No love for Jim Bede. This article explains it pretty well. Richard Bach's Comments on Jim Bede and the BD-5 In many ways I compare him to Al Mooney. Give them a pencil and paper and let them work their magic. Just don't let them anywhere near the business office.
To quote Captain A. G. Lamplugh "Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect. This quote applies to the business aspects even more so than the design or operation of any aircraft.... Lots of very smart people who made fortunes in other businesses have lost them in aviation. Jim Bede was always undercapitalized and there have been far better capitalized aviation endeavors that have failed in similar manner (although not many that failed as spectacularly as his BD-5). One could blame the failure of the BD-5 on Hirth, since they couldn't live up to their promises on the engine (and it bankrupted them too), and once the Hirth engine failed, there wasn't an alternative. The design required a light and powerful engine to work and without that it wasn't going anywhere. Jim's designs were always in the corner of the envelope and had great performance at the design point, but, if you went very far off the design point in any direction they didn't perform well and could be downright dangerous. The early BD-5 short wing kits and the Yankee being a prime example of that, with great speed and cruise efficiency, but with a huge number of stall/spin accidents when pilots were in the pattern or hot dogging (one Yankee in Toledo where I was at the scene and identified the poor souls who were killed doing the buzzing). More pedestrian designs of the major manufacturers didn't perform as well, but they also were a lot more forgiving of that "carelessness, incapacity or neglect" than Jim's aircraft. All that said, he was a pretty innovative designer and had he been properly capitalized the aviation world may have been very different than it is today.
