In the opening minutes of Octopussy (1983), Roger Moore’s James Bond escapes an exploding hangar in a jet barely bigger than he is, outruns a heat-seeking missile, then coasts up to a petrol station and deadpans: “Fill her up, please.” The joke works because the aeroplane is real — and it really is that small.

It is the Bede BD-5J, and more than half a century after it first flew, it still holds the record as the smallest jet aircraft in the world.

A jet you build in your garage

The BD-5 was born from a very 1970s dream. Designer Jim Bede wanted to sell everyday people a personal aircraft they could build from a kit in their own garage. The result was a tiny single-seater, and in 1973 he added the showstopper: a jet version, the BD-5J, powered by a French Microturbo TRS-18 no bigger than a beer keg, pushing out around 225 pounds of thrust.

At roughly 160 kilograms empty and a shade over three metres long, it was less an aeroplane than a wearable one.

The dream that did not quite fly

The trouble was that almost nobody could finish one. Thousands of kits were sold, but the BD-5 was fiendishly hard to build and harder to fly, and the piston engine intended for the propeller version never materialised reliably — leaving many garages with a beautiful little airframe and no way to power it. Bede Aircraft slid into financial and legal trouble, and the few BD-5s that did fly earned a fearsome reputation, killing a grim share of the handful of pilots brave enough to take them up.

The airshow star and the movie stunt

The jet found its real calling not in garages but at airshows. Stunt pilot Corkey Fornof built and flew BD-5Js as the world’s first civilian jet demonstration team, and the Coors Light “Silver Bullet” team wowed 1980s crowds with formation aerobatics in the pocket-sized jets. So when the makers of Octopussy needed a jet small enough for a hangar chase, Fornof simply flew the Acrostar through it for real.

The BD-5 never became the everyman’s jet Jim Bede imagined. Instead it became something arguably cooler: the smallest jet ever built, an airshow legend, and the only aircraft with the nerve to let James Bond pull up and ask for a fill-up.

Sources: HistoryNet; Smithsonian Air & Space; Pima Air & Space Museum; Wikipedia.