Arizona Daily Star June 19, 2012
Tucson tech: Marana pilot helping military as tiny target
By David Wichner
Tucsonan Bob Bishop has traded a hall-of-fame career as an air show pilot for a new job: human target.
Bishop was used to being the focus of thousands of fans as he roared across the sky in the world's smallest jet.
Now, as a subcontractor to the U.S. military, his job is to evade the electronic crosshairs of some of the nation's most advanced aircraft and missile-defense radar systems.
Bishop and his Marana-based company, Aerial Productions International Inc., build and fly a modified version of the Bede BD-5J, the world's smallest manned jet aircraft at just 12 feet long and under 500 pounds, with a 17-foot wingspan.
"It's like an Indy car you go way up in - in fact, shoe size 11 is the max," said the 5-foot-4-inch-tall Bishop, as he looked over the plane at his company's hangar at Marana Northwest Regional Airport.
Yet the plane's diminutive size and unique shape were just what the military was looking for when it began studying how to detect and counter subsonic cruise missiles more than a decade ago.
"When the radar hits it, it just keeps going. It isn't reflected back," Bishop said.
And even if he's detected, Bishop's not afraid of pilots drawing a serious bead on him.
"You're not really worried about someone shooting at you. They're not supposed to be armed ... I'm told," he said with a laugh.
While the Pentagon and major defense contractors including Tucson-based Raytheon Missile Systems are busy trying to erect a shield against ballistic missiles - long-range threats that fly in an arced trajectory - shorter range, slower cruise missiles are seen as perhaps a bigger threat.
Among the cruise-missile threats are several Soviet-era anti-ship missiles that have been modified by nations including China, Iran and, prior to 2002, Iraq, military analysts say.
The fear is that shorter-range cruise missiles could be launched from international waters off the U.S. coast to hit major cities, said military analyst John Pike, Globalsecurity.org director.
"If you think about how hard it is to build an ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) - and how much effort the U.S. is putting into defending against that - it would be much easier to shoot a missile off a ship down in the Caribbean, and the U.S. isn't doing anything to deal with that to speak of," Pike said.
One example, Pike said, is the Soviet-era Styx cruise missile, which is in the arsenals of China and Iran, and the similar Silkworm and Seersucker missiles made by China.
Low-tech threat
That's where Bishop's little plane - now known as the Small Manned Aerial Radar Target, Model 1 (SMART-1) - comes in.
"We're really representative of a lower-tech cruise missile, not a supersonic, terrain-hugging, Mach 3 missile - actually, we can see those," Bishop said. "We have a harder time with the slower stuff, the softball pitch."
Bishop's current role as a manned target began in 1999, when he was asked to act as a test target for the Joint Cruise Missile Defense Group, a five-year program to evaluate the nation's cruise-missile defense capabilities.
A wakeup call came after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, when Saddam Hussein fired five Seersucker missiles at Kuwait, including one that hit a shopping mall.
"We didn't 'see' any of them," Bishop said. "I got a call the next day after that one, saying 'we've got some work to do.' "
Since that program ended, Bishop has continued to play target in tests and war games for all the military services, plus the Department of Homeland Security.
Bishop can't talk about everything he does, but he and his three other test pilots have been kept busy flying and building new planes to keep up with demand.
The company's aircraft have been classified by the Pentagon as a "Type I Cruise Missile Surrogate," Bishop said, adding that the description of that type is classified.
Bishop's company works as a subcontractor to Arinc Inc., a longtime defense contractor based in Annapolis, Md.
While the military also uses recoverable drones as targets, the local company's work has been invaluable in helping the military evaluate missile-defense systems, particularly near populated areas where drones are deemed too risky, said Larry McNew, a retired Air Force colonel who headed the Joint Cruise Missile Defense Group and now directs operations engineering/innovation for Arinc.
"His service provided exactly what we wanted. It gave us certainly a degree of freedom to have a more robust evaluation, and with a man in the system it increased our safety," McNew said.
The manned target flights also are less costly than drone operations, he added.
Hall of fame career
Bishop, who was named to the International Council of Air Shows Hall of Fame in 2008, built his career around the tiny BD-5J.
He grew up working in his father's large crop-dusting business in Phoenix, flagging planes and making maps before he was old enough to fly. Bishop soloed for the first time when he was 16 - not long after his father died in a crop-dusting crash - and flew his first air show when he was 18.
Bishop wound up working as a test pilot for Kansas-based Bede Aircraft Corp. when the company developed the tiny aircraft as a home-built kit in the 1970s. There he met his future, as well as his wife, Mary Ellen.
Bede Aircraft failed, but Bishop and another test pilot, J.W. "Corkey" Fornof, built two of the planes and started their own airshow team.
From 1982 to 1991, Bishop led the Coors Light Silver Bullet Jet Team, which often led the brewer's expansion into new markets and at one time flew 40 air shows a year. Fornof went on to become a Hollywood stunt pilot, flying in several James Bond movies.
Bishop briefly flew a BD-5J called the Bud Light 1, but that job ended when he was forced to bail out and the plane crashed.
Since the Joint Cruise Missile Defense project, Bishop and his company have focused on military testing. His other three pilots fly most of the missions, but he still handles new or tricky flights.
He moved the company to Marana from the Phoenix area in 2005.
The company uses two planes for military testing and is building two more - including a lighter plane stretched five inches to hold more electronics. Bishop said he's got enough parts to build 10 more.
A week ahead of his 65th birthday, Bishop says he knows he'll eventually have to retire from the piloting part of his work but will continue to support the military testing.
"I really want to get to the point where I'm really confident we can defeat this. ... I think this is probably our biggest threat," he said.
DID YOU KNOW?
Movie fans may recognize the Bede BD-5J from the opening scene in the James Bond movie "Octopussy," in which Bond unloads a BD-5J from a horse trailer and escapes a fast-closing missile by flying through an aircraft hangar. The stunt was flown by Bishop's former air-show wingman, Corkey Fornof.
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