Single-engine floatplane

A single-engine floatplane banking over turquoise shallows, close enough to count the struts, held here with two press stills of a blue and white one at a jetty, two trailer flypasts and a trailer shot in a hangar.

The aircraft is banking left over clear water with a wooded shoreline and a strip of sand in the top left corner of the frame, shot from above and ahead of it. It is a high-wing monoplane: the wing sits on top of the fuselage, white with a yellow band edged by a thin black pinstripe on each side. There is one engine, in the nose, with a polished cowling ring around a yellow cowl, and the propeller is turning hard enough to blur into a disc.

Two full-length floats hang under the fuselage on cages of struts, with a boarding ladder running up from the left-hand float to the cabin door. The tail is conventional: one fin with a yellow top, a horizontal stabiliser either side. The cabin has square side windows and a door aft of the wing strut. A dark marking runs along one of the floats and does not resolve.

Two more press stills show a blue and white aircraft of the same layout. In the wider one it is moored at a wooden jetty with people standing on it, and the operator’s name reads on the nose in blue script, Brian’s; the marina whose own sign carries that name has a page here. The smaller line beneath the script and the registration on the fin sit under this site’s floor for lettering and are not read. The close-up shows the tail of that script, a possessive s, and the end of a word, rina, at a size that leaves no doubt, with a pilot in the seat and a figure at the door.

Three more come from the trailers. In Trailer 1 at 0:35 the aircraft is in the air over the same kind of water, the yellow wing bands showing from above. In Trailer 2 at 1:25.10 it stands in a dark hangar, backlit: a high wing over braced float struts, and a man with one foot up on a float and a case in his hands. And at 2:21.83 it passes low and backlit: a high wing, a radial engine in a round cowling with the hub visible, twin floats on cross-braced struts, and a run of registration-style capitals on the underside of the wing that does not resolve in the motion blur. We are treating all six as one type. Nothing proves that, and two liveries are in play: white and yellow in the air, white and blue at the jetty.

The GTA Wiki files this very press still, and the Trailer 1 flypast, as the Dodo, the Mammoth seaplane of GTA 5 and GTA Online, which it traces to a de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver with the tail, side windows and floats of a Cessna 185: one engine in the nose, like ours. Another database names a GTA 6 floatplane the Mammoth Streamer216 on a Twin Otter, a twin-engined aircraft, which ours is not. Neither name is written on the aircraft; the hypothesis block below carries the first, with its counter-argument.

How to recognise it

• High wing, white with a yellow band edged in black pinstripes
• One engine in the nose, yellow cowl inside a polished ring
• Two full-length floats on strut cages, ladder up to the cabin door
• Single fin with a yellow top, conventional tailplane
• Square cabin windows, door aft of the wing strut
• Brian's in blue script on the nose of the dock aircraft

The frame it comes from

The frame is a still from the official Press pack, which carries no timecode. It is 3840 by 2160, and the vehicle occupies 1267 by 777 of it. Also in it: the Leonida Keys.

How this was measured

These figures come from the dataset, not from the prose above. We measure everything and claim what counts. How we work

What we still do not know

• The lettering. There is a registration-style run on the wing in the Trailer 2 flypast and a marking on the float in the press shot. Neither resolves at full resolution, so we do not know whether the two carry the same registration, which is what would prove these are one aircraft rather than one model.
• Whether it is an amphibian. We can see floats; we cannot see whether wheels retract into them.
• Whether the blue and white aircraft at the dock is the same type as the yellow one in the air
• The registration on the fin of the dock aircraft, under the floor at this size
• Everything measured: top speed, capacity, price, where it spawns