Bede as in Speedy

The little airplane shown here taking shape and cruising at close to 200 miles an hour is powered by a German snowmobile engine. And its radical shape owes much to sailplane design, in which Europe has been the leader. But the concept behind the BD-5 is as American as Kitty Hawk. It's almost as American is its builder.

Jim Bede, who just turned 40 and has the aerodynamics of a small dirigible, has been tinkering with airplanes since he was 14. Lake Edison and Ford and Bill Lear before him, he's an inventor first but also a consummate promotor of himself and his products and a passionate student of the desires of the American people. In his office alongside a handsome, long-runwayed municipal airport 30 miles north of Wichita, Bede's introduction to the BD-5--an introduction punctuated by frequent calculations OA a computer terminal-turns quickly to marketing theories and the holes he sees in the strategies of the established small-plane manufacturers. After World War Two, the manufacturers expected prosperity, advancing technology and the core of pilot-envying GIs returning from Europe and the Pacific to make Pipers and Cessnas the Fords of the future. They mscalculated. The GI (continued on page 176) Bede-as In Speedy (continued from page 163) Bill dried up. Ex-Servicemen---or their wives---decided that they needed refrigerators and washers and TV sets more than they did airplanes. And even when a glut of small planes developed that brought the price of a Cessna T-50 (a twin-engine World War Two trainer) down to what Bede paid for one in 1952---$100 and a camera---maintenance costs became infuriatingly high. Today there are close to 800,000 pilots in the U. S.---and only about 120,000 airplanes, about a third of which are more than 15 years old.

Some of the responsibility for this state of affairs rests with the established light-plane manufacturers. Piper, Cessna, Beech and the few other major plane makers still produce trainers---on the sensible theory that they'll ultimately profit if student pilots learn in their products---but even a cursory look at the ads in Flying, the leading general-aviation magazine, proves the point that the big manufacturers are geared to the wealthy pilot, and especially to corporate aviation. ''At the end of a talk he'd given, someone asked Bill Piper why his company wasn't making the Cub anymore,'' Bede says. ''And his answer was, 'Why should we make the Cub, which we used to sell for $1000, when we can't fill the orders we've got for $40,000 twin-engine planes?''' In an industry that last year produced fewer than 10,000 units, labor is expensive and the cost of retooling for model changes exorbitant---partly because the Federal Aviation Administration tests every refinement of an approved production design with painstaking, bureaucratic slowness.

The light-plane manufacturers simply went where the profit motive---and the strictures of the FAA---led them. A relatively small percentage of the people who learn to fly do so because they want faster, more efficient transportation. The general-aviation industry serves that segment of the air-minded public well---if at great cost. But the man who'd like nothing more than to jump into a plane and lose himself in the pleasures it can give---the way we used to lose ourselves in Jaguars and Morgans on back-country roads---has been left to fork over hundreds of dollars a year to pay for 25 or 30 hours of flying in a rented Cessna 172. Or he's simply abandoned the dream and gotten himself a Honda or a snowmobile.

With the BD-5, Jim Bede intends to change all that. He's counting on the fact that people want a strong, fast, easy-to-maintain personal sport plane badly enough to put in several hundred hours assembling the thing. And he seems to be right. As this issue goes to press, only one prototype of the plane is flying and Bede isn't even in a position to ship entire kits. (He is shipping everything but the power train for each plane and will send that off when his engines start arriving from Germany this summer.) Yet he has a 4000-plane backlog of orders for the kits, and new orders are arriving at the rate of 15 to 20 a day. Piper produces 12 planes a day, of all types.

An order placed this spring, with a deposit and a final payment totaling $2600, will result in the delivery---next fall, Bede told Playboy---of five packing crates containing the plans and the 320 structural parts of the BD-5, a basic instrument package and a two-cycle, two-cylinder 40-horsepower engine. [Bede's address is P.O. Box 706, Newton, Kansas.] The engine comes assembled, and 55-and 70-hp models are available as options. Also optional are an electrical starter---an extraordinarily good idea for the man who values his friends' fingers---and a pair of long wings that convert the craft from a stubby acrobat to what amounts to a powered glider with a range of 1000 miles.

Bede says that the construction of the plane should amount to about 300 hours of simple work for an aircraft mechanic, 600 to 800 hours for a reasonably skilled home craftsman. A representative of the FAA has to check construction at a couple of points, but in fact the certification requirements for home-builts are much less rigorous than for production-line aircraft. As Bede gets more of his prototypes certified and displayed in the aviation press, there's no reason to expect that a well-constructed owner-built model should run afoul of the Federal regulators.

Of course Bede won't admit that the fact that he's designed a flying Heathkit is a drawback. When we asked him about the legality of the owner's hiring a mechanic to do his work for him, he allowed that the procedure was legal but guessed that his customers were eager to do the work themselves. He has even designed a couple of elements in the plane---including the tips of the wings---of balsawood, on the assumption that the kind of man who'll buy the BD-5 was up to his knuckles in airplane glue as a kid.

Barring the kind of hitches that seem less and less likely with each flight of the prototype, the finished plane will be remarkable. The human figure was the limiting factor in the BD-5's design and when you've hunkered yourself down into it, it fits the way, one supposes, wings fit angels. You close the Swiss-built canopy by reaching up and pulling it forward over your head, just as an F-4 jockey does his. The control stick is a subtle little wrist-controlled handle canted out from the right side of the cockpit---a configuration toward which fighter planes (again) are moving. (Bede says that he and the Air Force, working independently, came within a degree of each other on the angle the thing should be tilted.) Reporting the plane's handling and performance characteristics presents a problem, both because Bede and his test pilot are the only two men to have flown one and because what the BD-5 can do will vary widely, depending on which engine the buyer chooses and which set of wings he slips on. But Playboy has seen films of the plane in flight and it looks as steady and manageable in the air as Bede claims it is. And after the editors of Air Progress magazine flew alongside and photographed a test flight a few months ago, they reported: ''The little plane was far more impressive than we'd expected. It looked to be very responsive to control input and power applications, and according to [the test pilot], there was almost no pitch change with throttle changes. He was putting the airplane anywhere we wanted with seeming ease, and after he put it there, it sat steady as a rock.''

As recounted in that same report, the pilot's first comment when he hauled himself out of the cockpit was, ''With short wings and 70 horsepower, she'll outrun a P-51! Maybe we should enter some unlimited races.'' Military comparisons and connections are common at the Newton plant. Bede says that one of the early orders for the plane was placed by a two-star general from nearby McConnell Air Force Base. ''I said, 'Hell, man, you've got the choice of any plane over there you wanna fly---why are you getting one of these?' And he said, 'Because it'll be mine.'''

The BD-5 will be bought by a certain type of man. He won't have lots of money (your occasional major general aside), he'll be awfully good with his hands and most likely he'll be one of those 800,000 who love to fly---no matter how many obstacles the manufacturers and the mechanics and the Feds put in their way. But Bede's dreams extend beyond those weekend enthusiasts, much as he loves them and is counting on them now. He told Playboy that flying will finally fulfill its promise when there's a fast, low-cost, easy-to-maintain plane that we can use for transportation.

The BD-5 satisfies all of those requirements but the last. Somewhere down the line there's a BD-7 or a BD-8 that will, in fact, be a personal plane for the millions. Once Bede has it---once he really has it right---there won't be any reason for him not to go into production with it, so we won't have to spend two years of weekends cutting aluminum with heavy shears to put it together. In the meantime, Jim Bede's about to give the enthusiast a most beautiful toy.