74-Year-Old Builds Own Plane to Honor His Dad's Dream

When Len Neale straps on his flight goggles and takes to the sky in his handmade plane, he's keeping a promise to a father who never got the chance to fly.

The 74-year-old retired power station worker from Biloela, Central Queensland, spent seven years building "The Spirit of Smoky Creek," a plane he still pilots every week. But the real story started decades earlier, when his father dreamed of building an aircraft big enough to sit in.

His dad even bought expensive Irish linen to cover the wings of a future project. But marriage and raising a family meant those plans never took off, and the linen became bedsheets instead.

When his father died in 1989, Neale decided to fulfill that lifelong dream. As a fitter and turner by trade, he had the metalworking skills, but learning woodwork proved challenging.

"My old friend Kev would say, 'Len, I think you should do that bit again,'" Neale recalls of his mentor, a World War II Air Force veteran who guided him through the trickiest parts. Together, they brought the vision to life.

The J6 Karatoo features an Australian Jabiru engine and has logged over 700 flying hours in the past decade. "She's a delight to fly," Neale says, embodying his philosophy: "If I build it, I test fly it, and a faint heart never won a fair maiden."

But Neale didn't stop there. He also restored "Miss Sandgate," an Australian-built plane from 1936 originally created by Vladimir Slyusarenko, a Russian immigrant who fled the revolution. Neale's brother and friend Kev found it sitting forgotten in a Gympie shed.

Sunny's Take

The restoration took 30 years of patient work, and Neale loved the plane so much that when his third child arrived midway through the project, he named his son Cameron Heath after the aircraft's American design inspiration. "There's lots of aeroplanes named after people, but not too many people named after an aeroplane," he laughs.

Neale joins over 1,700 Australians who've registered amateur-built aircraft with aviation authorities, with thousands more flying through approved organizations. His friend Myles Breitkreutz, president of the Sports Aircraft Association of Australia, calls him an "aviation nut" and praises the J6 Karatoo as "a beautiful little aeroplane."

Though Neale recently deregistered Miss Sandgate in favor of his more comfortable newer plane, he still takes to the skies weekly. "On a real calm day, it's smooth as silk," he says. "It's like going to heaven and back."