Kodiak 900 Is the SUV of the Skies

• The Kodiak 900 is a fast utility turboprop airplane that just got its FAA certification last July.

• It seats up to 10 people or it can be rearranged to carry things like dirt bikes.

• Starting price is a cool $3.5 million.

No matter how large and impressive your high-end sport utility vehicle is—even if it’s jacked up on 37s and has a really cool roof rack—it will not compare to a Kodiak 900.

The Kodiak 900 is a fast utility turboprop airplane able to take off in less than 1200 feet—that’s three football fields—and that can fly as far as 1300 miles (1129 nautical miles) on a tank if you keep the speed down to 180 mph (156 knots) at 12,000 feet. If you fly at the plane’s maximum speed of 242 mph, or 210 knots, you can go 1115 miles between fill ups. You can configure it any number of ways, from seating for 10 people and all their luggage but no motorcycles, to two people, two motorcycles and camping gear for a week. You can take off with as much as 8000 pounds of fuel, passengers, and cargo for a weekend retreat—or to make a quick exit, should civilization go completely south.

The Kodiak 900 is a new way to look at fun and utility. You could even use it commercially, or for an NGO operation like Doctors Without Borders or UNICEF or the Red Cross, which often have to land in short spaces with lots of supplies.

It’s similar to the Kodiak 100 that has been in production since 2007, but more upscale.

“To put it in car terms, since you’re a car reporter, the Kodiak 100 is like our Jeep Wrangler. It’s built as a bush plane. It’s designed to land anywhere, go anywhere, but it still has some refinements of a modern-day luxury utility airplane,” said my pilot for the day, Mark Brown, chief demo pilot and director of sales and marketing for Daher Aerospace, which makes the Kodiaks. “This Kodiak 900 is more like a top tier luxury SUV, let’s say a Cadillac Escalade. There’s some heritage of being able to do off-road type stuff; you can still land on grass, you can still land on gravel, but you're not landing quite as short. The Kodiak 100 can land on a gravel bar in Alaska, it really doesn’t even need to have even a runway.”

So take your pick, Alaska gravel bar or semi-civilized runway. Either one would be fun.

For my purposes, I showed up at Van Nuys Airport, a facility that has more Gulfstreams, Citations, and Dassaults per square foot than anywhere else in America. Parked there between a G650 and a Falcon 8X was the small but rugged-looking Kodiak 900, the pitbull of airplanes. I met pilot Brown, who gave me a walkaround of the 900.

There is a single turbine powering the five-blade composite propeller. It’s a Pratt & Whitney PT6A-140A that makes 900 hp, 150 more hp than the Pratt & Whitney PT6A-34 in the Kodiak 100. The 140A and 140AG are the engines of choice in similar planes like the Cessna Grand Caravan EX, Air Tractor 502XP (the world’s funnest crop duster), and Thrush 510P2+ (another powerfully fun crop duster). The engine is good for 4000 hours between overhauls but that can be extended to 8000 hours—or 12 years—depending on the operation, according to P&W literature.

“With more than 230,000 flying hours accumulated and a perfect record of reliability, the series is the new benchmark in its class,” Pratt & Whitney says of its PT6A-140A.