Almost as many have crashed and killed their pilots. The Aviation Safety Institute database shows a total of 25 fatal BD-5 crashes—12-15 percent of all BD-5s that ever flew. Many occurred on the first flight of newly finished aircraft, with engine failures and subsequent stalls a common thread. Of the first four homebuilt BD-5As, a version with shorter wings, three crashed and killed their builders on their first takeoffs. The fourth survived long enough to crash on its first landing.

I suspect we are all glad it never progressed beyond that.

I grew up at 7,500 feet. My father was a member of EAA for decades. Jim Bede was known as a charlatan in my house and the BD-5 was known as a gutless wonder because it lacked the power to so much as take off from our home airfield. There was someone from Texas who got paid to "fly in" to the Albuquerque air show in his BD-5J; it made the TV commercials every year. That he then took the wings off and slapped it on a waiting trailer to get home was less known. In my father's mind, the true "power move" was to slap a cockpit into the AGM-86 where the warhead lived; he never explained the formidable difficulty that cruise missiles are not designed to take off or land.

Nonetheless the BD-5 probably explains a lot of my love for the Folland Gnat.