone. Combined with the low approach speed, this gave Draco landing runs that observers consistently described as something they had never seen from a fixed-wing aircraft. The performance figures are worth stating clearly, because they are the numbers that made aviation professionals stop and look twice. Take-off roll. Under 80 feet on a standard surface. Rate of climb. 4,200 feet per minute. To put that in context, a Cessna 172 climbs at around 720 feet per minute. Draco climbs nearly six times faster. At that rate, it is through 10,000 feet before most light aircraft have finished their initial climb. Cruise speed. Approximately 160 knots. Service ceiling. 25,000 feet. Useful load approaching 3,000 pounds. Four people. Full camping gear. Survival equipment. Fuel for a long flight into mountain wilderness and back. That was the mission Patey built toward. The aircraft debuted at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh in 2018. It won the High Sierra STOL Drag competition, defeating Mike's own twin brother Mark, who had won the same competition the previous year in a Carbon Cub. The reception at Oshkosh was unlike anything seen for a home-built experimental aircraft. People stopped, watched, pulled out their phones. The crowds around Draco on static display were larger than crowds at some of the commercial aircraft. The YouTube numbers told the same story. Patey's channel had been steadily building through the build series. After Oshkosh, it exploded. The performance videos accumulated millions of views. Comment sections filled with people who had never thought about STOL aviation wanting to know how this was physically possible. Pilots with thousands of hours who had spent careers around short takeoff and landing aircraft left comments saying they had not believed what they were watching until they saw it a second time. That kind of reaction from people who know what they are talking about is different from the reaction of a general audience. Both groups were having it simultaneously. The crash happened in September of 2019, Reno Stead Airport, Nevada. The conditions were difficult, wind gusting to 38 knots with a crosswind component on the departure runway of around 18 knots. The Wilga-based airframe, despite all of Patey's modifications, was still a relatively light aircraft. Light aircraft and strong gusty crosswinds demand the absolute attention of the pilot. The takeoff began normally. A gust caught the aircraft, and it was over. The aircraft was destroyed. The crosswind component was approximately 18 knots, close to or exceeding the demonstrated limit for the airframe. Patey was not injured. Within days, he had posted a detailed account on his YouTube channel. He took full responsibility. He explained exactly what he believed had happened, what he should have done differently, and what others could learn from his mistake. A clear, honest account of a pilot making a bad decision. The response from the aviation community was largely respectful, and that is worth dwelling on for a moment. Aviation accident analysis is a field where the instinct to blame something external, a mechanical failure, a weather event, a runway condition, is powerful. Pilots are not immune to it. Patey did not do that. He watched the footage, he looked at the wind data, and he said, I made a bad decision. That was it. No hedging. Because what Patey did in the aftermath was the opposite of what people might have expected. The man who built the most famous experimental aircraft of his era also understood something important. Showing people what went wrong is as valuable as showing what went right. The aircraft was a total loss. Whether that rebuild has happened, and in what form, continues on his YouTube channel. What is documented is that after the crash, Patey began work on a different aircraft called Scrappy, another extreme STOL build, documented in full. The legacy of Draco extends well beyond the aircraft itself. In 2023, a startup called Draco Aircraft was founded in Warsaw, Poland. With Patey's enthusiastic authorization, the company acquired the intellectual property rights to the PZL Wilga from Airbus Poland. Patey transferred his modification designs. The former Airbus Poland senior vice president, Johannes von Thaden, became CEO. The former head of design for the Wilga at Airbus Poland joined as chief engineering advisor. The production Draco will use a Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A135A engine producing 750 shaft horsepower, an upgrade from Patey's original 680. Certification target 2028 by both EASA and the FAA. Projected price approximately 2.9 million US dollars. Takeoff run in the production configuration under 30 meters. The aircraft, a Utah entrepreneur, built in five months in his garage, is now a multi-million dollar international program backed by aerospace industry veterans. That is what happens when the engineering is actually right. Patey himself authorized all of this. He did not set up a competing company or try to control the commercialization. He worked with Draco aircraft, transferred his designs and expressed genuine enthusiasm about seeing his concepts certified and made available to pilots who were not prepared to build their own. That is a specific kind of generosity that is not always common among people whose work becomes famous. Two prototypes will be built by Majelitz Aviation Works in Poland, the same facility that originally produced the Wilga. The institute doing the engineering certification work, what Draco proved more than anything else is that the category of aircraft most people think of as impossible is often just unattempted. Every expert who saw Draco's performance figures for the first time had the same reaction. That cannot be right. You cannot take off in 80 feet in a fixed-wing aircraft of that size and weight. You cannot climb at 4,200 feet per minute in a propeller aircraft of that configuration. The numbers do not work. But the numbers did work because Patey had not accepted the constraints built into the standard Wilga design. A design that was itself already an exceptional STOL performer. He had looked at every single system and asked whether it could do more. The engine, much more. The wing, rebuilt for maximum low speed lift. The propeller, oversized for maximum thrust. The weight, reduced wherever possible. Every decision was intentional. Every modification solved a specific problem. Nothing was added because it looked good. Everything had a reason. When Patey chose to integrate fuel tanks into the gear legs rather than the standard fuselage position, that was not a styling choice. That was weight distribution, center of gravity management, and freeing up fuselage volume for payload. Three problems solved with one decision. And the result was an aircraft the aviation community had simply not seen before. Mike Patey did not have a formal engineering qualification. He did not have a factory, a team, or a certification budget. He had a problem he wanted to solve. How do you fly a family into genuinely remote mountain wilderness, safely, reliably, in an aircraft that can go where no other fixed-wing aircraft will? And he built the solution. The Wilga he founded Oshkosh in 2006, the one he convinced someone to sell him against their better judgment, became the foundation for the most famous experimental aircraft of the 21st century. That aircraft is gone now. But the ideas in it are in production in Poland. The videos of it flying are still accumulating views. And the conversation about what is actually possible in a short takeoff and landing aircraft, a conversation Draco forced the aviation community to have, is still going. Every time a new S-TOL competition happens, every time someone talks about what a well-modified turboprop bushplane can do, Draco is the reference point. Not because it was first in its category, but because it was so clearly and completely the best thing in its category that it became the thing you compare everything else to. Some things build a reputation that outlasts the object itself. Draco is very much one of those things. The numbers are still the numbers, and nobody has beaten them in the years since. That really does matter. If you found this one interesting, subscribe. Every week we cover the aircraft and the builders that deserve more attention than they get.