Bailey's Bird followed the adventures of a pilot and his teenage son, running a one-plane airline in Southeast Asia. According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, the series partook of some of the elements of John McCallum's earlier productions for Fauna Productions, 'except that the locale was the waterways, jungles and villages of South-East Asia rather than an Australian national park complete with kangaroos and other native fauna. Nevertheless the series again had a young boy, father and others much in the "kidult" formula of Skippy, with a series of familiar narrative situations.'
An international co-production, the program didn't match the success of Skippy: according to Moran, 'By the late 1970s, adventure narratives even of the kidult variety were no longer being made in 30-minute units, so that Bailey's Bird could only be screened in children's viewing time.'
