This ‘$2,000 Jet’ Seduced Thousands of Pilots… Then Turned On Them

The first time the jet tried to kill him, Jack Collins was twenty-five years old and the sky over North Vietnam was on fire.

The sun was low over the jungle, turning the haze a dirty gold. Below him, the world was a mess of explosions and tracer fire, white puffs of flak blooming like poisonous flowers. His F-4 Phantom vibrated with power and fear as it knifed through the air, afterburners pushing him down toward a river valley that glowed orange under the burning horizon.

“Viper One, you’re hot, you’re hot—break left! Triple-A at your ten o’clock!” The voice in his headset crackled through static and adrenaline.

Jack’s gloved hand shoved the stick over and pulled, hard. G-forces crushed him into the seat. The horizon rolled and snapped, jungle and sky trading places in a blur. Black bursts of flak reached for him, each one a fist big enough to close over his whole life.

Thirty seconds earlier, the mission had been simple on paper. Escort a flight of bomb-laden Thuds to a bridge no one outside of the Pentagon could point to on a map. Keep MiGs off their backs, keep the guns on the ground busy shooting at someone else. Fly in, fly out. Standard war math.

But nothing about this place was standard. Not the heat, not the sound of the engines, not the way your pulse never came back down once you crossed the coast.

“Viper Two, I lost tally—where the hell are you?” Jack shouted, scanning the sky. Sweat trickled into his eyes, stinging. A line of tracers arced past the canopy, bright green needles stitching the air.

“Right behind you, Jack. Relax,” Bishop answered. Bishop—real name Michael Hart—was on his wing like always, the kind of pilot who made formation flying feel like dancing. Calm, smooth, too good at joking for a war zone.

Jack caught a glimpse of his wingman’s Phantom sliding into position off his right side, close enough that Jack could see the scuffed paint on the nose and the tiger sticker Bishop’s crew chief had slapped under the cockpit. For half a second the sight of that little cartoon tiger, teeth bared in a lopsided grin, made Jack feel like everything was under control.

Then the sky lit up.

The flak that got Bishop wasn’t the angry little puffs they’d been dodging all day. It was a black sun that bloomed right in front of his jet.

One moment Bishop’s Phantom was there, vapor trails curling off its wings, engines burning hot and clean. The next, the nose disappeared in a dirty orange flash. The shockwave slapped Jack’s own jet, rattling the canopy. Shards of metal spun past, too close to see anything but silver blurs.

“Jesus—Bishop!” Jack yelled, twisting, trying to track the wreck. For a heartbeat he caught sight of a flaming shape tumbling through the sky, broken wings and trailing fire. Then it vanished into the haze, leaving only an ugly smear of black smoke.

“Viper Two is hit! Viper Two is—” Jack’s backseater shouted, voice cracking. “No chute—no chute—”

Jack pulled back, fighting the urge to dive after his friend. Training screamed at him: keep flying, stay with the formation, don’t chase the dead.

The jet shuddered, a hard buffet that felt like a hand on his shoulder yanking him away from the edge. He forced his focus back ahead. The bombers were still lined up on the bridge, the river below glowing like molten glass under the bombs. The world kept moving, indifferent.

In that instant, a thought burned into Jack’s mind and stayed there for the rest of his life:

The airplane is not your friend. It’s a blade you sit on and try not to fall off.

He finished the mission. He got the Thuds home. He landed on the carrier with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking. The flight surgeon gave him a cup of coffee and a pill and a pat on the shoulder. He watched the empty bunk where Bishop’s flight bag should have been and listened to the white noise of the ship’s ventilation and told himself he was lucky.

He was alive.

He never fully believed it.

Years later, when the war was over and the politics had moved on to other sins, that same feeling came back to him in a small town hangar in Ohio, staring at a cardboard sign that promised fighter-jet dreams for the price of a family car.

You know how every pilot’s got that one airplane they secretly dream about. For most pilots gathered at the Oshkosh airshow that summer, it wasn’t a Mustang or a Phantom or even a Bonanza. It was the BD-5.

A tiny homebuilt that looked like a pocket-sized fighter, sitting on the grass like a toy someone had enlarged by mistake. Sleek metal fuselage. Bubble canopy. Retractable gear. All wrapped around a promise that sounded like pure heresy to anyone who’d ever signed on the dotted line for a certified airplane.

Two hundred knots. On a budget.

Jack read the brochure twice, then a third time, then looked back at the airplane with something he hadn’t felt since before the war turned everything into a series of odds and percentages.

Want.

The salesman at the booth had a smile that tried to look casual and failed. He wore a polo with the BD Aircraft logo, a name badge, and the unshakeable confidence of a man who believed the future was glued together in aluminum and fiberglass.

“Thinking about it?” he asked.

Jack looked down at the glossy paper in his hands. A tiny rocket ship grinned back at him from the page, banking against a blue sky. Underneath the photo, in bold letters, were the words that would hook thousands of pilots across the country:

Affordable. High-performance. Build it in your garage.

He’d only been out of the Navy for two years. The Phantoms had become overgrown memories—massive, loud, belonging to a part of his life the country seemed eager to shove into a filing cabinet and forget. He’d gone from flight decks to factory floors, working a job that smelled like oil and boredom. His wife, Anne, loved that he was home every night. His little boy, Tyler, didn’t know what to make of the quiet man who sometimes stared at the sky like it owed him answers.

In the evenings Jack would drive out to the local airport just to smell avgas and watch Cessnas float down to the runway. It wasn’t war, but it was air, and that was something.

Then he’d seen a magazine ad for Oshkosh. And in that ad, a thumbnail picture of a BD-5.

“A tiny high-performance homebuilt that looks like a fighter and promises jetlike speed on a budget,” the article had said. “Pitched as the ultimate pilot’s toy, a personal rocket ship you can build in your garage.”

Standing in the grass, with the smell of grilled hot dogs and airplane exhaust swirling together, Jack looked up from the brochure at the real thing. The BD-5 sat there like it was waiting for him. Short, sharp wings. A tail that looked like it belonged on an F-104 that’d been left in the wash too long. It didn’t look like a Cessna’s practical cousin. It looked like a weapon.

“How much?” Jack asked.

The salesman’s smile brightened.

“You put down four hundred dollars today,” he said, tapping the number on the brochure with a friendly finger, “toward a total cost of around two thousand dollars for the kit. That’s your deposit on a two-hundred-knot airplane you build yourself. Retractable gear, bubble canopy, empty weight around four hundred pounds.”

He said the numbers like a liturgy.

“Two thousand,” Jack repeated. It was, weirdly, believable. The price of a used car. Less than he’d spent on the Oldsmobile sitting at the hotel.

“For that price,” the salesman added smoothly, “you’re getting performance that rivals certified singles ten times the cost. We’re talking about jet fighter looks and near-jet performance for the price of a family vacation. Put in a couple hours a day, you’re flying in a year or two. Six hundred to eight hundred hours of build time. Basic tools. No fancy jigs.”

Jack tried to imagine it. The evenings in the garage, the smell of epoxy and aluminum. The feeling of stepping into a cockpit that was his, not the Navy’s, not a rental’s. A personal warbird for a man who wasn’t done fighting ghosts.

“What’s the catch?” he asked, because some stubborn part of him still remembered Bishop’s jet disappearing in a blossom of fire.

The salesman spread his hands. “It’s a homebuilt, not a Piper. You’ve got to be comfortable doing the work. But the design—look at it. Fighterlike speed for used car money. And we’re working on a microjet version down the line. Guys who get in now, they’re in on the ground floor.”

Jack’s eye caught a small note at the bottom of the page, easy to miss under all the promises.

Engine details pending final selection.

He tapped it. “No engine?”

“We’re finalizing that,” the salesman said quickly. “The prototype flew with a thirty-six horsepower Polaris, but we’re upgrading. Jim Bey—our designer—he’s looking for something in the sixty to seventy horsepower range. Light, compact, reliable. We’re close. Once we lock in the power plant, everything else will fall into place.”

He said it with the breezy certainty of a man who believed physics answered phone calls.

Jack looked back at the BD-5. When he closed his eyes, he could almost feel the stick in his hand. The tiny canopy around him. The same razor edge he’d ridden over the jungle, only this time in quiet Midwestern air, over cornfields instead of enemy guns. No call sign. No bombers to cover. Just speed and sky.

You know how every pilot’s got that one airplane they secretly dream about.

For most pilots on that field, the BD-5 was becoming exactly that.

“Can I sit in it?” Jack asked.

“Sure,” the salesman said, like he’d been waiting. “Go ahead. Careful getting in. It sits low.”

The cockpit was snug, almost intimate. Jack lowered himself in and pulled the mock-up canopy down. The noise of the airshow dulled. The world shrank to aluminum ribs and Plexiglas and the familiar smell of heated plastic and sweat. The panel was simple: airspeed, altitude, engine instruments. The gear handle. The stick fell perfectly into his right hand, as if it had been designed for it.

He imagined the runway stretching out in front of him. The throttle sliding forward. The little airplane coming alive around him, the way the Phantom had, only this time it would be his choice alone.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?” the salesman said through the canopy, his voice muffled, like a memory bleeding into a dream. “This is the future of personal flying. We’ve got thousands of orders already. Guys like you. Builders all over the country. You’re all going to be part of something big.”

Thousands. Jack swallowed.

Bishop had once told him, half-joking in a ready room filled with cigarette smoke and nervous laughter, that pilots were the easiest marks in the world.

“Show us something that looks faster than the last fast thing,” Bishop had said, pushing a cold coffee aside. “Tell us it’ll make us feel like we’re cheating death instead of waiting for it. We’ll sign anything short of a confession.”

Jack had laughed. Then. Back when he’d believed that if you got good enough and careful enough, the jet would be on your side.

He took a deep breath in the BD-5’s cockpit and realized he wanted to believe that again.

When he stepped back onto the grass, the salesman was holding a clipboard with a form on it and a pen already uncapped.

Jack looked at the sky. Then at the airplane. Then, finally, at the signature line.

He signed.

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The box arrived in late autumn, when the Ohio sky was low and gray and the leaves had already given up on pretending they were fire. It came on the back of a rattling flatbed truck, strapped down like a coffin for someone who’d died in pieces.

“Your new toy, huh?” the driver said, pulling his cap low as they unloaded it into Jack’s garage.

“Something like that,” Jack answered.

The crate smelled of fresh wood and faint machine oil. Inside, everything was wrapped and labeled, a jigsaw puzzle of aluminum ribs, fiberglass fairings, and cryptic brackets. Jack opened it like a man opening a long-awaited letter from the front, fingers careful, heart faster than it should have been.

The dream was right there. Tangible, cold, sharp-edged. He could see the airplane hidden in the chaos the way he could once see the landing pattern in the chaos of a busy deck.

Anne stood in the doorway, arms folded, watching.

“So this is it,” she said. “The jet.”

He smiled, sheepish. “It’s not a jet. Not yet. Just an airplane. A little one.”

“Little,” she repeated, looking at the pile that seemed bigger than their car. “And you’re going to build it in here.”

“That’s the plan.”

She studied his face for a long moment, as if searching for someone she recognized from older, unscarred photographs. Then she sighed, half amused, half resigned.

“Just promise me one thing, Jack.”

“Anything.”

“If you build it, don’t let it take you away again.”

He didn’t know how to answer that, so he kissed her on the forehead and turned back to the crate.

At first, it was almost fun.

He cut and drilled and clecoed metal together. He measured twice and drilled once and sometimes drilled twice anyway. The manuals were thin but enthusiastic, written in a tone that felt like Bosun’s calls to action: you can do this, any pilot can, just follow the steps. Diagrams showed the skeleton of the airplane taking shape, a small, sleek thing that looked more and more real with each evening he spent out there.

The BD-5 had been marketed as the ultimate build-at-home kit. Put down your four hundred dollars toward a total kit cost of around two thousand, and you could own a two-hundred-knot airplane you built yourself. The ads promised that a pilot could put it together in six hundred to eight hundred hours, using basic hand tools and no exotic skills.

In reality, Jack discovered, everything took longer.

The ribs didn’t quite line up the way the drawings suggested. The pre-drilled holes were sometimes not drilled. The instructions assumed a level of fabrication fluency he hadn’t acquired in his years flying Navy jets. He learned to bend metal carefully, to clamp and grind and polish.

His hands, which had once been trusted with millions of dollars of advanced hardware, now ached from riveting his own dream together piece by stubborn piece.

Winter turned the garage into a freezer. A small space heater barely kept his breath from fogging. Still, he kept going. The more the fuselage took shape, the more he could see it. A little rocket with his name on it.

What he couldn’t see was an engine.

Every time he called the company, they had the same confident answers ready, like pre-recorded messages.

“We’ve shelved the original thirty-six horsepower Polaris from the prototype,” a representative explained on one call. “We’re working with Hearth on a new six-hundred-fifty-cc snowmobile unit. Lightweight, compact, easy to source. Perfect for the BD-5’s envelope.”

“Is it flying?” Jack asked.

“Test articles are performing well. We’re ironing out some cooling and durability issues. Not unusual when adapting a ground engine for aviation. We’re very close.”

“How close?”

“A few months, tops.”

A few months became a year. The garage walls filled with notepads and weight calculations as Jack tried not to think about the empty hole in the back of his airplane where an engine ought to be.

He wasn’t the only one.

At fly-ins and local EAA chapter meetings, BD-5 builders gravitated to each other like veterans finding their own at a crowded bar. They traded stories and tricks and frustration, leaning over faded blueprints and coffee-stained drawings.

“How many hours you got in it?” one guy asked him at a chapter meeting. The man was a dentist with silver hair and oil under his fingernails, his enthusiasm undimmed by the streaks of metal dust on his shirt.

“Lost count after a thousand,” Jack said.

The dentist laughed. “They told us six to eight hundred. Honest to God, I’ll be lucky if I’m done at three thousand.”

Around them, the talk flowed: missing hardware, vague instructions, the acrobatics required to keep the CG within the razor-thin envelope the design allowed. And always, always the same question.

“Any word on engines?”

The answer, more often than not, was a shrug.

Still, they stayed hooked. Because on paper, the BD-5 looked like the next big leap. Sleek retractable gear, near-jet performance, and the promise of a microjet down the line. In a decade when most kits were simple wooden taildraggers topping out around one-twenty to one-fifty miles an hour, the BD-5 looked like something from a science fiction magazine. Fighter-like speed for used-car money. Detachable wings for trailering. The ultimate personal aircraft.

The idea of owning a mini high-performance airplane within reach of an average pilot’s budget was irresistible. It felt like a rebellion against mediocrity.

For Jack, it was something more. It was a way to rewrite the ending of a story that still haunted him every time the wind slammed a door or a car backfired too close.

Some nights, he dreamed he was back in the Phantom, the cockpit glowing green, the sky ahead filled with tracers. He’d wake up to find himself staring at the dim outline of the half-built BD-5 through the open door to the garage, the airplane’s skeleton motionless in the moonlight, looking for all the world like it was waiting for him to strap in.

Anne learned not to wake him too suddenly. Tyler, now seven, would poke his head in and watch his father work, eyes wide.

“Is that the jet, Dad?” he asked one evening, pointing at the fuselage.

“Not a jet,” Jack said. “But it’ll be fast.”

“Can I fly it when I grow up?”

Jack paused. The question hit him in a part of his chest he’d thought he’d armored over long ago.

“We’ll see,” he said finally, knowing full well he might not let his son anywhere near it.

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The first time he heard about the accidents, Jack was standing in line at a parts booth, arguing about the price of a set of rivet squeezers.

A man behind him, face red from the sun and too much coffee, said, “You hear about those first BD-5s? Four of them up, and three of them crashed on takeoff. Fourth one crashed on landing.”

Jack turned. “You sure?”

The man nodded grimly. “First four homebuilt short-wing versions. Three went in on first liftoff. Killed the builders. Fourth made the takeoff, didn’t make the landing. Airplane’s twitchy as hell. CG envelope’s a razor. Engine quits and the nose pitches up like someone’s yanking on the tail. Stall city.”

Another builder, overhearing, joined in. “Most of the crashes are on first flights. Guys don’t get a chance to learn the quirks. No two-seat trainer. Your first takeoff is your first solo in type. Makes the test pilot in you or kills you.”

Jack felt something cold settle in his gut. The war had taught him that airplanes could kill you even when they were built by contractors with defense budgets. A homebuilt thoroughbred, assembled in garages and barns, with an engine originally meant to push a snowmobile across a frozen lake—it seemed like inviting trouble to dinner and handing it the carving knife.

But the men around him weren’t backing away. If anything, the danger seemed to sharpen their interest, not blunt it.

“It’s a pure machine when it’s built right,” someone said, almost reverent. “Handing like a fighter. Just… unforgiving.”

Unforgiving. Like a war that didn’t care how many hours you’d logged or how many promises you’d made about coming home.

On the drive back to Ohio, Anne watched him from the passenger seat while Tyler slept in the back with his head lolling against the window.

“What did they say about those little planes?” she asked.

“Some accidents,” Jack said. “New type. High wing loading. Sensitive controls. People underestimated it.”

“And you?” she asked quietly. “Are you underestimating it?”

He gripped the steering wheel a little tighter. The highway stretched ahead, gray and indifferent.

“I know what airplanes can do,” he said.

“That’s what scares me,” she replied.

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At BD Aircraft, far away in a modest office that smelled of paper and desperation, Jim Bey was learning the same lesson in a different way.

He was visionary, restless, convinced he could bend physics and business timelines to his will. The BD-5 was his brainchild, his moonshot. On paper, it was beautiful. In the air, when it behaved, it was exhilarating. On the balance sheet and the test stand, it was a rolling emergency.

He’d taken the first prototype up himself in September 1971, and it hadn’t flown anything like the brochure suggested. Pitch-sensitive. Unstable in roll. A handful. Months of tweaks and test flights finally tamed the handling into something honest, at least on the aerodynamic side.

The powerplant was another story.

He’d shelved the original thirty-six horsepower Polaris engine when it proved inadequate. He went hunting for something in the sixty to seventy horsepower range that could run at continuous RPM, handle prop loads, and still be light and cheap enough to keep the kit price in reach.

That combination, he discovered, didn’t exist off the shelf.

The six-hundred-fifty-cc Hearth snowmobile engine was a compromise. Lightweight, compact, easy to source—on paper. In the real world it hated living at high continuous power. Cooling was tricky. Vibration shook things loose. Reliability was more aspiration than fact.

In 1972, during a demo flight for FAA officials meant to clear the BD-5 for display at Oshkosh, the engine quit cold. The test pilot dead-sticked it in, landing safely. But the FAA refused to issue a display permit, and the BD-5’s temperamental reputation spread before most customers even opened their crates.

Still, Bey believed. Or at least he believed he could not afford to stop believing.

He kept taking orders. He floated ideas for a factory-built certified version. He dreamed of the BD-5J microjet, a turbine-powered evolution that would shriek across airshow skies and make the BD-5 name synonymous with innovation instead of disappointment.

For a while, the microjet looked like proof he’d been right. It debuted at Oshkosh in 1973 and by 1974 was flying formation routines as a three-ship demo team. Fast, clean, crowd-pleasing. The poster child of his vision.

But behind the scenes, the numbers were bleeding red.

Hearth, the supplier of the piston engines, went bankrupt in 1974, cutting off the only powerplant source. Hundreds of kits sat in garages and hangars with no engines to install. Bey scrambled to line up a replacement, eventually striking a deal with a Japanese manufacturer, but delays piled up.

He’d started shipping kits before the engine was truly sorted, counting on optimism and flight testing to close the gap later. He’d embraced concurrent development, starting production while the prototype was still in flux. It saved calendar time on paper. In reality, it meant every flaw was baked into hundreds of partially built airframes scattered across the country.

By the mid-70s, BD Aircraft was running on fumes. Development delays, missing engines, growing numbers of frustrated builders—all weighed on the company like too much baggage too far aft of the CG. By 1979, the air ran out. BD Aircraft went down.

More than three thousand customers had sent in full or partial payments. Only about two hundred BD-5s would ever be completed and flown. Out of those, a staggering number would end in wreckage and funerals.

On a quiet evening in Ohio, decades later, Jack would read these facts in a memoir and an article that tried to make sense of it all. Back then, he only had rumors and his own stubborn hope.

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The spring afternoon he rolled his BD-5 fuselage into the sunlight for the first time, Jack felt like he was wheeling out a piece of his own history.

The airplane gleamed in bare metal, unpainted, its lines sharp and eager. The wings were on. The controls were rigged. The canopy slid and latched with a satisfying click. Friends from the local EAA chapter gathered around, admiring it with the wary respect mechanics reserve for things that look fast and unforgiving.

“You finally got an engine,” the dentist said, shaking his head in disbelief as he peered into the tight compartment behind the cockpit.

“Found a modified unit,” Jack said. “One of the builders out west did a lot of testing. Better cooling. Beefed-up mounts. Different carb setup. Claims he’s put a couple hundred hours on it.”

“You trust it?”

Jack hesitated. That little pause said more than any engineering report could.

“I trust it enough to fly it once,” he said.

That night, Anne sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, the steam curling around her face like battlefield smoke. She watched him pacing.

“When?” she asked.

“Saturday morning,” he said. “Early. Cooler air. Less traffic in the pattern.”

“You could let someone else do the first flight,” she said. Her voice wasn’t accusing or pleading, just… tired. “There are test pilots who do that.”

“It’s my plane,” he replied. “My build. My responsibility.”

She closed her eyes for a long moment. When she opened them, there was resignation in them, but also love.

“When you were flying in the war,” she said, “I used to sit on the floor by the phone and stare at it for hours. I was afraid that if I left the room, that would be when they called.”

“They never called,” he said softly.

“Because you came home,” she answered. “Don’t make me do that again, Jack. Don’t make me sit by the phone when you’re five miles away.”

He knelt beside her, took her hand.

“I’m not going back to war,” he said. “It’s just an airplane.”

“That’s what scares me,” she whispered. “You trusted the last airplane to bring you home too.”

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The dawn on Saturday was pale and cold, the kind that made the grass behind the hangars crunch under Jack’s boots. The small airport was still, the only sound the occasional distant bark of a dog and the clink of metal as he pulled the BD-5 from the hangar.

It looked even smaller on the ramp. Like a toy someone had left in the wrong world.

His friend Dave, an A&P mechanic who’d spent his early career patching up combat-tired Hueys, ran his hands over the engine cowling, checking the fasteners one more time.

“You sure about this, Jack?” Dave asked. “You know the stats. This little bastard’s got teeth. High wing loading. Narrow CG. Engine mounted high. Thrust line pushes the nose down under power, and when that engine quits…”

“The nose pitches up,” Jack finished. “I know.”

“Violently,” Dave added. “Loses that downward thrust and suddenly the tail’s pushing the nose up. You’re in the region of reverse command with no warning. Stall comes quick. You’re low and slow on first flight. There’s no margin.”

Jack nodded. “So I keep it on the front side of the power curve. Fast. No dawdling. No pattern dragging. One lap. Climb, downwind, base, final. If anything feels wrong, I chop it and land straight ahead.”

“And if the engine quits at five hundred feet?” Dave asked.

“Then I fly the airplane all the way into the crash,” Jack said quietly. “Like they taught us.”

Dave looked at the little plane, then at Jack. “You ever think maybe you already used up your share of miracles over Hanoi?”

“Every day,” Jack replied. “That’s why I’m careful now.”

The BD-5’s cockpit welcomed and confined him at the same time. He strapped in, the harness snug across his shoulders. The panel glowed to life as he flicked on the master. Instruments that had been still for years twitched awake, needles flicking like startled birds.

He took a long, slow breath, breathing in the familiar cocktail of fuel and oil and cold air. For a moment, he was back in the Phantom, helmet heavy, backseater calling out altitude. Then the illusion snapped—the BD-5’s cockpit was too small, the panel too simple. The war was not here, except in his heartbeat.

He keyed the handheld radio.

“County traffic, Experimental Five Delta Juliet taking runway two-seven for initial test flight, remaining in the pattern,” he said. His voice sounded steadier than he felt.

Dave stood by the wing, holding the nose, watching him with the tight, focused expression of a man who’d seen too many things go from fine to fatal in seconds.

Jack reached back and hit the starter.

The engine coughed, sputtered, then caught. The BD-5 vibrated like a caged animal, the prop a silver blur. Oil pressure came up into the green. RPM steady. Temps rising slowly.

He ran through the checklist, lips moving silently. Controls free and correct. Trim set. Flaps retracted. Canopy locked.

For a heartbeat, he thought of Anne, sitting at the kitchen table with her tea. Of Tyler, who’d been forbidden from the airport this morning and had glared about it with all the righteous anger of a child denied a show.

He thought of Bishop’s Phantom disappearing, the black blossom of flak swallowing the nose, the sudden absence where his friend had been. The lesson he’d learned then: the airplane is not your friend.

And yet, here he was, asking a new airplane to give him back something he’d lost.

He released the brakes.

The BD-5 rolled forward, at first reluctant, then eager. The runway stretched ahead, a band of faded asphalt cutting through fields glistening with dew. Power came up smoothly. The little airplane pulled against his back like it wanted to fly right now.

Forty knots. Fifty. The nose lightened, the stick alive in his hand. Sixty. The world narrowed to centerline and the trembling numbers on the airspeed indicator.

He eased back gently.

The BD-5 lifted off.

The ground fell away. The airplane climbed, light and sharp, the controls crisp. The seat of his pants, calibrated by war and training, told him exactly what the wings were doing. The climb rate was brisk, the angle shallow—he did not want to be nose-high with nowhere to go if the engine coughed.

“County traffic, Five Delta Juliet airborne, turning crosswind for two-seven,” he reported, hearing his own heartbeat between the words.

The airplane felt… good.

Pure.

Responsive in a way that reminded him of fighters and knife-edge passes, not of docile trainers. He moved the stick gently left, then right. The BD-5 rolled without hesitation, the nose tracking like it was wired directly to his neurons.

The refrain from the builders’ meetings came back to him: when it’s trimmed right and the engine stays running, it flies beautifully.

He turned downwind, keeping the pattern tight. A thousand feet. Airspeed solid. Engine temps holding. Oil pressure steady. For a few seconds, he let himself enjoy it. The rush of air. The feel of the machine, small and powerful, carved around him.

Then the engine quit.

There was no sputter, no cough, no warning. One instant the engine’s vibration was part of him, as familiar as breathing. The next, it was gone.

Silence slammed into the cockpit.

In that same instant, the airplane tried to kill him.

The loss of thrust took away the nose-down moment that had been quietly balancing on the high-mounted engine. Without that push, the aerodynamics reasserted themselves like a spring uncoiling. The nose snapped upward, brutally.

Jack’s head slammed back against the seat. The horizon disappeared low in the canopy as sky filled everything.

Instinct honed over thousands of carrier approaches screamed through him.

Push.

He shoved the stick forward, hard. For a terrifying half-second nothing seemed to happen. The BD-5 hung on the edge of the stall, the airflow dirty and angry over the wings. Then the nose grudgingly dipped, the airspeed ticking back up from the brink.

“Fly the airplane,” some long-ago instructor’s voice barked in his skull. “You’re not a passenger. Fly the damn airplane.”

He looked down. The runway was now behind him, receding. Fields sprawled ahead, dotted with trees and fences and a single narrow road.

A thousand feet. No power. No time to troubleshoot. No engine to coax back to life. The BD-5, with its slick wings and high wing loading, was not going to glide like a trainer. It was going to drop like a polished brick.

He picked a field. Just one. Not the best, but the one directly ahead, giving him the longest straight-in path. Corn, mostly. The stalks would be high enough to tangle the gear, but he was out of options.

He trimmed for best guess at glide speed, hands steady. The airplane felt lighter and heavier all at once, freed from the engine but weighed down by gravity’s sudden attention.

“County traffic, Five Delta Juliet, engine failure, landing straight ahead in the field north of the airport,” he said into the mic. His voice came out calm. Distant. Like he was listening to a recording.

He rode the BD-5 down.

The ground came up fast. He kept the nose slightly low, unwilling to let the airplane tempt him into trading speed for altitude he didn’t have. At a hundred feet he flared gently, just enough to soften the impact.

The BD-5 hit the corn.

The first contact was a violent grabbing, the wheels snatching at dirt and stalks. The nose pitched, then dug. The airplane decelerated from forward motion to violence in a heartbeat. The canopy filled with green and brown and then shattered brightness as it tore free.

There was the sound of metal deforming, a roar that wasn’t quite sound, more like the world collapsing into a narrow tunnel. Harness straps bit into his shoulders, his chest. Something hit his leg, hard. His helmet—no, he wasn’t wearing a helmet. The impact jolted his head anyway, flinging him forward and back.

Then there was silence.

He smelled fuel and dirt. He tasted blood and dust.

For a long moment, he didn’t move. The world felt like it was holding its breath with him.

Then he coughed.

Pain lanced through his side. His left leg burned, hot and cold at the same time. His hands, astonishingly, still held the control stick in a death grip.

“Jack!” Dave’s voice faint in the headset, distorted. “Jack, talk to me—”

He reached for the mic switch, fingers fumbling.

“I’m here,” he managed. His voice sounded like it belonged to someone who’d used up a lifetime of luck in a few seconds. Which, in a way, he had. Twice.

He thumbed the harness release and pushed at the canopy frame. It moved grudgingly under his weight, the metal creaking, protesting. He shoved harder. Corn stalks snapped and fell away, letting more light in.

He hauled himself out of the wreckage.

The BD-5, that tiny, seductive promise of fighter-jet thrills for a used-car price, lay crumpled on its belly in the field. The wings were twisted. The nose was buried. The tail was askew. It looked less like an airplane now and more like an accusation.

In the distance, sirens wailed. Closer, he heard the SHUNK-shunk of someone running through the corn. Dave burst into view, panting, eyes wide.

“You stupid son of a—” Dave started, then stopped when he saw Jack standing, leaning slightly, blood on his forehead but alive. “You okay?”

“I’ve been worse,” Jack said.

It was true. He had been worse at twenty-five, watching his wingman’s jet vanish in fire, helpless. He had been worse on a carrier deck, counting helmets at debrief and coming up short.

But standing there in a field in Ohio, staring at the broken little airplane he had built with his own hands, he realized something that hit him harder than any flak.

This time, he didn’t have to go back up.

He didn’t owe this airplane another chance. He didn’t owe this war, this private little battle with speed and risk, another casualty.

He limped closer to the wreckage. The engine sat crooked in its mounts, silent and smug. The cockpit where he’d sat minutes earlier was now a cramped coffin, bent and bruised.

The BD-5 had seduced him with promises: fighter-like speed, affordable performance, the chance to be that kind of pilot again. For thousands of men like him, it had spoken the same language—dreams of glory, of beating gravity and mortality on a budget.

And for far too many, it had turned on them.

He reached out and laid a hand on the crumpled skin of the fuselage.

“We’re done,” he said quietly.

The wind moved through the corn, carrying away his words.

––––––––––––––––––

Years passed.

The BD-5’s legend turned into a cautionary tale told in hangars and at airshows, in forums and magazine articles. People talked about the design’s brilliance and its flaws, about how a solid aerodynamic concept had been dragged down by engine troubles and business decisions that outran engineering reality.

Some BD-5s flew on, their owners having modified them with better engines, refined systems, and careful rigging. They showed up at airshows, darting and glinting, still seducing crowds with their tiny-fighter looks. Others sat in hangars, half-built, gathering dust—monuments to a dream that had never quite taken off.

Jack sold what was left of his wreckage for parts. Some other builder would use a rib here, a control surface there, a bracket somewhere else. In that way, his BD-5 would fly, scattered across the sky in pieces.

He went back to flying more forgiving machines. Cessnas. A rented Bonanza, occasionally. He became the old guy at the airport who sat under the wing of a high-wing and told stories to wide-eyed kids. Stories about carrier decks and phantom jets, about the sound of flak and the smell of jet fuel at dawn. Stories about a tiny silver airplane that had almost killed him in a cornfield—but hadn’t.

He never quite forgave himself for signing that form at Oshkosh. But he also never forgot what it had taught him.

You could be seduced twice by the same basic lie, just dressed in different skin. The war had promised honor and purpose, and given him loss and a lifetime of echoes. The BD-5 had promised jet-like freedom on a budget, and given him a broken leg and the chance to choose a different ending.

He chose.

––––––––––––––––––

In 2019, when he was an old man with stiff knees and more metal in his body than he cared to list, Jack sat in his living room and watched a news report on his tablet.

The story was about a BD-5 accident in Camarillo, California. An eighty-two-year-old pilot named John Lewis had lost power shortly after takeoff in his BD-5 and gone down, fatally.

The footage showed twisted wreckage, familiar and awful. The reporter talked about the BD-5’s history, its reputation for being unforgiving, its lure.

“Even today,” the voice-over said, “BD-5s are still flying, and still occasionally falling out of the sky. By some estimates, around fifteen percent of all completed BD-5s have been lost in fatal accidents, many on their first few flights.”

Jack set the tablet down, hands shaking slightly.

He thought of all the men who’d been drawn in by that same gleaming promise. Fighter-like speed. Affordable thrills. A personal war fought in clear blue skies over quiet fields.

He thought of Bishop, twenty-five forever in a sky over a jungle, never knowing how close his old wingman had come to dying in a cornfield decades later for a different kind of dream.

Anne came into the room, slower now, hair white.

“Bad news?” she asked, seeing his face.

“An old story,” he said. “Repeating itself.”

She sat beside him, took his hand, fingers warm and familiar. “You’re still here,” she said.

“I shouldn’t be,” he replied. “Not twice over.”

“That’s not how it works,” she said. “You’re here because you chose to be. You chose to land that little monster in a field instead of tempting fate again. You chose to walk away.”

He looked at her, then at the framed photo on the mantle. It was from the 70s, taken after his BD-5 crash but before the limp set into his stride permanently. He stood in front of a rental Cessna with Tyler, then a teenager, grinning and holding up a freshly earned student pilot certificate.

He’d let his son fly. But only in airplanes he trusted.

“Do you ever miss it?” Anne asked softly. “The fast ones. The fighters. The dangerous ones.”

“Every day,” he said. “And not at all.”

She smiled. “That sounds like you.”

He thought about the BD-5’s designer, about the memoir he’d skimmed once where Bey admitted they’d been naïve, thinking putting an engine in an airplane wasn’t much harder than installing a radio. He thought about how that confidence had drawn in thousands of men like him, how the deposits had ballooned into millions of dollars, how the dream had outclimbed its technical ceiling.

He thought about how easy it was—to sell the dream as hard as you chased it, and to ignore the way the numbers and physics quietly whispered no.

On the TV, muted now, the news showed footage from an airshow. A BD-5J microjet screamed past the crowd, leaving a thin white trail, the announcer’s excited mouth moving silently about speed and innovation and crowd-pleasing performance.

The little jet looked magnificent. For a moment, Jack’s heartbeat kicked up, his old instincts stirring, the part of him that loved the edge leaning forward.

Then he remembered the field. The silence when the engine quit. The brutal nose-up lurch. The choice to push, to fly the airplane, to accept that this would be it if he was wrong.

The microjet banked and climbed, a tiny streak against the blue.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Anne said, following his gaze.

“Yes,” he said. “And dangerous.”

“That’s life,” she replied.

He nodded. “True. But life’s worth a lot more than two thousand dollars and a promise in a brochure.”

He turned off the TV.

The room settled into quiet. Outside, a civilian sky arched over a civilian town in a country that had moved on from the war that had once defined him. Somewhere, other pilots were dreaming of other airplanes, other edges.

Jack Collins sat in his chair, feeling every year and every mile, and understood, finally and completely, that he didn’t need another seductive machine to tell him he was alive.

He already was.

He had survived a war that took his friends. He had survived an airplane that tried very hard to be his private war’s final shot. He had a wife who still held his hand, a son who flew safely, grandkids who asked him to tell stories about the old days and rolled their eyes when he warned them about shortcuts.

The BD-5 had seduced thousands of pilots. It had turned on too many of them.

But it hadn’t taken him.

That was the ending he chose to live with.

Not the cannon burst over a foreign jungle.

Not the twisted metal in an Ohio cornfield.

Just this: an old pilot, in a quiet room, at peace with the sky and the machines that had tried to own him.

He closed his eyes, not in fear this time, but in something that felt suspiciously like gratitude.

Outside, a small airplane droned overhead, a harmless little Cessna headed somewhere ordinary. Jack listened to it fading into the distance and smiled.

“Fly safe,” he whispered.

And for the first time in a very long time, he knew the airplane up there probably would.