Posted on 05/15/2006 5:18:54 PM PDT by IonImplantGuru
Some days Bob Bishop works in an office.
Some days he straps himself into a 12-foot-long mini-jet, screams across the treetops at nearly 300 mph as paid professional plane killers in military jet fighters try to wax him.
"It's like playing a video game," says Bishop, president of Aerial Productions International Inc., which operates out of Marana Regional Airport, 11700 W. Avra Valley Road.
His company provides four BeDe 5 mini-jets that pretend to be enemy cruise missiles so U.S. military pilots can practice shooting them down.
Bishop says the planes started off in the 1970s as personal commuter planes, sort of a flying Volkswagen Bug.
His first association with the little planes was as a demo pilot and salesman. The original engine, a two-stroke snowmobile engine that pushed a rear-mounted pusher propeller, wasn't reliable — not a good trait in a single-engine aircraft.
It was replaced by a tiny jet turbine engine. It was still not a hit.
Eventually, Bishop started his own company, flying the planes at air shows as the Coors Silver Bullet or the Budweiser plane.
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Since 2000 he's been working strictly for the U.S. Defense Department, playing the part of the flying fox to the military's flying hounds.
"I don't do air shows anymore. Air shows don't pay enough."
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(Excerpt) Read more at azstarnet.com ...
If I remember correctly the weak point of the prop version was the availability of the engine (a modified Honda I think). As for the jet, I think that the powerplant alone was in the $40k plus range (and the airframe kit was somewhere around $5k).
Holy Hanna Reich, Batman.
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