There is a very good chance my dad stood behind this author and handed Bede the next check. I'm 100% sure he put down a deposit on some kit plane (while, by his own admission, he was living in an apartment), and 100% sure he was going to EAA in the 1970s. I'm just just not sure if it was a BD-5. I'll have to ask him.On August 2, 1972, standing near a taxiway at Wittman Field in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, I pressed a check for $200 into the hand of a short, fat guy in a red shirt.
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.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.
My dad did indeed have a deposit down for a BD-5. It led him down a rabbit hole of looking up websites about it and what's being done with the planes now. He really enjoyed that, so thank you for posting this article. It brought a 73 year old man happiness while he reminisced about when he used to fly and dreamed of owning his own plane. He only ever flew single engine planes and was in a flying club in rural Wisconsin. I think the club owned a plane. He never had his own and either flew the club's plane or rented. He would have been flying in to Wittman Field for the fly-in back then. We went many years as kids, but driving. I remember seeing the F-117 shortly after it was made public. I probably saw an SR-71 but don't really remember. I do remember hearing what we think was a sonic boom at home that year which we speculated was the SR-71 flying in and maybe going a bit too fast over the farms and small towns in central Wisconsin. I might be getting old enough to reminisce myself.