Who am I?

Dave Grosvenor - aeroplane nut - living just outside of Durban, South Africa. (S29°44’34.4” E030°49’35.6”)
I have a Private Pilot Licence and a Glider Pilot Licence, and for the last few years have been building an aeroplane in my garage at home.

The Bushbaby is a homebuilt kit aircraft supplied by Kitplanes for Africa. I purchased s/n 56 in 1997. The Bushbaby kit can be supplied as 5 sub kits; the Fuselage kit, Wing kit, Landing Gear kit, Cover and Finish kit and the Engine kit. This proved to be a great help as I bought the wing kit first. The wings incorporate the most work and this part of the kit is fairly inexpensive. While I built the wings I was able to save the money for the remainder of the kits. My building process has been fairly slow, broken by a 2 year work contract in the Sultanate of Oman and the arrival of our son, Mark, on 30 September 2001. He is already being trained as a copilot. To see my construction photos, click on the different parts of the Bushbaby in the picture to the right. Use your browsers Back button to return to the thumbnails.

Latest progress report  (updated 04/09/05 )

• A kit as opposed to a restoration project or plans built aeroplane – the need to have something to fly ASAP became important.
• Affordable. Anything imported from overseas became almost impractical because of the poor Rand-Dollar exchange rate.
• A two seater – much more sociable and fun then a single seater.
• A compromise between a “round the patch” aircraft and an aircraft that can actually take you places.
• A safe aircraft – the Bushbaby fits this category since it is a similar design to the well known Kitfox and Avid Flyer, some of the most popular homebuilts in the US market.
• Requiring a minimal amount of machinery and equipment – all adds to the expense of homebuilding.
• Within the capacity of someone who has loads of experience in flying and model building and flying as well as aerodynamics but who has never before built his own aeroplane.
• With reliable and affordable backup – being a South African kit solved this problem.
• Able to run on an affordable engine, since this can affect the total capital expenditure tremendously in homebuilt aircraft. A huge variety of engine options are available for the Bushbaby that has been built light, from the Rotax 582 to BMW and VW conversions to the Rotax 912S, on which we have decided.
• Time to build. All very well to have a beautiful aeroplane by the time you retire, but it would also be nice to fly sooner rather than later. Having said that, quoted numbers of hours to build always tend to be on the optimistic side.
• Affordable. Being able to buy the sub-kits, meant financial flexibility i.e. I bought the wing kit first, which gave us some breathing time before having to find money for the rest of the aeroplane.
• Then of course it should look good. That is for the wife to decide (as well as colour schemes)!