THE 10 MOST DANGEROUS AIRPLANES EVER BUILT
A CLASSIC 1941 NEW YORKER CARTOON DEPICTS AN AERO ENGINEER WALKING AWAY FROM A SMOKING WRECK MUMBLING, “WELL, BACK TO THE OLD DRAWING BOARD.”
Unless an aircraft design is irredeemably bad, even the worst of them get corrected, and their fatal flaws become just a bad memory. Which is why the following selection of dangerous airplanes will inevitably prompt cries of “Nothing wrong with that bird once pilots learned how to operate’er,” or “Great machine, just took a little refining.”
Tell that to the pilots whose last earthly view was the ground approaching at 600 knots, or passengers who had only a moment of consciousness as a cabin shattered around them. There are no do-overs in flight, and we offer this selection of aviation’s Achilles’ heels as evidence that bad things happen even to aircraft that eventually gain good reputations.
BEDE BD-5
Jim Bede was aviation’s greatest promoter, fan and charlatan. He could sell air conditioners to Inuits and speedboats to Saharans. And, as he eventually proved, $12,000 (in 2019 dollars) single-seat kitplanes to homebuilders entranced by the idea of flying 210 mph in an airplane that looked, and too often flew, like a lawn dart. Aviation writer Richard L. Collins noted that a bystander said he appeared to be lying in his coffin when Collins once tried on a semi-supine BD-5 cockpit.
Collins survived, but 25 BD-5 pilots have died in 31 accidents since the airplane first flew in 1971. Those are big numbers considering that only about 180 BD-5s were built of the 5,000-plus that Bede sold (some estimate he took deposits on as many as 11,000 kits). He spent much of the deposit money on other projects before eventually delivering BD-5 kit parts.
Part of the problem was that Bede’s little bullet never got an adequate engine, though recent builders have found reliable modern substitutes for the original modified two-stroke snowmobile engine. Engine failures were frequent, including one during Bede’s demonstration of the airplane to
