Gippsland GA200 Fatman

The Gippsland GA200 Fatman is a single-engine, low-wing agricultural aircraft designed and built in Australia by Gippsland Aeronautics, now trading as GippsAero, at Latrobe Valley Airport in Victoria. It was developed loosely from the Piper Pawnee, and its first two prototypes were built from damaged Pawnee airframes, while the third was the first all-original airframe. The Australian Civil Aviation Authority issued its Certificate of Type Approval on 1 March 1991, the first issued for a wholly new aircraft design in Australia since the GAF Nomad some twenty years earlier. The airframe combines a strut-braced all-metal wing with a welded chromium molybdenum steel tube fuselage, with the pilot seated behind and above a hopper of about 1,070 litres and a second seat beside the pilot for a loader driver or a farmer. The standard aircraft is powered by a 190 kW (250 hp) Lycoming six-cylinder piston engine. Variants are the dual-control Ag-trainer, of which three were built, the GA200B with extended wingtips, and the GA200C with an up-rated engine and constant-speed propeller. About 50 were built, 28 of them exported, before production was scaled back in the late 1990s to make way for the GA8 Airvan.