THANKS TO YOUTUBE, THE Valdez STOL Competition has a worldwide
audience among those who love to watch strangely modified airplanes
land and take off in the shortest distance. Mostly it’s the “extreme”
aircraft that make the editing cut, but Paul Claus, a longtime Valdez
competitor with 27,000 bush hours logged, says, “The highly modified
aircraft represent a tiny percentage of the aircraft flying in Alaska.
Even those pilots flying the bush regularly are usually flying basically
stock airplanes. But they fly them well.”
Wayne’s instrument panel is made of carbon fiber for lightness.
Paul should know what he’s talking
about: This year he won three out of the
four categories—“Heavy Touring” in a
Cessna 185; “Alternate Bush” (
anything-goes experimental category) in a Cub
Crafters Carbon Cub; and “Normal Bush”
in a mostly stock, though thoroughly lightened, 160-hp Super Cub.
“The key,” says Paul, who wasn’t yet
24-hours-old when his parents bundled him
into a Super Cub and flew him back to their
Alaska homestead, “is precision. You have to be
able to consistently put the airplane right on
the spot where you want it at a minimum
speed, and that means making every move as
precisely as you can.”
So, while he’s saying it’s the pilot who
makes the difference, in his next breath he
begins extolling the features of his Super
Cub…aka the “Alpha” Cub. Although there
are non-Cub aircraft all over Alaska, the
Super Cub is still the bush airplane and the
jumping-off point for the wildly experimen-
tal aircraft.
About his Alpha Cub, Paul says, “It origi-
nally had a 125-hp Lycoming, but when we
wore that out, Dan’s Aircraft of Anchorage
replaced it with a 160-hp Lycoming.” Why a
