The Thrill of Flying the World`s Smallest Jet

The Albuquerque Radio Control Club Newsletter
www.arcc.club
September 2015
AMA Chartered Club #2022
The Thrill of Flying the World’s Smallest Jet
Jim Bede and the 1975 BD-5 Jet Team
By Debbie Gary
Air & Space Magazine
August 2014
people sent deposits hoping for kits to
build or places in line for the production
model.
At the Experimental Aircraft
Last summer while I watched
Association’s AirVenture in Oshkosh,
Justin Lewis perform at an airshow in
Wisconsin, last July, Lewis told me that
his polished silver BD-5J, that old
seeing BD-5 jets in the 1980s and 1990s
feeling came back. I longed to strap
inspired him to fly. He also talked about
into a BD-5 jet again. I wanted to dive
building his own Flight Line model with
it along the show line, pull up vertical, Bede jets fly again! A-10 Air
Skeeter and Richard Karnes at BD-Micro
National Guard pilot Justin
gyrate through a Wild Turkey, drift
Technologies in Siletz, Oregon, one of
Lewis zooms at last year’s EAA
backward into a tail slide, bop the
the places where amateur builders can
AirVenture. (Lewis & Clark
gear up and down, then zoom past
get help putting a BD-5 together.
Performance,
LLC)
the airshow crowd the way we used
Because the Federal Aviation
to in 1975, when I was the third pilot
Administration classifies the BD-5 as “experimental,”
of the BD-5 Jet Team.
the Karneses, who bought parts from one of the
Sleek as a bullet, efficient as a sailplane, sexy as original dealers, are able to make any modifications
a little Reno racer, the BD-5 was the key piece in
they like. Lewis described the changes. “It has beefed
Jim Bede’s 1970s dream of affordable, fun flying for -up wings, a more powerful engine, and a five-inch
the masses. Bede had already hit a home run,
stretch to the fuselage. It still flies like a dream,” he
selling more than 800 kits for his boxy, practical,
said with a grin. For my part, I told him stories from
build-it-yourself BD-4. But orders for the BD-5
when I was left wingman on the demonstration team
soared into the thousands.
with fellow airshow pilots Bob Bishop and Corkey
The airplane whispered fantasy and adventure.
Fornof. Back then the jet was relatively new, full of
Nothing about it said wife and kids. Built at home,
Continued page 3
slipped on at the airport, it was a single-seat, mansize toy. With a fuselage not much bigger than a
NEXT MEETING
motorcycle (empty weight: about 450 pounds), it
September 3rd, 2015 at the Asbury Methodist Church at
earned a Guinness
record as the world’s
7pm.
smallest jet. Its wings
Program:
and tail could be
This month Stan Johnson will be making a presentation
removed for storage in
a garage instead of an
and Les will be bringing some modeling memorabilia
expensive-to-rent
including some vintage magazines.
hangar. The public
panted for it. Even
Raffle Prize:
before the airplane
This month we will have the AMA card drawing for a gift
The author in 1975. (Courtesty flew or the engine ran,
Debbie Gary)
card to Hobby Proz.
Continued --->
surprises, and watched enviously by crowds of
people who wanted one of their own.
Bede Aircraft had already begun its historic tail
slide when I flew my first airshow with the team in
May 1975, but I did not know that. Marketing was so
far ahead of development that incomplete kits were
being shipped to customers; necessary parts simply
hadn’t been made. More ruinous, there was no offthe-shelf, airworthy, two-cycle piston engine for the 5, and it was the low-cost piston engine model that
homebuilders wanted, not the $20,000 jet. No
airplane had ever used such an engine, and in trying
to develop one, Bede’s team of engineers and the
snowmobile engine manufacturers they were working
with seemed to be running in quicksand.
Still, everyone I worked
with was under the
airplane’s spell. Bede
Aircraft in Newton, Kansas,
was a magnet for pilots,
mechanics, and engineers
excited about homebuilding
airplanes. Fornof, who led
the jet team and had flown
airshows in the P-51
Mustang and F8F Bearcat,
acquired a Bede dealership
to sell kits and later, he
hoped, production airplanes.
Bishop, who had become
famous for his airshow
The revolutionary BD-5.
Only experienced builders performances in the
could finish the –5.
Bellanca Super Viking, flew
(Courtesy Jim Bede)
right wing and had put a
deposit on one of the
production models. Dan Cooney, destined to solve
mysteries in the drive train that linked the midContinued page 3
ARCC Calendar 2015
Sept 3
Sept 5-6
Sept 19-20
Sept 23
Oct 1
Oct 17
Oct 28
Nov 5
Member Meeting
Labor Day Meet
RMFM Fall Pattern
Board Meeting
Member Meeting
Swap Meet
Board Meeting
Member Meeting
Asbury
Maloof
RMFM field
Asbury
Asbury
Maloof
Asbury
Asbury
ARCC General Membership
Meeting Minutes
6 August 2015
The meeting was called to order at 1910 with 9
members present.
Thanks to Steve Moscal for filling in as secretary.
Announcements & Business
Rick, Chuck and Keith were not in attendance.
Guest(s)
Dan Wilkes
Treasurer Report


Vic reported the club’s balance
Scale meet was a success due to
Entry fees
Concession
Sponsors providing prizes instead of the
Club having to purchase them
Report approved
Secretary Report
Not covered due to Keith’s absence
Discussion
 Discussion of the RMFM scale meet coming
up 15/16 Aug
 Moved to Maloof due to road condition
getting to the RMFM field.
 Stu mentioned he could do a technical program at our September meeting.
There has been a request for a helicopter meet
in September.
Continued page 4 -->
Continued page 4
AMA Vision
We, the members of the Academy of
Model Aeronautics, are the pathway to the
future of aeromodeling and are committed
to making modeling the foremost sport/
hobby in the world.
Continued from page 2
fuselage engine to the rearinexperienced pilots.
facing propeller, showed up
Rutan’s other contribution
in Newton with his Cessna
was to make Les Berven
172 ready to camp out until
the BD-5’s test pilot. Rutan
they found him a job.
and Berven worked
Engineer Al Thompson, who
together at Edwards and
worked out how to build the
flew the airplanes in the
unique mechanical landing
base’s aero club. “Even
gear, arrived from Boeing.
though Les was a flight test
Now-famous aircraft designer
engineer like me, he was
Burt Rutan left a civilian job
bonkers about flying,”
at Edwards Air Force Base to
Rutan says. “He was a stick
become Bede’s flight test
-and-rudder guy. I knew Les
director.
would be a better pilot for a
“This was the only real job
BD-5 than any military test
in the homebuilt industry,”
pilot stepping down from
From the right cockpit of the worlds smallest jet, Justin
says Rutan. “There wasn’t
Phantoms or F-15s.” Bishop
Lewis waves at the fans. (Courtesy Jacobus Saayman)
any place else where I could
called Berven our cowboy
work a day job that was something I did for fun at
test pilot. He was serious about his test flying, but
night.” Rutan arrived in Newton with his own, nearly
everything else was fodder for his wacky humor,
finished design, the VariViggen. While he was at
like the rivet gun recording he hooked to his radio,
Bede, from 1972 to 1974, he improved the BD-5 prop
which in our cockpits sounded like a machine gun
version, converted the propeller -5 to the jet -5, and
shooting us down.
developed Bede’s concept of a trainer called Truck-aEven people in the office felt the little jet’s
Plane: a BD-5 airframe suspended from a trapeze in
magic pull. Carol Hall worked with her husband
front of a pickup truck. It offered a simple, ingenious
John, who was marketing vice president. “It was
way to practice the critical first and last 20 seconds of
almost a cult,” she says. “You belonged to
flight, close to the ground. Since the BD controls were
something. You worked for a cause. If you didn’t
extremely sensitive and the airplane sat as low to the
get paid, well, you could live on creativity. John
ground as a glider, takeoff and landing were tricky for
and I worked in the car driving to Newton from
Wichita with boxes of folders and files, answering
letters. We took the kids there in our Volkswagen
camper on weekends. We were all working to
provide this wonderful airplane to all these
customers who put money down. Those $200
checks that came in just to hold a spot, they just
poured in. You couldn’t count them fast enough.”
John Hall was critical to Bede’s business in two
ways: He directed the BD-5’s extensive publicity
campaign, and he lovingly drew the BD-5 building
plans, famous for their meticulously planned build
sequence.
I showed up in Newton because Bishop and
Fornof said there might be a job for a wingman if I
had time to hang out. I had just finished a year
and a half in Canada as a pilot on the four-Pitts
Carling Aerobatic Team when Bishop called me to
replace their number three pilot, Ed Mahler. The
little jet is slippery and sensitive, and the six-footfour Mahler found it awkward in formation. So he
became their solo pilot until the day his jet sucked
in contaminated fuel at Corpus Christi and flamed
out, and the aircraft went down on a sandy patch
near the airport. Mahler peeled off the fuselage
Jim Bede (in ball cap and white shirt) introduced the BD-5 in
and escaped with a broken palate. Fornof and
1971 at the Experimental Aircraft Association airshow in
Bishop flew the rest of their 1974 20-show season
Oshkosh, Wisconsin. (Martt Clupper)
without him. (Mahler went back to flying his
Continued page 4 --->
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from
from
page
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Parsons-Jocelyn biplane; in 1977, he crashed it in a
show and died.) Bishop had seen a video of me flying
in the Carling Team, so he figured I could do the job,
and he thought a woman on the team would increase
its market appeal for a corporate sponsorship. Fornof
was skeptical; he didn’t know any professional
women formation aerobatic pilots, because there
were none—except me. I’d led a team for acclaimed
airshow pilot Jim Holland from 1971 to 1973, then
flew the number four, or slot, position on the Carling
Aerobatic Team. (The slot flies right behind the leader
in a diamond formation.) When I showed up in
Kansas that May, Fornof said I could try out, but that I
would probably not be ready to perform with the team
before Oshkosh, at the end of July.
But when we flew together, I felt at home in the jet
and comfortable with their formation routine, and
Fornof changed his mind. In the journal I kept in 1975,
I noted what he said: “If a man had flown that well, I
wouldn’t have been quite so surprised.” We both
laughed. It was the sort of thing people said in the
1970s, but I didn’t let it offend me, and I never let it
stop me. Our new team flew our first show 10 days
later there in Newton for Bede customers and
employees, and the rest of the summer the three of
us had a wonderful time flying together.
Our job on the jet team was to keep the BD-5 in
front of the public. At the start, Bede invited us all to
his office for a welcoming toast. I looked around.
Bookshelves held thousands of National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics manufacturing reports
dating from the 1920s and 1930s onward, some
printed on cheap, fragile paper from World War II.
“Have you read all these?” I asked.
“I live on them,” Bede said, reaching for the one
titled The Hinge Moment of Control Surfaces. “Here is
one of the secrets to the BD-5’s beautiful flying
characteristics.”
Handmade models on a cabinet across from his big
desk gleamed under a spotlight. With Bede’s drawing
on quadrille paper as a guide, Paul Griffin designed
them. In 1964, after reading a Mechanix Illustrated
article about the BD-1, Griffin joined Bede Aviation
(which became Bede Aircraft) as an illustrator. His
models gave life to Bede’s ideas. At the flight test
center, he would work a full day on the BD-5 project,
then stay late sanding a model of the next Bede
concept.
Because of the slow and partial shipments of kits,
the initial intoxication over the propeller version of the
BD-5 needed reinforcement. We all got a chance to
fly the prop plane too. In fact, right after the Newton
show, we took one to the big airshow in Reading,
Pennsylvania, because our jets had been shipped to
Edwards for testing and research by the Air Force.
With Bishop’s supervision, the U.S. Navy had used
the jet to mimic a cruise missile in an effort to
convince the Carter administration that a cruise
Continued page 5
Events
Next events will be
Labor Day – Sep 5/6 (Sat&Sun)
Swap Meet – 17 Oct (Sat)
Safety Minute
Erwin presented his safety minute on circuit
breakers and RX switches for electronics.
Program
Vic showed several You-Tube videos
Raffle Drawing
The members present voted to postpone it.
Show and Tell
None
New Business
None
Next Meetings
The next board meeting is on 26 Aug at
1830 at the church. It is open to the
general membership.
The next general membership meeting will
be on 3 Sep at 1900 at the church.
Meeting adjourned at 2030
The conventional BD-4 kitplane. (Courtesy David Rider)
Continued from page 4
missile was a better cold war weapon than the B-1
bomber. Now it was the Air Force’s turn. It was fun
to imagine this seemingly frivolous little machine
having a secret life as a military weapon, or as a
spy’s tool. Hollywood also saw its spyplane
potential, casting it in
the 1983 James Bond
movie Octopussy, with
Fornof at the controls
as Roger Moore’s
double.
At our next jet show,
in Mojave, California, I
made five practice
flights, and each time I
Paul Griffin (left) modeled Jim rolled or dived, my
Bede’s designs in the 1970’s.
engine made harsh
(Courtesy Paul Griffin)
sucking noises and
flamed out. No formation flying for me that
weekend. Instead, the show was memorable for a
different kind of experience. I allowed one curious
fan to sit in my jet, and as I was telling him that its
range was 550 nautical miles, another man
interrupted. “You can cut that by 90 percent. You
can cut anything Jim Bede says by 90 percent,” he
said. “Jim Bede is all talk, and anybody who works
for Jim Bede is a liar!”
Although I’m embarrassed to admit it today, I
thought he was a crank slandering a guy I believed
in, and I told him to get lost. Recently I asked Bede
about that tough time for him and the company.
“Out of about 10,000 customers I got some very
mean hate mail from about 100 people,” he says.
“Some people thought that if they really put
pressure on me and made me feel bad by writing to
the magazines and the government that I would
solve the problem.”
But making Bede feel worse didn’t solve the
engine problem. “When you are running as fast as
you can and somebody says ‘There’s a flaming
torch behind you, run faster!’ you go ‘This is as fast
as I can go here,’ ” he says today. “So many good
people like Paul Griffin and John Hall put all their
effort into it.”
And enthusiasm for the BD-5 was so broad, way
beyond the homebuilt market, that Bede believed
the way forward was to manufacture a production
airplane. This required getting the airplane certified
by the FAA, a tedious process involving
unimaginably vast amounts of time, money, and red
tape. In 1972, right after Curtis Pitts got his
aerobatic Pitts biplane certified, he told me, “If I had
ever known how difficult and expensive it was going
to be, I never would have done it. It cost more than
a million dollars.”
Bede sank his house, his personal accounts,
everything he and his family owned into the
company to try to save it, and somehow remained
Continued --->
optimistic about future deliveries.
Our jets spent a lot of time at Edwards in the
summer of ’75, and the next time we climbed into
them was to taxi out for the Fourth of July show in
Lancaster, Texas, near Dallas. I had gone six weeks
with no three-ship practice. Formation aerobatics is
all about timing and practice. On the Carling Team,
we had a big budget and plenty of control, so our
training included six weeks of winter practice. The
Bede Jet Team was on a very tight budget, but after
the Lancaster experience, we never did another
show without practice.
The Fourth of July weekend in Texas was so hot
that 40 people in the crowd fainted, and the air was
as rough as stones. We dived in for our first loop
and I cranked my elevator trim to the full nose-down
position to make my controls so heavy that I would
not chase the bumps and have the jet’s nose
bounce up and down like a truck with bad springs.
Don’t move the stick, I told myself as the plane rode
over the bumps. In an aircraft as light on the controls
as the BD-5, it is easy to overreact. It was hard
work, but that’s the fun of formation flying.
Another part of the fun of being on the team was
traveling to shows in Bede’s DC-3, which also
transported our jets. For four years I had traveled to
shows in a Pitts with all my belongings stuffed in a
tiny back hatch the size of bread box, so I was giddy
over all the space and freedom the DC-3 gave us.
We three took turns: up front as the copilot, or in the
back on a bench. It was a party back there, with
buckets of fried chicken and magazines we read
aloud to each other. The jet fuselages were turnbuckled to the floor with the wings and horizontal
stabilizers tied down under them, wrapped in blue
sleeping bags. It was especially fun arriving together
for my first airshow at the yearly Oshkosh
convention.
We performed both solo and team flights, and
when not flying, we manned the Bede booth. By the
second day I was hoarse from raving about the BD5 and shouting hello to what seemed like everyone I
had ever met in aviation. Although we performed our
formation flight in the rain, we flew the routine with
rhythm and finesse, and I remember feeling great;
but I also remember that I got a slow start on
takeoff. From the left wing I saw Corkey’s mouth
move, then his jet crept away before I realized I was
on the wrong radio frequency.
What I was really looking forward to was my solo
flight; I had practiced a surprise. Our jets had been
home with us for a week, so I’d had a chance to
experiment. The Bede jet could do things that other
jets can’t: snap rolls, tail slides, and our signature
level pass, called Now You See Them, Now You
Don’t, with the landing gear popping in and out as
we moved the mechanical landing gear lever
forward and back. My surprise was to do an inside/
Continued —>
Continued from page 5
One of the greatest airshow performers in history,
Leo Loudenslager dazzled audiences in a BD-5J
by Budweiser. (Ty Greenlees)
outside figure eight, the first and maybe only
negative 3-G maneuver done in a Bede jet at an
airshow. Before I tried it back in Newton, I checked
with Berven and the company mechanics and
engineers. I stayed within the airplane’s G and oil
pressure limits, so I expected no problems. The
airplane sailed through the inverted portion of the
eight as if it was built for negative Gs. It delighted
me, but not Bishop. “The nickel cadmium batteries
are right under your legs,” he said after I flew. “The
caps on those batteries are only certified for three
negative Gs. If that stuff got loose on you, you would
have been in very bad shape. You could have lost
the use of your legs.” I didn’t perform another inside/
outside figure eight.
Bishop was not just a talented wingman, but also
the one who gave us reality checks. He knew the
airplane better than anybody else. Not long after
Oshkosh, something happened that made him say
our days as a show team were numbered. For a
long time, the engineers and mechanics had been
working to perfect the “conformity model” BD-5 so
the airplane could meet FAA certification
requirements. We all thought the BD-5 production
airplane was just around the corner. That’s what we
told people we met on the show circuit, and deposits
rolled in from customers wanting places held in line
for them. But Bishop sensed that the delays were
not the ordinary hurdles that every airplane has to
overcome during development, so he introduced
Bede to Rod Absher, the aircraft production expert
who saved Bellanca Aircraft 800 man-hours per
airplane when the company set up its new
production line. After a couple months at Bede’s,
Absher took Bishop aside and said the company
was a long way from starting production.
In September, I left Bede’s to fly solo shows in my
new Pitts S-2A and to set up an aerobatic school at
Art Scholl Aviation in California. Bishop and Fornof
left a couple months later to build their own jets and
find other sponsors. They flew together for a long
time—first as the Acrojets, then as the sponsored
Sonic Jets. Then they split; Fornof headed for his
movie stunt flying career, and Bishop formed the
long-running Coors Silver Bullet Team. Bishop did
some BD-5 test flying for Ames Industrial
Corporation, which had built the original BD-5 jet
engine under license from the French engine
builder Microturbo (then Sermel). The company
had purchased 20 BD-5 kits, and Bishop
negotiated a good deal for 19 sets of parts. He
has since used the kits to build many of the jets he
now owns and flies under contract for the military
as the Small Manned Aerial Radar Target, or
SMART-1. Justin Lewis, an Air National Guard
pilot as well as an airshow performer in the BD5FLS, sometimes flies missions for Bishop.
In 1979, Jim Bede lost his company, his
savings, and his home to bankruptcy. Customers
lost their money too. Bede didn’t intend to cause
harm; he just didn’t see how bad things had
become.
Bede has written a book about his experience:
The BD-5 Story. It’s sold by the company he
formed with his two sons in 1998, Bedecorp,
which also sells kits for four models, including the
BD-4. But not the BD-5. Bede calls the BD-5 a
dream. It was a dream I got to live in the summer
of 1975.
At the Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron in
Yuma, Arizona, Marines examine the Small Manned Aerial
Radar Target-1, a BD-5J that simulates a cruise missile
during training exercises. The military-style canopy is one of
the features that makes the BD-5 desirable. (USMC / SGT
Benjamin R. Reynolds)
Today Bob Bishop offers the BD-5J as an aerial target for
the military. (Arizona Daily Star / Benjie Sanders)