Why Did This Crazy Kitplane Kill So Many Pilots?

December 30, 2020 4:55 PM

The tiny plane was called the BD-5 Micro. More than 3,000 people—many of them, like me, with imaginations fired but zero experience building airplanes—eventually purchased BD-5 kits. A handful of factory prototype BD-5s made test flights, triggering paroxysms of excitement among us kit-buyers. But plagued by the lack of a reliable engine and reckless financial mismanagement, Bede never delivered a single complete BD-5 kit.
posted by ShooBoo (71 comments total)

That is one sexy looking coffin.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 6:00 PM on December 30, 2020 [11 favorites]

This reads like the worst Kickstarter ever, at least by body count.
posted by clawsoon at 6:09 PM on December 30, 2020 [7 favorites]

$90,000 for a BD-5 built in a facility specifically designed to build BD-5s is a far cry from $1800 (about $11,600 in today's dollars) to build one in your garage. But I suppose getting to walk away from your maiden flight is worth paying over 8 times as much.

This would absolutely be a kickstarter today, and if it was it'd be one of the biggest kickstarter disasters of all time.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:12 PM on December 30, 2020 [8 favorites]

...sooo, you’re saying I should rip off the design and make a Kickstarter?
posted by aramaic at 6:15 PM on December 30, 2020 [3 favorites]

The whole concept of kit planes is just amazing to me. It speaks to the American spirit of aviation which has been very much about individual empowerment, encouraging experimentation, and allowing for personal daring. The FAA regulations are one of the few cases of government regulations that explicitly trust the pilot to make life or death decisions themselves. Of course those rules get real strict as soon as there's passengers in the plane, and triply so for commercial service. But if you want to build your own plane and kill yourself in it the FAA doesn't really see that it's their job to stop you.

What I find amazing is all these 40 something dudes with no experience are like "yes, I will start a 6000 hour project to build a machine that eventually I will climb into and fly". Particularly for some crazy rocket-like design like the BD-5. A fully built perfect factory plane like this should require lots and lots of extra training to pilot. Can't imagine starting by building it yourself. Oh, and jerry-rigging some sort of engine since the plane's designer never could figure out one that would work.
posted by Nelson at 6:22 PM on December 30, 2020 [19 favorites]

I love that the author had briefly piloted one of these and remains transfixed by their deadly siren song, as though someone who went through the Cannonball Loop waterslide at Action Park had the best ride of their life.

"And yet Jarts remain an intoxicatingly fun backyard pastime."
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 6:24 PM on December 30, 2020 [13 favorites]

Oh man, Jarts were the best. Also I kind of want want one of these tiny death planes despite being neither a pilot nor particularly handy. For the best that it's somewhat out of my price range (also still hundreds of hours work, F that).
posted by rodlymight at 6:32 PM on December 30, 2020

And I am suddenly remembering the time 200x-era tech pundit Bob Cringeley tried to design, build, and fly a plane in one month. PBS sent a documentary crew; it’s on YouTube.

(The plane never left the ground, thankfully.)
posted by FallibleHuman at 6:32 PM on December 30, 2020 [9 favorites]

I recall that media blitz in the 70s and definitely had the impression that this was a real aircraft. I'm startled to see how shabby the reality was.
posted by Mogur at 6:51 PM on December 30, 2020 [2 favorites]

The ultimate private pilot’s fantasy, I think not so much. I was at Oshkosh in 78 and 80, and while I don’t remember the BD, I do get the allure of homebuilts. And some kitplanes are superb.

But I like my “expensive”, stodgy Cessna. Even the tiniest aeroplane is big enough to kill you, as my instructor liked to say. The longer I fly, and the more I learn, the more respect I have for what goes into engineering a certified aircraft.

The proposition of cheapness sets off alarm bells. But there’s always someone out there who wants so desperately to believe in the Free Lunch that they’ll bet their life on it.

You can get five airworthy Cessna 150s for 90k, they go faster than you’re allowed to drive a car, and flying is awesome no matter what.
posted by maniabug at 6:59 PM on December 30, 2020 [22 favorites]

If you want to watch someone build their own ridiculous (but actually working) airplanes without killing themselves, Peter Sripol is worth a watch.
posted by clawsoon at 7:07 PM on December 30, 2020 [7 favorites]

There are kit airplanes available now, like the kitfox, which seem to be reliable and look like a lot of fun. But as far as i can tell, building a kitfox is about a $100k adventure once you buy everything you need, and at least 1000 hours of time. Pretty tempting for this handy but not a pilot guy, if i had money, space, and time.
posted by maxwelton at 7:11 PM on December 30, 2020

100 to 150 words per minute talking is not fast. When I once tried calculating words in a book, I used audiobook numbers and they averaged 160.
Perhaps this problem with speeds are why their airplanes never worked.
(And that Octopussy poster is crappy.)
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:12 PM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

...Bede announced the BD-10, intended to be the world’s first supersonic homebuilt.

There are adventurous people and then there are there are people that don't want to live anymore.
posted by rdr at 7:13 PM on December 30, 2020 [10 favorites]

I’ve put together IKEA furniture and the idea of assembling an aircraft that would actually fly with me sitting in it pegs my no-way-o-meter.
posted by jquinby at 7:21 PM on December 30, 2020 [9 favorites]

I confess that I'd love what probably counts as the modern (less wildly dangerous) version of the BD-5J, the SubSonex kit jet.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 7:22 PM on December 30, 2020

Octopussy BD-5J scene.
posted by eye of newt at 7:23 PM on December 30, 2020 [8 favorites]

I’ve put together IKEA furniture and the idea of assembling an aircraft that would actually fly with me sitting in it pegs my no-way-o-meter.

OMG! I love the concept of an ikea kit plane. What would it be called?

Fløwn?

Augr?

Krasch?
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 7:24 PM on December 30, 2020 [51 favorites]

Krumpl
posted by jquinby at 7:25 PM on December 30, 2020 [57 favorites]

What I find amazing is all these 40 something dudes with no experience are like "yes, I will start a 6000 hour project to build a machine that eventually I will climb into and fly".

Meanwhile, inevitably, the next dozen comments: “oh man I want one so much, I would fly it for sure”. The moment I read that, I thought, you definitely do not know many 40 year old men.
posted by mhoye at 7:27 PM on December 30, 2020 [12 favorites]

Öopsie
posted by DingoMutt at 7:28 PM on December 30, 2020 [11 favorites]

overheard long ago and far away:

"Want to exponentially increase your chances of dying in a plane crash? Get your pilot's license."

To which I suppose we could now add:

"And build your own Kitplane."
posted by philip-random at 7:43 PM on December 30, 2020 [7 favorites]

I'd seriously thought about fabricating a Bensen autogyro several times over the decades. I used to live near a dry lake, not all that far from Edwards AFB, where enthusiasts would fly them. But I always end up concluding that there are enough things conspiring to kill me without pestering Death deliberately. Frankly, in recent years, it's far more attractive to spend the money on a nice DJI Mavic setup, still cheaper than a Bensen, and end up with awesome video to prove it all happened.
posted by 2N2222 at 7:44 PM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

I went to school with someone who built a kit plane as a (several years long) gift for his father. Granted, my colleague was a professor of industrial design, but I still thought that as an expression of parental trust and love just accepting and using this “gift” was not beatable.
posted by q*ben at 7:53 PM on December 30, 2020 [4 favorites]

6000 hours...The Bradley GT was only 60 from the crate.
posted by clavdivs at 8:02 PM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm an acrophobe who is not particularly well-coordinated, and I wouldn't fly unless I got superpowers, and even then it would be a long time before I went more than six feet off the ground, but I still totally get the appeal of this thing--it just looks fast and fun, and the aspect of it (supposedly) being able to use a snowmobile engine gives the whole thing a goofy Mad Scientists' Club aspect to it, like building a helicopter out of an old washing machine or something. And the jet version seemed to have worked pretty good, although I'm left wondering how much they cost.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:06 PM on December 30, 2020 [8 favorites]

I like the way it sits on its tail with the nose wheel up in the air until the pilot get inside and levers it down with his weight. That's a pretty fine line for weight and balance.
posted by JackFlash at 8:16 PM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

It speaks to the American spirit of aviation which has been very much about individual empowerment, encouraging experimentation, and allowing for personal daring.

Also very much about the nearly-immediate and repeated death, particularly also from bombing, lots of bombing, mostly of people in other countries but of US civilians as well.

But there is definitely intrepid and fun stuff too, plus UFO encounters, in the American spirit of aviation.
posted by XMLicious at 8:29 PM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

Years ago I went hang-gliding and if you are some chump who rolls up offering to pay money to strap yourself to their large kite, they will get the proceedings started by attaching a rope between your large kite and what's basically a stick figure drawing of an airplane that 1000% looks like it came out of a kit that had several important parts missing. I'm DEATHLY afraid of heights and do not love airplanes but I had prepared for the hang-gliding itself, I Was Not prepared to be towed a couple thousand feet into the air behind this Snoopy-ass toy airplane and then cut loose.

At the time I consoled myself thinking "you idiot, planes don't come in kits" and right now I am even more surprised than usual to be alive.
posted by jameaterblues at 8:33 PM on December 30, 2020 [35 favorites]

I have the same feelings about home-built airplanes as I do about DIY boat building -- it's amazing to see when someone has beautiful craftsmanship, but the thought of the thousands and thousands of hours involved scares me. For every one that gets built there must be fifty half-completed projects moldering in sheds.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:07 PM on December 30, 2020 [2 favorites]

Phobias are complex. My father — my flight instructor — was acrophobic, and disliked being a passenger over even relatively tame bridges.
posted by maniabug at 9:21 PM on December 30, 2020 [4 favorites]

By only selling kits, they ensured that they would always be able to blame the customer if something went wrong -- and I'd bet no investor would have been willing to back them any other way.

In fact, I'd guess that never coming up with a workable engine had similar motivations.
posted by jamjam at 9:23 PM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

The Bradley GT was only 60 from the crate.

The boys and girls back in Wolfsburg put in a hour or two before you put in your 60 hours, though.
posted by sideshow at 9:42 PM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

Was this inspired by the Jalopnik article on the Pulse?
As someone who grew up around a lot of civilian aviation stuff, from restorations to home built/experimentals, I remember asking my dad what the little bullet of a plane was, at Oshkosh, and it always stuck with me. Never knew that Bede had used the same design but stuck some wheels on it and tried to call it a car until that article, even after stopping a guy delivering a Pulse to a nearby custom bike shop and chatting him up about it. In retrospect, the Pulse seems like a safer concept, despite smelling like a lawnmower in a greenhouse in July.
posted by rp at 9:56 PM on December 30, 2020 [3 favorites]

I once dated someone whose father was building a kit plane in his garage at home. He got to putter around with a bunch of tools, listen to football games, and dream of flying his plane to Oshkosh or Paris. I seem to recall it came with a real purpose-built aircraft engine, delivered late in the project after you'd finished the airframe and controls. Certainly not something rigged for a snowmobile! The performance expectations are so different for flight than for driving any vehicle, for sure.

(I think the one he was building had the range to cross the Atlantic, amazingly. He was also WAY ahead of his time, wanting a small computer onboard to help plan his flights, years before tablets were commonplace.)

I helped him with it some one summer when we were visiting, it was my first experience working with fiberglass as we built part of the back of the canopy. I gather that he eventually did finish the thing, and and indeed flew to the Oshkosh Air Show! That must have been a great feeling. But it's not a cheap hobby in terms of cash or time. Planes NOT built by people high on epoxy fumes are available for less than you'd think, though training and keeping up the hours is a bear.

One of my friends keeps up with his hours by working with a charity that flies dogs from one part of the country to their foster homes elsewhere. A chain of small planes takes a dog or dogs through short jaunts until it reaches its forever home—it's pretty cool.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 10:36 PM on December 30, 2020 [13 favorites]

Bede worked closely with Hirth to build an engine specifically for the BD-5, but the underlying problem was that airplanes are different than snowmobiles.

LOL. This article is great, thank you!
posted by subdee at 11:05 PM on December 30, 2020 [3 favorites]

Heads up! Aviation great Burt Ratan is in this story.
posted by chrchr at 11:10 PM on December 30, 2020

Holy crap. I was one of those enamored by the BD-5. When I was a kid, my dad gave me the information packet that they gave out, complete with all the blueprints and specs. I used to lie in bed reading through it, imagining flying my very own when I grew up.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 11:41 PM on December 30, 2020 [8 favorites]

The experimental carve out in airplane certification is pretty incredible, as is the 51% rule that allows kits to be sold. An argument can be made that most of the progress in small general aviation airplanes has come from the homebuilt phenomena.

The real expense of an Experimental or Kit plane is the engine. The airframe is less than half of what the engine costs if new; a brand new 160hp engine with 1940's technology costs 8 grand more than a brand new Subaru Outback.
posted by Pembquist at 11:45 PM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

What I find amazing is all these 40 something dudes with no experience are like "yes, I will start a 6000 hour project to build a machine that eventually I will climb into and fly". Particularly for some crazy rocket-like design like the BD-5. A fully built perfect factory plane like this should require lots and lots of extra training to pilot. Can't imagine starting by building it yourself. Oh, and jerry-rigging some sort of engine since the plane's designer never could figure out one that would work.

That is the story of the early history of flight.

(Well, except for the ready made kits and established aeronautical engineering standards.)
posted by fairmettle at 12:22 AM on December 31, 2020

So yeah remind me again why idea of flying cars for the masses is still being pursued as a good idea and is the 'next big thing' every ten years or so ...
posted by GallonOfAlan at 12:51 AM on December 31, 2020 [5 favorites]

You know how sometimes when you're making a bed, and the cat slips in between the sheets and blanket? Airplane wing.
posted by bartleby at 2:05 AM on December 31, 2020 [16 favorites]

How much to build an Archaeopteryx, do you think?
posted by bartleby at 2:26 AM on December 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

The whole concept of kit planes is just amazing to me. It speaks to the American spirit of aviation which has been very much about individual empowerment, encouraging experimentation, and allowing for personal daring. The FAA regulations are one of the few cases of government regulations that explicitly trust the pilot to make life or death decisions themselves. Of course those rules get real strict as soon as there's passengers in the plane, and triply so for commercial service. But if you want to build your own plane and kill yourself in it the FAA doesn't really see that it's their job to stop you.

My jaw was on the floor for much of that article - Bede kept lying, kept selling, kept going bankrupt, kept not delivering products, and a huge proportion of those that did get built kept crashing and killing people. That "American spirit of aviation" and this plane and its inventor have, uh, Big Libertarian Energy.
posted by entropone at 5:45 AM on December 31, 2020 [16 favorites]

My dad built a Minimax when I was in middle school.* It takes a special kind of loner-y weirdo to spend that much time cloistered in your garage just so that you then spend every weekend sitting alone in a loud wooden chair in the sky.

* He later crashed it in to a sand dune, but the plane was so slow and the dune so soft that he walked away completely unscathed.
posted by saladin at 5:51 AM on December 31, 2020 [13 favorites]

So yeah remind me again why idea of flying cars for the masses is still being pursued as a good idea and is the 'next big thing' every ten years or so ...

Because people don't understand all the work that goes into keeping aviation safe.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:04 AM on December 31, 2020 [4 favorites]

I sent this article to a friend whose father has built at least two kit boats that both immediately sank on first launch, expressing how glad I was that he never got his hands on one of these. (He's moved on to kit cars now, which by all accounts are going much better and have not sunk yet.)
posted by terretu at 6:49 AM on December 31, 2020 [10 favorites]

Eddie Izzard, from Circle, about Leonardo da Vinci:

... and he also made weapons of war and pictures of anatomy. And he invented a helicopter that did not work. And so did l! Yeah! Did not work! I accept your applause for my crap invention. For it had a lawnmower engine, it was made out of wood and string and it went underwater. On paper. But then the paper would get wet and a helicopter that just exists on paper…it needs to fly in the air and l’m trying to make this work as a joke and it won’t. But in that Venn diagram of helicopters that do not work, there’s me and Leonardo right in there. I think that’s quite nice.

posted by Huffy Puffy at 7:25 AM on December 31, 2020 [12 favorites]

bartleby: Current list price for a new one is €69,500.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 7:31 AM on December 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

curious use of the phrase "diehard builders" in this paragraph:

A number of diehard builders managed to complete and fly jury-rigged BD-5s powered by improvised engines. In the process, they crashed and killed themselves in horrifying numbers.
posted by chavenet at 7:44 AM on December 31, 2020 [4 favorites]

remind me again why idea of flying cars for the masses is still being pursued as a good idea

the selling point, of course, is the noise. Tens of hundreds of thousands Harley Davidson LOUD* machines buzzing around 24-7. It makes perfect sense.

* there will be a quiet solution, you say. Excellent. Let's see the specs
posted by philip-random at 7:53 AM on December 31, 2020

There's no place in my actual life for piloting lessons, airplane ownership or regular flight, but it's not hard to imagine getting sucked into one of these projects. For a while in my twenties I was infatuated with Richard Bach's stories of barnstorming, and then with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's flight-centered contemplations. Sometime in the late nineties I stumbled on tiny rural airstrip that was offering introductory flights for about $50 as bait for their ultralight kit sales. I was their first customer that season, and got to spend half an hour aloft in a two-seater like the one in the cat video above. Aside from having an unbelievably loud engine very close to my head, it was a great experience. Years later I got another ride out over Lake Erie from a neighbor who'd built an enclosed-cockpit experimental plane in his garage.

The latter guy was an ex-military pilot who absolutely knew what he was doing. But the guys selling ultralight kits out of a barn, and rides from an airstrip that was basically a smoothed-out tractor path in a fallow corn field... I have no idea how lucky I was to survive that.
posted by jon1270 at 7:56 AM on December 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

I went to school with a guy who got his license flying a plane his father built. And not from no kit, he started with a pile of wood and fabric and turned it into a plane (I assume he bought some sort of standard engine package). But that was an incredibly normal high wing job not a garage built supersonic air frame.
posted by Mitheral at 8:39 AM on December 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

FTA, from just before Rutan's entrance: "The little plane proved wildly unstable"! Low-time SEL private pilot here, and I've had thoughts of building kitplanes (the Berkut among them) but you can look at the BD's little wing and image the speeds that you'll have to maintain. Coming from small Cessnas it's easy to image pilots getting over their heads very quickly (no pun intended).
posted by achrise at 9:09 AM on December 31, 2020 [3 favorites]

As a current owner and pilot of an Amateur-Built aircraft, I will say that it's been shown time and time again that humans are extremely poor at evaluating risk based on little information. I grew up spending my weekends at an airport where my father flew (privately) in a formerly certified airplane that he restored himself and placed in the Amateur-Built category (a Fleet Canuck 80). Over the years I saw many A-B aircraft completed, flown, and yes, occasionally, crashed.

When old enough, I studied Aeronautical Engineering at university, and designed two aircraft on paper (that I did mostly for the exercise in doing it, not because I thought I would ever build one). Eventually I did start a kit project (a Vans Aircraft RV-7) but sometime after that jobs changed, life situations changed, and I lost the spare time I had to work on it. I sold it, and bought a flying aircraft instead (a Vans RV-6) that was built by a former Boeing engineer.

Over the 30 years i've been flying, i've flown everything from basic Cessnas to a Rutan Vari-Eze... Probably the closest to the BD-5 in terms of "holy crap this is different".

All that said, the BD-5 is a tiny aircraft. Like, on the weight spectrum of an ultralight. But it flies in the performance envelope of the aircraft I fly now... 180mph cruise is common. It lands like the Vari-Eze, touchdown speeds of 90mph are common. While the RV is a light-on-the-controls aircraft, the BD-5 is next level. If you sneeze while holding the stick, you're heading for an unusual attitude. It takes a calm, smooth, precise hand to fly one.

The BD-5 also has a thrust line (the axis on which the propellor pushes the plane) above the center-of-gravity. So if you add power, the nose drops, and if you remove it, the nose comes up. On landing, a cut of power has to be accompanied by a forward motion on the stick, or you'll pitch up, stall, and die. If you choose to abort a landing, adding power needs to be accompanied by a backward motion of the stick, or you'll pitch forward and auger in. These things can be learned, there have been a number of aerobatic acts that uses them over the years. But they're definitely not for beginners.

Where it was builit and by who has almost nothing to do with the accident history for the type... By and large, the vast majority of them crashed due to pilotage or engine issues... The Engine being the achilles heel of the type. Bede designed an engine specifically for it, and never delivered. Since then, every example has flown with a custom engine installation.
posted by Snowflake at 9:46 AM on December 31, 2020 [23 favorites]

the guys selling ultralight kits out of a barn... I have no idea how lucky I was to survive that.
Depends on the ultralight. Weight shift trikes, even something that pushes the limits of the type like P&M's 100mph Quik-R, are one of the safer forms of general aviation because they're pretty much unspinnable.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 10:44 AM on December 31, 2020

The headline is a bit clickbaity. “Why were there so many crashes in planes constructed by amateurs using partial kits supplied by a bankrupt manufacturer combined with random salvaged motors?” Why indeed.
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:17 AM on December 31, 2020 [7 favorites]

I had no idea that there were so many crazy people, I mean people interested in homebuilt airplanes, on Metafilter....

I've been flight-mad from early childhood (many, oh so many decades ago), and a couple of years ago I achieved my life's dream: I now fly an airplane that I built. God I love how that sounds!

Since I value my hide, it's a standard configuration (no crazy canards etc) and uses standard airplane components like the engine, propeller, avionics, etc. But a homebuilt airplane also gives me the freedom to rip out ancient required-by-regulation technology like magnetos and replace them with modern reliable equivalents.

Best part of building my own airplane: on the tail I can have my cat Billy. Kids of all ages grin as a taxi past.
posted by phliar at 11:22 AM on December 31, 2020 [19 favorites]

Phliar, good on you, that cat is stylin'! Most aircraft paint jobs are dreadfully boring.
posted by maniabug at 11:48 AM on December 31, 2020 [2 favorites]

I find it difficult to get all finger-waggy while citing the authority of Rutan to make some kind of point. Rutan's VariEze has a pretty impressive record of crashes and fatalities itself, and spawned a slew of copies and successors despite it all. I see a couple of them flying almost every weekend out of the local airport about a mile from my house. Designing novel, temperamental planes is kind of more normal than not in that world. Combined with Bede's scammy business practices is what makes it more of a story.
posted by 2N2222 at 1:27 PM on December 31, 2020

Wow, that was a great article. Though maybe I should feel bad to have so thoroughly enjoyed a story where lots of people crash and die. But then, they all did it voluntarily. What I have trouble getting my head around is: why? Flying is a thrill, I know, but the risks are not trivial, it seems to me. There was one decade in my life when three men of my acquaintance died in three separate crashes of small planes they were piloting. Although, to be fair, I just learned of the death of another old acquaintance who was a pilot--of navy fighter jets. But despite the fact that landing on aircraft carriers is about the riskiest thing you can do in a plane, I'm happy to say that he died of old age, at home in his bed.
posted by Transl3y at 1:53 PM on December 31, 2020

Does anyone use kit planes and LSAs to go anywhere?
Like I can see someone getting tired of the 7 hour drive to their weekend lake house, so they buy or build a little seaplane to do it in two, and their time is worth the money somehow.
Bush pilots, or 'flying doctor' services? Or is it just a fun toy?
posted by bartleby at 2:16 PM on December 31, 2020

What I have trouble getting my head around is: why?

It's been decades since I last piloted a plane (Piper Warriors for me), but I feel like this is a question that is most fully answered through direct experience. That first time you pull back on the yoke and you're in the air because you - you!! - made it happen; that first time you achieve a smooth-as-butter landing; every time you're up in the sky, on your own, looking down at the world that looks both familiar and completely different from your new perspective ... and then to be doing all of that in a beast you made with your own two hands(!!) - while I don't think I'd ever trust myself to build my own plane, I can 100% understand the allure.

I have fond memories of my dad's aviation magazines lying around the house throughout my childhood, and of looking at the ads for kit planes therein. I'm 99% sure he and I saw one of those BDs at one of the airshows he took me to when I was a kid; maybe the Sun n' Fun in Lakeland. He often talked about building a kitplane and his mechanical skills were such that I do believe he could have done it; given how many other larks he fulfilled I'm kind of amazed he never did try. Viscerally I understand that these things are quite risky, but something about them will always make me think of my dad in a way that makes me really happy. We had a complicated relationship, but love of planes was something that was special for both of us.
posted by DingoMutt at 2:48 PM on December 31, 2020 [6 favorites]

I hugely admire the skill and ambition of anyone who manages to complete even a rudimentary homebuilt. Personally, I've always had an eye for the Rutan canards, which still look like the future. It's depressing but understandable that instead of exotic composites and unusual configurations, the current trend in homebuilding is towards extremely conventional, tried and true, very basic aluminum construction like the Vans RV series.
posted by scottjlowe at 3:10 PM on December 31, 2020

Does anyone use kit planes and LSAs to go anywhere?

I can say with certainty at least one person I (used to know) used theirs to fly around the region. With the weather was good in terms of ceilings and visibility, which was probably 75% of the year, they could shave off half the travel time vs. driving even though the trips were mostly under 200 miles. Well, half of what most people made it in. Probably about the same as my travel time once time time taken to get to the airport and preflighting was taken into account, but I drove those roads so damn much I could safely ignore the absurdly low speed limits without risking a ticket or a crash.

I'd rather have flown, but I made the mistake of not doing flight training back when it was less than half what you'd pay today and a decent plane could be had for a quarter of what they cost now. It was doubly stupid since I lived less than five minutes from the airport and didn't have much in the way of scheduling constraints. Oh well.
posted by wierdo at 3:22 PM on December 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

My jaw was on the floor for much of that article - Bede kept lying, kept selling, kept going bankrupt, kept not delivering products, and a huge proportion of those that did get built kept crashing and killing people. That "American spirit of aviation" and this plane and its inventor have, uh, Big Libertarian Energy.

Almost everything in America has big libertarian energy. The regulation of passenger air travel is the huge exception to America's willingness to let people die at horrible rates and that only happened because the first passenger jets, the horribly aptly named Comet, fell apart in midflight several times in their first year of service and without hardcore regulation nobody would have been willing to fly in jets ever again.
posted by srboisvert at 4:27 PM on December 31, 2020 [6 favorites]

Does anyone use kit planes and LSAs to go anywhere?

Absolutely. I've done multiple 1000 mile trips in mine. Factoring in a stop for fuel half-way, and the savings of parking/security/boarding/waiting/etc. at a commercial airport, I can usually beat the equivalent travel time by commercial airliner. And I get to fly it myself.

Most of my flights are shorter though. Living on Vancouver Island (BC, Canada) and having parents on the mainland, hops over to visit them are quite common. I can make each trip faster, and cheaper, than driving and taking a ferry.

Since I value my hide, it's a standard configuration (no crazy canards etc)

Canards aren't crazy at all. Look at the accident statistics, they're no worse than any standard configuration aircraft of comparable performance. It's interesting that Canards aren't the "standard" configuration... It's what the Wright Brothers started out with. The real downside to them is they usually need longer takeoff and landing runs, and aren't great for soft/rough fields.
posted by Snowflake at 9:49 AM on January 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

"crazy kitplane" wasn't the first clue?
posted by AJScease at 11:54 AM on January 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

Snowflake: Canards aren't crazy at all. Look at the accident statistics, they're no worse than any standard configuration aircraft of comparable performance.

I seem to recall something about a tail being able to provide stability without needing active control, while a canard always needs active control to maintain stability. Am I remembering that correctly? If that's true, are the accident rates comparable because there are so many other things that can go wrong?
posted by clawsoon at 3:37 PM on January 1, 2021

I seem to recall something about a tail being able to provide stability without needing active control, while a canard always needs active control to maintain stability. Am I remembering that correctly? If that's true, are the accident rates comparable because there are so many other things that can go wrong?

You are not remembering correctly. If designed right a canard isn't anymore inherently unstable than a conventional design. Probably a conventional design was better understood in terms of gremlins that might crop up. I seem to recall that an early Rutan design had a problem because the airfoil of the canard was a rather intolerant laminar flow section so with a lot of bugs or rain on it it would begin to lose lift to the point of not being able to maintain altitude. Another potential problem with a canard is if you some how manage to get the main wing stalled you lose a nose down pitching moment and potentially cannot recover, I remember reading about one design, the Cozy, where they had made a testing rig to evaluate this possibility and also outside of the envelop center of gravity loadings.

I am pretty sure that any fast homebuilt is more sensitive than a high wing Cessna, they pick up speed fast and are much more responsive to control inputs, however that is not the same thing as being unstable. Unstable would be where an airplane would tend to persist in an excursion from straight and level for example pulling back the control stick and then returning it to neutral resulting in the aircraft pitching up steeper and steeper until stalling or having an oscillation in one of the axis of flights that would tend to become more and more severe without corrective action by the pilot.
posted by Pembquist at 6:25 PM on January 1, 2021

Never finished, known to be dangerous, but irresistably tempting to middle aged men? Bede’s airplane is Homer’s Sub!
posted by condour75 at 9:21 AM on January 2, 2021 [1 favorite]