My dad was building a BD-5A – short wings, and big engine. He was pretty fanatical about making it perfect. Like, he measured all of the holes down to like a zillionth of an inch. Not content with just deburring the lightening holes in the spars and giving them a smooth finish, he spent hours polishing the edges to a mirror finish. And no one would ever see them once the wings were together. As far as he was concerned, there would not be another BD-5 better than his. Dad was a Flight Service Specialist at the Barstow-Daggett FSS, and he was transfered to Lancaster. He carefully disassembled and packed his project, and ordered special handling and extra insurance for it. The truck it was on had a long loading ramp. Another trucker needed it and took it. He swapped his short, 200-pound ramp for it. He tossed it right onto the convenient-looking flat spot in the truck carrying dad’s BD-5. Smashed it. It turned out OK, though. Dad checked around to see how much it would cost to build another airframe to his 80%-finished, and up to the same quality he put into it. $10,200. (This was in 1976.) Upon receiving the insurance check, he bought a six-year-old Cessna 172K Skyhawk. He said he had ‘the only four-seat BD-5 in the world’. He was doubly-lucky. It was about this time that engines became unavailable.
ANd speaking of engines, here’s another BD-5 story. Dad had a friend who could get a small turbojet engine. I think it was a target drone engine. The friend offered to procure the engine for the BD-5 in exchange for half-interest in the aircraft. Dad called Jim Bede and asked it a BD-5 could be modified to fly with a jet engine. Bede told him in no uncertain terms that it was not possible. The deal with the friend fell through. A year later Bede unveiled the jet-powered BD-5J.
Now, the BD-5 is cool. But I think a cooler plane is the BD-4. Just as fast, uses readily-available aircraft engines, and seats four. The BD-4 pictured on the Wiki page, N777LC, was parked at Paine Field in Everett, WA last month. I snapped this photo of it.
I have a very vivid and hilarious memory from childhood which involves that plane. When I was 7 years old or so, my friends and I loved watching James Bond movies (particularly the Roger Moore ones) because they were full of ridiculous over the top action, and also had enough of a dose of naughty sexual innuendo to be exciting. A friend of mine had watched Octopussy and he was like, “you guys have to see this movie, it’s awesome…a plane flies out of a horse’s ass!” I had no idea how this would be possible, so I had to see it. So we rented that movie and we saw that scene where the plane flies out of the back of a truck containing a fake horse. It sort of flies out from underneath the horse, if I recall correctly. It’s not literally flying out of the horse’s ass, but I guess it’s similar enough to where a little kid could interpret it that way. In any case, after that movie we made up a little song that we would sing (to the tune of “Camptown Races”) - one of the lines was, “Plane flies out of a horse’s ass, doo-dah, doo-dah.” We used to sing it while we were rollerblading at the skating rink that we went to on the first Thursday of every month.
The dowdy old Skyhawk has been in production for over 50 years. It ain’t fast, and it ain’t sexy. It’s like a flying Ford Taurus. Dull and boring. But. It’s a good, honest airplane. It will cruise twice as fast as a car, and isn’t a bad choice for a 300-mile trip. Until the mid-'70s its big, barn door-sized Fowler flaps would go down to 40º. I remember one hot day when I was training in the 172K I mentioned in my previous post, and the instructor told me to see how slow I could get it before it stalled, while maintaining altitude. I slowed it down, got ‘behind the power curve’ (i.e., added power and was still slowing down) dropped the flaps to 40º, hauled back on the yoke, and was still maintaining altitude and couldn’t get it any slower. So then I reached for the carb heat to lose some RPM. The instructor told me to give up. It wasn’t going to break. I’d gotten it as slow as it would go while maintaining altitude, and at that point I had no more control inputs to make. He called it a ‘technical stall’.
And you know? The Skyhawk isn’t bad looking. It’s so uncool, that uncool wraps around and it becomes cool.
The Bronco was able to carry i believe a squad of troops in a little cabin in the rear, and some marines kit bashed a version of it to carry the original chin turret of the Cobra attack helicopter.
I don’t think I could narrow it down to just one, but the Northrop Gamma would be on the short list. It held the speed record from Los Angeles to New York City, was the first airplane to fly over the south pole, and looks like an art deco sculpture.
In the same line, I flew from Nagoya last month and at the airport I spotted the strangest plane I’d seen with my own eyes. It turned out to be the Boeing 747 Dreamlifter. It’s shape isn’t quite as odd as the Beluga or Guppy, however it is a very big plane and the hunchback-like protrusion makes me think of an inverse 747: slim head, fat body instead of fat head, slim body.
My fave has always been the Spruce Goose - I dunno if it’s cool, per se, but it’s damn impressive. They’ve got it at an aviation museum in Oregon, and it just dwarfs everything else in the room. And it’s freaking wood! How badass is that.
On the other end of the scale, the XF-85 Goblin is also pretty damn amazing. Sure, it’s not the smallest plane out there, even discounting ultralights, but an actual combat plane that small is pretty cool. Even if it did kind of fail. The Stits Sky Baby is another pretty cool little plane.
The Hughes H-1 Racer was a beautiful plane - looked fast just sitting there. This picture is of a replica.
But perhaps my all-time favorite is the Lockheed Constellation. A great example of form meeting function - a premier airliner of it’s day. And every time I see one, it evokes this great sense of elegance and class associated with days gone by.
What’s the advantage of a twin-boom fuselage? Lateral stability? Seems like it would increase drag a lot more than just widening the fuselage of a single-boom aircraft.
As airliners go, the de Havilland Comet is by far the best-looking. It’s just a shame that they kept crashing.
