Fly Like Bond In Octopussy’s Jet
The pint-sized plane will facilitate your escape from villains, but it only flies if the pilot is wearing velour.
Want a private jet from the early eighties powered solely by double-entendres? Your day has come, chap: The Superlight aircraft from 1983’s Octopussy is going up for auction today in Beverly Hills.
The jet is a Bede BD-5J (or “Acrostar”), a tiny personal aircraft sold in the early seventies. Originally, it was marketed as an inexpensive ($1500) “kit plane” for home enthusiasts. Bond’s version, though, is a later development, with a Sermel turbojet that allowed to hit 300 mph and climb to 23,000 feet, high enough to evade a Cuban heat-seeking missile.
The glass canopy and mod red-white-and-blue scheme give the plane a fighter-jet-twice-through-the-drier look, though anything the size of a refrigerator that moves that fast is cool in our book, even without Roger Moore’s ass-print in the leather. A word of caution: If you don’t die on the first day you fly it, you may well die on another one. There have been five fatal Bede crashes – two in the last ten years.
If you win the auction, honor its history by sipping a martini in the bar of your local airfield and gazing out the window at your grounded Bond jet—not taking her for a spin. Really, you only live once.
Read This Next
