Have you ever day dreamed about what it would be like to be a multi-millionare and own a private jet or a seaplane to whisk you off to a palm fringed tropical island? Of course you have, you're a flight simmer and us flight simmers day dream all the time about such things. We can escape to our virtual worlds for a hour or two and become airline pilots, jet fighter jocks or bush pilots any time we like.

My favourite fantasy involved the aforementioned seaplane and tropical island. I got to thinking "What would be the best plane to have?" It would need a decent speed and range to get me there in a reasonable time, after all, I'm a multi-millionaire and my time is valuable. Not too big, it needs to get into some pretty small airstrips and harbors. Did I say airstrips? It needs to be an amphibian then. So, a fast amphibian with STOL performance, enough room in the back to stretch out and relax and all the modern navaids of course. Hmmm, a King Air on floats maybe? Not really a practical proposition.

Fortunately for my day dream such a plane does exist though, because back in the 1980's a certain Professor Claudius Dornier Jr. designed and flew the Dornier Seastar. The Seastar has two Pratt & Whitney PT6A-112 500hp turboprop engines. The wings and hull are made of non-corrosive composite material, it has a clean, high lift, wing of advanced design, similar to the Dornier 228's, and a cabin for 6-12 passengers. Who wouldn't want one?

Unfortunately for Prof Dornier the late 1980's turned out to be not a good time to sell amphibians and for 20 years his brainchild existed only in the form of a few prototypes, however, in 2009 it was announced that a new company, Dornier Seaplanes, had been formed to manufacture the Seastar and that manufacture would commence in Quebec, Canada in 2011, the price would be about $6 million.

Well, 2011 has come and gone and things have gone a bit quiet on the Dornier Seaplane web site, one can only hope that things are still moving.

However, back in 2010 when my day dream started I was a virtual multi-millionaire, six million virtual dollars were easy to come by and I was determined to have my Seastar. As a member of the Premier Aircraft Design (PAD) team at the time all I had to do was to speak nicely to my colleague Jean-Pierre (J-P) and send him some photographs of my heart's desire. In due course J-P produced the goods and I set about painting it. The livery of the prototype D-ICKS looked pretty good to me so I stuck with that, and the real life registration appealed to my sense humor, maybe Prof Dornier shares my sense of humor, or maybe it means something else in German.

The performance specifications of the Seastar were in the public domain so I was able to tailor the PAD Seastar's air file to match the real life Seastar pretty closely.

All I had to do now was to load up the champagne and the shrimp cocktails and set off to explore the Caribbean for a suitable island.

Starting from Miami Tamiami Executive I figured that the Seastar's ample range of 1150 miles would get me to Montego Bay, Jamaica via the Bahamas island chain, in two and a half hours at 190 kts IAS cruising speed, even allowing for a diversion around Cuba, and still have nearly half a tank of juice left. Montego Bay would be a good base from which to explore the Caribbean.

With one notch of flaps the Seastar needs only 1400 feet for take off, fully loaded, so Tamiami's 5000 foot runway 9L was way below us by the time we flew over the threshold headed for the Bahamas.

A water landing at Montego Bay, just in time for lunch was now on the cards. Yes, my Seastar was a good choice.

A Few Facts About The Real Seastar

The Seastar is not like most general aviation seaplanes. Dornier says that it is a boat that flies rather than a plane adapted to float. The hull is a speedboat's hull, it has no floats on the wings because stability on the water is maintained by sponsons on each side of the hull. The sponsons are multi-purpose, they house buoyancy chambers, the fuel, the main wheels and also act as convenient platforms for entering and exiting from a boat alongside. The lack of wing floats also makes mooring alongside a pier or jetty a simpler procedure. Dornier say it is so stable in the water that it can be used in "speedboat mode" up to 60 knots!

You can see from the attached pictures that the Seastar's engines are mounted above the parasol wing, in-line. This arrangement has some obvious advantages: 1. The engines and propellers are out of the way of sea spray during water take offs and landings and 2. There is no yaw effect when flying on one engine. A pilot with time in the Cessna 337 Skymaster would feel at home in the Seastar. The Dornier Seaplane Company had one eye on the military/paramilitary market when they re-launched the Seastar and pointed out that one engine could easily be shut down to extend patrol or loiter time. I can't think of any disadvantages of this layout except perhaps the engine technicians would need a taller step ladder when doing the servicing.

A Few Facts About The PAD Seastar

This model was one of the few that we did on our own without expert help from a pilot or engineer who knew the plane. The reason was of course that very few people have actually seen a Seastar, let alone flown one or serviced one. Fortunately for us there are lots of photographs and drawings of the prototypes and the Dornier Seaplane company have published a lot of information about it. The model took approximately 180 man hours to produce. J-P used the FS Design Studio (FSDS) program to make the model, not everyone's cup of tea but J-P was comfortable with it. The panel was the hard part. The Seastar has, or will have if a standarized production model is ever produced, a "glass cockpit" with all electronic gauges. A few elements of the flying gauges already existed as freeware but most did not and J-P had to learn XML programming to make many of the gauges.

Flying the PAD Seastar is not difficult. She handles very responsively and predictably, in the air she feels very much like a DHC-2 Turbo Beaver and with the wheels down she can land on just about any air strip, paved or grass.

As with all floatplanes and seaplanes water landings need to be practised if you want to be able to stop at a pre-determined spot on the water. I can't do any better than to re-print this paragraph from Flying Magazine written by J. 'Mac' McClellan after he first flew the real Seastar in 2010.

"The approach is really just aiming into the wind and allowing the Seastar to settle in ground effect - or is that water effect - and then holding it there as you bring the power back and allow the hull to settle onto the surface. The visibility over the nose is so good I had no difficulty judging the correct attitude, and the landing worked out fine. I tried several more and found the Seastar to be amazingly easy to handle".

If you want a Seastar and don't already have the PAD model you can download it from the FlightSim.Com file library. The file names are seastar_3_x.zip (FSX) and seastar_3_9.zip (FS2004)

There are a couple of pretty good review videos of the PAD Seastar on youtube.com:

Bob May
Premier Aircraft Design