A kit plane that became the Yankee

Aeronautical engineer Jim Bede founded Bede Aircraft in Cleveland in 1961 to sell the BD-1 as a kit. It was developed into the American Aviation AA-1 Yankee, a factory-built two-seater. The four-seat BD-4 of 1968 was more conventional, but Bede was already sketching something wilder, inspired by a sleek German glider, the Schleicher ASW 15.

The miniature fighter

That was the BD-5 Micro: a single-seater with the pilot reclined under a fighter canopy and a small engine behind him driving a pusher propeller. The first deposit was taken in February 1971; by the end of that year there were more than 4,300 orders, before the prototype had properly flown. It hopped on 12 September 1971 on a snowmobile engine. Bede hired a young Burt Rutan to run flight testing in 1972, but reliable engines never arrived.

Bankruptcy, Bond and Budweiser

More than 5,000 kits or plans were sold and some 12,000 orders were taken for a factory-built version, yet the company went bankrupt in the mid-1970s and only a few hundred kits were completed. The BD-5J jet version, at 358.8 lb, held the record as the world’s smallest jet, flew in the Bond film Octopussy and starred in Budweiser’s Bud Light Jet adverts.

الناس

• Jim Bede · founder, designer
• Burt Rutan · head of flight test from 1972
• Paul Griffin · chief designer — Worked on the first BD-5 sketches in 1967

الأرقام القياسية والأولويات

• BD-5J: world’s smallest jet aircraft (Guinness), 358.8 lb