Australian Aircraft Designer, Scott Winton.

To begin the Story of Scott Winton I have to backtrack to last months issue and the Story of Colin Winton.

By this time Colin's children were young adults and two of them, Eric and Glen, were into surfing in a big way. I surmise that Eric the bronzed surfer dude really didn't work so Eric became Scott (Eric's second name). Glen became Mr X and was a top echelon surfer, coming first in the Hawiian Pipeline. Glen today has a 'Mr X’ Steg line of surfboards and other Winton Design products.
Colin was still building boats when Scott and his brother Dean began working with Colin. When Colin started work on the Grasshopper Scott, Dean and Colin's wife Mickie assembled them. Building the Grasshopper was a true family business.
Flying For Fun, April 2010

This was the point where the professional lives of Colin and Scott began to diverge, but they still remained a family. Much of this article is in Colin’s words taken from the communications between us whilst I was researching the article. This is Colin’s account of what happened.

Scott came and worked with us putting the Grasshopper together and he worked well, but drove me mad by wanting to change things on the Grasshopper. I had sold about fifty before he came along and I was not game enough to change anything as up to date I never had any problems and that was a good thing in Aircraft.

After a time I could see that Scott was getting a bit dejected, so I said to Scott don’t change mine, make a plane of your own and you can make it however you like. That seemed to cool him off.
Scott moved to Bankstown with his family and after a year we went to his place and in the shed was a mould plug started for the Sapphire and I was extremely pleased as the Aircraft looked good.

Colin Winton

The only problem that Scott had with the Sapphire was that it was so successful that he did nothing but work. The rights to fit out the Sapphire where given to an engineer and Scott’s brother Dean did the fibre glassing. Even so it was years before Scott had any time to do anything else.
  The Sapphire was way ahead of it’s time in construction, looks and performance and is still selling well some twenty years after it first flew.
There was a side product to the Sapphire, the Ultrabat. This          came about because George Markey used his Sapphire to perform aerobatics. He did this very publicly and naturally received unwelcome attention from the authorities of the day.