AOPA Pilot Magazine - December 2012 - 47

“It was a beautiful little airplane, but engineering-wise, it was a mess,” Rutan recalled.
model almost as an afterthought to fill space next to the BD–4 kit—arguably the first kit-built aircraft ever made—he was actively selling at the time.
THE LITTLE BD–5 STOLE THE SHOW

Bede soon found himself fielding questions on a flatbed trailer provided by EAA founder Paul Poberezny that lifted the tiny aircraft into sight of an eager crowd. Bede said he had hoped to sell perhaps 1,000 aircraft in a decade, and was caught off guard by the outpouring of interest. “We were already up at 800 orders right then, and the airplane hadn’t even flown yet,” he recalled. “We literally had to go back to the drawing board.” Plans to produce a fiberglass skin were scrapped in favor of metal once it became obvious the demand would support the required tooling and production process. Bede assembled a team of pilots and designers to refine the engineering and test the aircraft. He also caught the eye of a young Rutan, who was employed by the U.S. Air Force. Bede offered Rutan a pilot’s job; Rutan said he convinced Bede to hire him as the flight test program engineer, and then recruited Les Berven—who became legendary in his own right—as the chief test pilot. “It was a beautiful little airplane, but engineering-wise, it was a mess,” Rutan recalled. As the basic aerodynamic problems with the original piston-powered, pusher-prop BD–5 were solved, Rutan moved to the jet version, and recalls playing a key role in the adaptation. It also provided Rutan’s introduction to Herb Iverson, who worked for the French turbine maker Microturbo that supplied the first-generation jet engines. The two would go on to found Scaled Composites. Rutan left the BD–5 project in 1974, returning to California as it became clear to him the company was headed for disaster.

Bede tried and failed to certify a production version, the BD–5D. He had taken thousands of orders—and deposits. The engine manufacturer chosen for the propeller version, Hirth, went bankrupt in 1975 with 3,000 engines on the production line awaiting pistons. Bede mortgaged his family home in an effort to pull the program out of a fiscal nosedive, and wound up losing it all. “The part that hurt me the most,” Bede recalled, is that “so many [customers] couldn’t finish it.” Hundreds of incomplete kits were shipped piecemeal, leaving owners to finish projects on their own after Bede’s bankruptcy. Only a few hundred were ever registered. There are 328 BD–5s of all types now on the FAA registry; a few more are scattered around the world. Some builders installed untested engines, sometimes with tragic results. The NTSB database includes 54 accidents involving BD–5 aircraft (all models); 19 were fatal, and 13 of those occurred on a first flight, or very early in the testing of a newly completed aircraft. Bede, an engineer by training, said he should have hired

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AOPA Pilot Magazine - December 2012

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