Matt Guthmiller, well-known in general aviation for his popular YouTube channel and his around the world flight in a Bonanza when he was just 19, finds himself in a place he never thought he’d be: Co-starring in a hit television series on Disney Plus.
Called “The Worst Trip Around The World,” the series pairs Matt with Mexican comic Juanpa Zurita on wacky adventures at eight stops around the world.
The series opens with Juanpa mourning his 30th birthday and looking for an adventure. He contacts Disney to sell a show about traveling the world and Disney eventually connects him with Matt.
Matt had been speaking with Disney representatives since 2020 after company officials reached out saying they really enjoyed his YouTube channel and wanted to make a TV series like it.
“It turns out that Disney’s head of original content for Latin America is a pilot down in Miami who liked my YouTube channel,” Matt explains. “And so they wanted to do this show where we’d fly around the world and have different guests along the way.”
They originally pitched Matt once again flying his Bonanza around the world, but he said if they wanted other people in the plane that just wasn’t practical and instead suggested a TBM 850.
They seemed to be on board but then COVID happened and everything got delayed.
“Four years later they called me up and said, ‘hey, what if instead of a travel adventure documentary, it’s a comedy?”
“I said, ‘sure, that sounds great,’” he recalls. “And I was thinking at the time what do I care if the show’s funny? They’re giving me a TBM for a few months and paying me to fly it around the world.”
But the show is funny. In fact it’s laugh out loud funny.
That’s because of the manic personalities of Juanpa and his guests, but also because of the dichotomy of Juanpa’s personality and Matt’s.
The juxtaposition of the opposing personalities “worked fantastically well,” Matt says.
“Everybody else is bouncing off the walls and I’m the one saying ‘no, we can’t do that right now, we’re flying a plane.”
Having one or two extra people in the airplane was a lot different than flying around the world by himself in a Bonanza, he acknowledges.
“There’s so much going on,” he says, noting it’s not just the actors, but the producers and the cameras and all the moving pieces to make a comedy series.
What’s also interesting is that some of the dialogue is in Spanish, some in English, and in the first episode, which features Chingu Amiga, a South Korean social media influencer and comedian based in Mexico, in Korean. Since the action is so fast, subtitles are essential for those who only speak English.
As the series takes Matt, Juanpa, and his guests around the world, Matt is faced with flight planning around not only weather, but also production schedules, getting permits to fly into other countries, or do sightseeing flights in countries that just don’t have a lot of general aviation.
“You end up with five or six plans and nobody’s quite sure which one you’re going to end up on, so you just have to have another one in your back pocket in case the primary plan isn’t something they’ll actually let you do,” he says.
The TBM 850
Matt suggested using the TBM 850 for the series because of its range.
“The TBM makes so many things easier than the Bonanza because it’s just so much more capable,” he continues. “You’re going twice as fast, you can go up over weather, and you’ve obviously got plenty of power.”
But unlike the Bonanza, they found they couldn’t add ferry tanks to the TBM 850 for a variety of reasons. That wasn’t a problem until the leg from Japan to Alaska.
When flight planning first began, the idea was to go from Japan to Russia and then Alaska. Of course, that was scuttled by the war with Ukraine. That led to a lot of discussion on the best way to get from Japan to Alaska.
“Was it practical to add ferry tanks once we got to Japan? Turns out that adds a ton of costs. Should we fly back around the world the other way? Or wait three weeks in Japan for the perfect weather window where we had at least a 50 knot tailwind the whole way and reasonable weather on both ends to get from Japan to the Aleutian Islands nonstop?That’s what we ended up doing.”
“And then, just for fun, we set a world speed record from Japan to Anchorage with a stop at the Aleutians,” he adds. “I figured it’s not going to be that impressive a speed, but nobody else is going to go do this, so we might as well. It’ll probably never be broken in that category anyway.”
While he didn’t have experience flying the TBM 850 before the series, he notes it’s a “pretty straightforward airplane to fly.”
“It handles a lot like a Bonanza that’s a little bit heavier and a little bit faster, but I’ve got a bunch of experience in other turboprops and jets, including a lot of time in the L39. I got to race one of those at Reno a couple of years ago and do some instructing in them.”
He did spend a few hours with an instructor in the TBM and flew it quite a bit before filming actually began, he adds.
He notes there were several squawks that needed to be worked out before the trip around the world, but once the journey began, it was all minor stuff, such as changing a light bulb.
During the filming of the series, Matt estimates they spent about 170 hours in the air over six months.
“We’d fly somewhere, film there for a week, fly to the next place, film there for a week, do that three or four times, and then airline home for a couple weeks and then come back,” he explains.
And while he’s not an actor, Matt says he did do some genuine acting towards the end of the show.
“We needed a way to end something and they came to me and they asked how could this unfold? And I came up with something and wrote it and directed this little scene that we end with. When I saw it on the show I was like, ‘I guess I can act.’”
The show has become a hit for Disney Plus, taking the top spot for Spanish language shows and the third most popular show on Disney Plus worldwide.
“It’s extremely popular outside the US and hopefully that spills over into the US too,” he says.
The Best of the Worst
The best part of participating in the series was that it was a “grand adventure,” Matt says.
“We had so much fun because all these people are so entertaining and we had a good time,” he says, noting it was a lot different than flying around the world by himself because the production team handled a lot of the logistics.
Another bonus: “I got to bring my fiancee along for basically the entire thing. We spent six months exploring the world and having fun and eating really good food. I think I gained 20 or 30 pounds because we just ate our way around the world.”
The worst part of the trip?
“I hadn’t really thought too much about the worst, I guess, other than it’s in the title,” he muses.
Probably the worst was the “pucker factor” during the flight from Japan to Alaska, he says, because “everything had to go exactly the way it was planned.”
And back to the best: Matt was able to bring the newest addition to his family, his daughter Emmeline, to the Mexico City premiere of the series when she was just six months old.
“She’s goes everywhere with us,” he says. “She’s been flying since she was about two days old.”
For more information: MattGuthmiller.com, YouTube.com/@MattGuthmiller, DisneyPlus.com
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