the 55 hp Hirth, and owners were offered a "trade up" for the difference in price if they had ordered the aircraft with the original 40 hp engine. When 1974 came, engines were still not being delivered in sufficient numbers, although some started to arrive early that year. At that point, unexpectedly, Hirth went bankrupt after about 500 engines had shipped. Once again, the BD-5 lacked a suitable engine, but this time the search for a replacement ended with a Zenoah design from Japan. Development of this engine was lengthy, and in the end it would not be certified for export until 1978, although this was not anticipated at the time. In the meantime, Bede came up with another novel solution to the problems of converting pilots to the new aircraft. They took an engine-less example and bolted it to the front of a pickup truck on a trapeze, attaching the pilot's throttle control to the truck's. Pilots could test fly the aircraft without danger – if a problem developed the driver of the truck simply hit the brakes. It was named the "Truck-a-Plane" and Jim Bede was awarded a US patent for the design. Deliveries end, Bede bankruptcy After more than 5,100 kits had been delivered to prospective builders, the kits stopped shipping as well. Although the company was effectively bankrupt at this point, work on the BD-5D continued for some time. The bankruptcy became official in 1979, by which point the BD-5 project was long dead. During the bankruptcy proceedings, it was learned that the money ostensibly being used to build kits was instead being spent on a variety of other projects. As a result, Bede entered a consent decree with the FTC to no longer accept deposits on aircraft for a period of 10 years. Many owners stored, abandoned, or sold their incomplete kits, but a few hundred diehard builders finished them with a variety of engines, with installations designed by third parties and former Bede Aircraft dealers. Having to hunt for an engine was only one problem. The time to build the aircraft was much longer than quoted; original estimates from the company put it at 600 to 800 hours but users estimated it to be as much as 3,500 hours. Some of this was due to the need to fit their selected engine into an airframe designed for the Hirth, which was no longer available.