Carbon Cub UL Flies Nearly 17,000 Nautical Miles Home to Australia

For most pilots taking delivery of a new aircraft on the opposite side of the world, the solution is relatively straightforward: put it in a container, load it onto a ship and wait for it to arrive. Australian pilot and aircraft owner David Green evidently had other ideas. Rather than dismantling his new CubCrafters Carbon Cub UL and shipping it from Washington State to Australia, Green climbed aboard, pointed the nose east and flew the aircraft home himself.

Green’s aircraft, a Carbon Cub UL nicknamed “Dusty” and registered N456DG, departed Yakima Air Terminal in Washington on July 22, beginning what would become a remarkable 30-day, approximately 16,800-nautical-mile journey to Port Macquarie in New South Wales.

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The route was anything but conventional. After leaving the CubCrafters factory, Green headed east and made an early stop at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh in Wisconsin, where the diminutive backcountry aircraft found itself among tens of thousands of aviation enthusiasts and some of the world's most sophisticated aircraft. From there, Dusty continued across North America before heading into Canada and eventually undertaking the first of several major ocean crossings.

The journey would take Green and his Carbon Cub through 16 countries and territories, with the route stretching from Washington through the United States and Canada, across the North Atlantic to Iceland and Europe, and then south and east through the Mediterranean, Middle East and Asia before finally reaching Australia.

Among the more demanding sectors was the 12-hour, 13-minute flight from Goose Bay in Canada to Reykjavik, Iceland. From there, the route continued through Scotland and Guernsey before turning south through Italy and Greece, then across Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Green subsequently crossed India, Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia before making the final push through Indonesia and into Australia.

After 22 substantive travel legs and 143 hours and 40 minutes of flying, Green finally arrived at Port Macquarie on August 20. The final sector, from Birdsville to Port Macquarie, took seven hours and nine minutes.

“Flying Dusty home from Yakima to Australia has been a heck of an adventure,” Green said following his arrival. “Nearly 17,000 nautical miles across oceans, continents, and some incredibly remote parts of the world, and the Carbon Cub just kept going. The aeroplane performed beautifully, and I trusted it every step of the way.”

That last point is perhaps more significant than the headline-grabbing mileage. The Carbon Cub UL is not a long-range transport aircraft designed specifically for intercontinental operations. It is, at heart, a backcountry machine designed to operate from short, rough and remote strips. Green’s flight therefore provides a rather spectacular demonstration of how much capability can be extracted from an aircraft designed around simplicity, light weight and short-field performance.

For CubCrafters, the accomplishment is a particularly useful demonstration of the aircraft’s reliability and versatility. “We focus on reliability and safety, and as a result, this is the kind of adventure the Carbon Cub is capable of,” said Brad Damm, Vice President of CubCrafters. “David could have put the aeroplane in a container and shipped it to Australia. Instead, he pointed the nose toward home and flew it more than halfway around the world.”

Backcountry pilots routinely operate well away from the infrastructure normally associated with aviation. A remote gravel bar or mountain strip may be hundreds of kilometres from the nearest major airport, maintenance facility or parts supplier. In that environment, confidence in the aircraft becomes every bit as important as its performance figures. “Very few people are ever going to take their backcountry airplane on an adventure like David’s,” Damm added. “But whether you’re crossing an ocean or heading into a remote strip, you need to trust your aircraft to go the distance.”

The Carbon Cub UL combines CubCrafters’ lightweight airframe with modern avionics and the turbocharged, electronically controlled Rotax 916 iS, giving the aircraft strong performance at altitude while retaining the efficiency and low-speed handling expected of the Carbon Cub family. System redundancy is also particularly relevant when an aircraft is being operated far from conventional support.

Green’s flight is not the first time the Carbon Cub UL has been taken well outside the normal operating envelope expected of a backcountry aircraft. In October 2025, a Carbon Cub UL flown by Jon Kotwicki climbed to a verified 37,609 feet over the California coast, establishing an unofficial world altitude record for a Cub-type aircraft and comfortably exceeding the previous 30,203-foot benchmark set by Caro Bayley in a Piper PA-18 Super Cub in 1951.

Then, in July 2026, another Carbon Cub UL, N21UL, completed the type’s first transatlantic crossing, flying approximately 6,900 nautical miles from Idaho to Poland. That expedition involved 94.5 flight hours and crossings of the United States, Canada, Greenland, Iceland and Europe.

Now Green’s Dusty has taken the concept considerably further. “Last year we took a Carbon Cub UL above 37,000 feet. This summer another one crossed the North Atlantic to Poland. Now David has flown one from our factory in Yakima all the way home to Australia,” Damm said.

There is an appealing irony in the achievement. An aircraft capable of making an intercontinental journey spanning almost 17,000 nautical miles remains fundamentally an aircraft intended to operate from places where conventional aircraft may struggle to go. Its party trick is not crossing oceans; it is getting airborne and back onto the ground in very little space.

“Records are fun, but ultimately these flights aren’t really about records,” Damm said. “They demonstrate what the aeroplane is capable of.”

And that is probably the most interesting aspect of Green’s adventure. The Carbon Cub UL was never intended to become a miniature airliner. Its appeal lies in its ability to combine lightweight construction, impressive short-field performance, useful payload and modern propulsion in an aircraft that can venture far beyond the end of the runway.

Green simply demonstrated that “far beyond” can, in the right hands, mean almost halfway around the planet.

The complete journey took 30 days, covered an estimated 16,800 nautical miles (19,300 statute miles/31,100 km) and included stops ranging from Oshkosh, Goose Bay and Reykjavik to Cairo, Abu Dhabi, Ahmedabad, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Broome. The final destination was Port Macquarie, where Dusty completed one of the most ambitious journeys ever undertaken by a Cub-type aircraft.

For the growing Carbon Cub UL community, it is another impressive entry in what is becoming a rather extraordinary record of achievement for an aircraft whose natural habitat is supposed to be the backcountry.