my business partner and myself attended oshkosh to purchase a twin engine aircraft ,with the option of 2 more in 9 months . we attended the adam’s stand and was talking to one of the consultants when adam’s fronted up and in front of us stated “get rid of those pair we have a lunch to put on .” I couldn’t believe how rude he was. In the end , we purchased 2 KIng Airs at Oshkosh and ordered 4 more in 12 months . What a way to treat people .No wonder they went under.
I actually worked on the prototype. I distinctly remember the engineers claiming that every surface was overbuilt on the testbed aircraft. Wieght concerns were always answered with "the production models will be much lighter". From what I saw, the sales and finance side of the business made a lot of promises without consulting anyone that lived in reality. It was a great concept and could have been a fantastic airframe. I feel like the whole project didnt know if it was a GA twin or a small corporate plane. Throw in poor financial management and you have a recipe for failure. On a side note, the one shown on diplay is at Wings Over the Rockies in Denver Colorado. Top notch museum with a good RU-vid channel.
There are a couple of these things still around. One passed through the FBO where I work a year or 2 back. I'd never heard of the Adam 500 before so had to ask the pilot what it was and then googled it up after he left, so learned its sad story. Some of this was apparent at the time, however. There were 3 folks on the plane so the pilot was VERY specific about the amount of fuel, which was far less than filling the tanks. He also fussed and fiddled with various parts of the plane quite a lot, because they'd apparently been causing problems, and didn't sump the tanks after fueling because he said the sumps wouldn't close properly and fuel would constantly leak. I guess when you can't take much fuel and 3 people at the same time, and are burning fuel with 2 big engines, losing even a little would be a worry. Anyway, even before I googled the plane up, it was apparent that it was a bit sketchy. Still, it did look cool, though :)
@@aircraftadventures-vids I used to be a manufacturing engineer building airplanes. So yeah, it takes a while to iron out all the detail problems both with design and with production, and how those aspects interact.
I’ve noticed that as many of Rutans designed are hailed as breakthroughs that none, that I know of, have had a commercial success. Now the military stuff is something else. But I started building a VariEze back in the late 70 . I lived in Lancaster California. It was only a thirty minute drive to Mojave airport where Rutan had his factory. In the late 70s it was only himself, a receptionist and his cutting edge Apple II computer. I took my small practice parts out to his hangar. He inspected them. Gave me his critique. I started building the plane. It was renamed the (VariTedious) by the aerospace engineers in the area who were building it. Took very long on sculpting and layup with epoxy. By the way the Lancaster Palmdale area is crawling with aerospace/aeronautics engineers. Palmdale has the big aviation companies including Lockheed, Boeing, etc. the have their own private 10,000 ft runway. My father in law worked building the shuttle there. Edwards air force base was a few miles from Mojave airport, where a lot of private small airplane companies had their businesses. You basically had to be a sculpture expert. The epoxy system fumes were toxic to liver. You had to get liver tests periodically. I’m a retired pharmacist who worked for a time in poison control. I subscribed to Aviation Consumer Magazine. I started to see stats of accidents for the plane that supposedly didn’t stall because of the canard. The accidents happened because the guys were used to slow landing Cessnas and pipers. They approached too slow and tried to flare and land too slow. Guess what happens when you do that ? The canard stalls about ten feet above the runway, dips down to start flying then stalls again. Porpoising. Do this too low and the nose hits the ground and bounces up. The landing gear was weak. It would break and the STRAIGHT manual rod that was used to lower the gear would spear the pilot. It was redesigned with a crank action and no spear. Also when the porpoising got too bad the airplane would cartwheel down the runway….i stopped building it. Rutan then came out with the LongEze. Lower landing speed.
Excellent post. Over the decades, I loosely followed some of Rutan's projects. The VariViggen was heavy and offered no real benefit over other two-place designs. But he was young and still developing his design skills. The Vari-and Long EZs gained popularity. I also considered building a Vari-Eze, but when I saw how much runway it required, I realized it wouldn't meet my needs. He devised some other unusual one-off designs, including the Solitaire powered sailplane. The engine and prop could be stowed in the nose during flight, then extended again in front of the pilot's face for takeoff or landing. I had initially admired Rutan more than was likely warranted. As you mentioned, none of his designs (other than the EZs) really were successful, though he certainly made money developing them. The Starship was a flop. The Virgin Galactic "spaceship" is another of his designs. It has no future either, but that's mainly due to the infinitesimally small market for wealthy people who want to go on a 10-minute carnival ride to the edge of space and right back down again. Many have defended his disappointing track record by saying the FAA or Beech screwed up everything. There may be some truth in that. But other successful composite designs exist, from Cirrus and Diamond aircraft and Lancairs to 787s and A350s. Some came before Rutan's designs, and some after. German sailplanes used fiberglass construction since the 1960s or earlier. Maybe none of it is his "fault," but whatever the reasons are, virtually none of his designs turned into viable commercial aircraft, large or small.
Rutan loved to designs and build extreme designs that looked cool but could not be commercial successes however his use of composites and thinking outside of the box opened up the kit plane world and the use of composites. One example was space ship one was revolutionary and led to virgin galactic but its limited capabilities has allowed space x ect to exceed its limits
Adam was not easy to get along with and many employees moved on as quickly as they could find other jobs. That caused a talent drain and development delays.
@@rael5469 Yeah but he perverted Rutan's concept with mission creep and there was not a powerful enough economical engine available, and it seems Piper would come into the market and fill the need with the Meridian, and the Jetprop Malibu conversions from Rocket engineering did as well. It also seems Piper found the upper limit of value as the PiperJet failed, so the twin A700 jet would also be too expensive without enough range as well.
@@Craiglife777 Yes, it would seem to be self-evident. But narcissistic CEOs and managers cannot think logically. So, they simply cannot see cause and effect. "We just can't find loyal workers, no matter how poorly we treat them."
I'm all for innovation, but it needs to be an improvement over the old. The Beech Starship, another aircraft with Rutan involvement at the beginning, was hailed as a leap forward in corporate turboprop design. It was of composite FRP construction, and had a canard, and pusher engines. The Cheyenne 400 came out a year or two earlier (the mid-1980s for both). The Cheyenne 400 was of totally conventional design and construction, with an aluminum airframe, TPE 331 engines, and huge propellers. The 400 weighed less than the Starship, carried more people, and had a faster climb rate and higher top speed -- 400 mph. It did all that with a total of 2,000 hp, compared to the Starship's 2,400 hp. With 3% more fuel capacity, its range was about 20% greater than that of the Starship. Neither aircraft was much of a commercial success and are long out of production, though most of the Cheyenne 400s are still in service. Interestingly, the Piaggio Avanti first flew 2 years after the Cheyenne 400 and is still in production. It has a very large cabin for a corporate turboprop and has a top speed of 460 mph, faster than early Citations.
I've had a couple of Avantis come through my FBO. I didn't realize they were this old but I should have, given that they're louder even than Mu-2s. Planes like this are why we now have to deal with noise abatement procedures. I'm thus surprised they're still in production. I didn't think you could make such loud planes these days. They must have been grandfathered in somehow, even in Europe.
And the Avanti wasn't made of composites and used a total power of 1700 shp. The noise issues were caused by the propellers and exhausts and were partially solved in the lastest model. It was significantly better than everything else and still had room to improve and the potential to easily install other engines. The Starship was subject to the FAA nitpicking all the time (since it was the first composite airplane to be ceritified) and other suspicious events which also ruined the project.
Worked for Adams for 5 years and returned when they were purchased after bankruptcy . The Russians had a sizeable interest as they had an order for 75 units. 2008 kicked them to the curb when they shut down their stock market in country for two week instead of an afternoon ,like here in the states, was rumored the company lost 2 Billion in those two weeks. When we went to the last afternoons hangar meeting they said " we can own the project ,we just can't operate it any longer".
Come on... The company had to have known about the weight issue before the production model even left the drawing board. That's just a waste. Thanks for sharing.
The introduction makes it clear that the Adam 500 was just an updated take on the Cessna Skymaster configuration, although it obviously has a lower wing position. A specification comparison shows that the Adam was a bit larger but much heavier, with much more power... yielding no more payload but a much faster aircraft. I wonder if a modification of the Skymaster could have achieved the same result?
Thanks @TractorMan104 - that's exactly the sort of thing I was wondering about. The Skymaster has been the subject of a few experimental modifications, usually because of the engine placement. At least two companies have used them to build hybrids, replacing one engine with an electric motor and adding a battery. There has been at least turbine conversion using the rear location (just omitting the front engine, and extending the nose for balance); that was a single taking advantage of the twin-boom design, not the nonsensical Adam twin turbofan.
Yes, the design program CATIA can very accurately estimate weights based on the size and density of materials specified by the designer. I don't know if they used CATIA, but many other software programs today can similarly estimate the weight. Maybe by the time they weighed the prototype, they were so deep into money spending that they decided to keep going in the hopes that they could eventually figure out a way to reduce the weight.
Burt Rutan always designed passenger carrying aircraft with a significant safety factor greater than 4.0 (compared to Cessnas 1.5). He has claimed they can dive beyond VNE to VDive and (if somehow able to) yaw side-ways 90-degrees it would be able to withstand the air loads. "Over weight" is relative. There is ZERO laws against taking off over gross weight.* Many countless records were set by aircraft purposely loaded far overweight. Design Gross Weight is the weight the aircraft structure and performance meet all design criteria. Any additional weight reduces performance and structural margins. The (test) pilot must account for this in his flight calculations and planning. *I have read MANY NTSB reports from fatal crashes due to fuel exhaustion, and they always state "The pilots reluctance to exceed gross weight and depart with marginal fuel reserves for the planned flight showed poor judgement"...
It was pretty clear from the beginning that this project was vaporware, the developers were earnest and honest, but it was clear that they were promising too much too soon, and didn’t have the resources to get there…. As happens with so many “revolutionary” aircraft projects…
The main issue as I recall was weight and useful load. They didn't have the resources and depth to maximize the potential of carbon composites. They also promised too much, too loudly, too soon. Mistake that countless of startup aircraft wannabe producers have made and make.
@@bitc0inlightningrules423The twin boom makes it inherantly overweight. Imagine replacing that whole twin boom with a simple tail on the back of the fuselage. The weight saving would be pretty significant and it would also produce less drag.
I’ve flown in one. Formerly owned by a law enforcement agency, so it had several holes cut out of the fuselage for optics and sensors. Very, very loud, probably due to the patches not being insulated or perhaps reduced sound deadening to allow a higher useful load. Nice flying plane though, very roomy and a ton of interest on the ramp.
Thank you for an excellent documentary. I wondered what happened to that beautiful bird. Nice job. I couldn't help wonder why the Russians didn't just slap a couple of PT6A's on the thing and make it a real airplane. 550shp x 2 would have made it a slick ship and it would have still had the inline thrust advantage.
Drop the push pull zoom cut, it's rather distracting, just a simple cut is fine. Also, why the open captions? This is not a TicTok video, hate those with their distracting captions. Just use the RU-vid built in captions and add your captions that way so it's an option. I appreciate you created the script and put captions in, versus using auto caption generation that most people use in RU-vid.
A sad case is that of the Raptor aircraft, designed and test flown by Peter Muller. Its development had an avid following here on RU-vid in the 2018-2021 period. There's a good Wikipedia entry under "Raptor aircraft Raptor", including later initiatives. It was a single-engined swept-wing canard, similar to a number of other designs of this type inspired by Dick Rutan. Muller made numerous and regular RU-vid videos in the channel "Raptor Aircraft" and these are an interesting archive for anybody interested in designing and building an innovative aircraft. Unfortunately, the Raptor had too many weaknesses due to the non-aviation source of many of its parts, and eventually crash-landed after several powerplant failures, a fate one could see coming for an excruciatingly long time. However, the unusual honesty and openness of Muller's chronicle of pursuing his passion is most instructive and even gripping.
1. The FAA is comfortable with aluminum structures, but not with composite. This led to all kinds of certification headaches. The FAA is bound by the FARs. Then comes something new which the FARs don’t cover, what then? 2. There is likely more hours in setting up a certified production process than designing and building a prototype. Not to mention manuals, service networks and the like. How many new designs folded surmounting this hurtle? 3. The other Rutan push-pull, the Defiant, has good performance on 160 hp engines. It’s useful load to gross weight is 43% whereas most planes is 33% and that’s FRP, not GRP structure. I don’t know why this plane layout was not pursued. Cheers
Starship another clear example with FAA hurdles. I just released a new video on a plane (Questair) which went with aluminum precisely because composites were sort of an unknown back in the 80s.
@@aircraftadventures-vids 1. FYI. The weight difference between composite and aluminum is an apples to orange comparison. Aircraft aluminum planes are mainly sheet/stringer/rib semi monocoque structures. Composite aircraft are sandwich construction. Semimonocoque is lighter, but composite stay with sandwich because it’s easier to build. 2. The granddaddy of composite planes is the Wyndecker Eagle. It was certified if I remember correctly. 3. From an FAA certification viewpoint, saying NO entails nothing..the applicant goes quietly into history’s dustbin. But if you say YES and the design later fails, you get egged. The FAA trusts, for instance, Cessna, but not the new guy. The new guy has 3 hurtles..earning FAA trust, figuring out how they expect things done, and design testing satisfactorily. Cheers
Good idea, bad timing. I’ve never heard of this Adam guy, but my guess is he’s more a bean counter than an engineer. You don’t take a concept prototype and think you can rush it into production. I’ll bet he was heavily leveraged and needed cash which is why he rushed the production and cut corners. Centerline thrust aircraft make a lot of sense in GA. The weight limitations could be solved. 1.2 million is not the price point for such an aircraft. They need to get the cost well under 1 million to be attractive to people looking for a cabin class twin. That takes a lot of engineering to accomplish. Do it right and you would have a successful and profitable product.
So the original Rutan design was over 1000lbs lighter, and we are using piston engines. What's the problem? :) Seems like this happened to the Starship as well. Original, clean, functional super efficient and fast Rutan build vs. when a company tries to emulate it.
What was the runway performance like compared to a standard tractor twin? Did it gave any rotation limits due to the rear prop? Are these better or worse than a standard tractor twin?
I imagine that's why they had such a tall landing gear and, if you look at the placement of the rear propellor, that seems to be placed as high as they possibly can. So with these factors in mind, I doubt it had much problem with ground strike on take off. Looking at the profile of the plane, if you draw a line from the bottom of the rear wheels to the bottom back corner of the booms, the propellor sits entirely above this line. So any tail strike would be with those booms hitting, instead of the propellor. But I'm only guessing and no expert.
I swear to God, investors are like Goodfellas gangsters. "Design isn't ready yet ? Too bad, pay me." "People might die if we launch product too soon ? Too bad, pay me." "Gotta take your kid to leukemia therapy ? Too bad, pay me."
They only manufactured 5 aircraft. Adams already started working on a jet prototype before the 500 had even started to sell. They owed Centennial airport $850,000.
What T-boprops save in weight and complexity they gobble up in fuel weight, especially if they are more powerful than the piston engine they are replacing. They run at full rpm and at sea level use excessive fuel to stop their turbines melting. The Adam 500 simply lacked the fine tuning of a good developmental period and fell on its face. A mere engine change would not have saved it. Rutan always designed impractically lean racehorses of aircraft.
1 million dollars just for 2 new PT6’s, in addition to the rest of the cost of the airframe and certification, would make it more expensive than a King Air, which would kill any chances of commercial success…
I see this video appears to have quite a bit of information seemingly directly lifted from Mac McClellan's 2007 article in Flying magazine. That is not mentioned in the sources however.
They got caught in the lead up budget cuts by investors the six months before the crash of 08 and the perfect storm there after. They also had a massive payroll.
Several reasons. They spent too much time on the piston version instead of the jet version. The piston version had several time limit items that need replaced. At very very short intervals. The hydraulic hoses were stupid expensive to replace. They also killed two test pilots because they rigged the ailerons backwards. Just removing the leading edges took hours. The FAA had it out for them. Several things need to be done that other manufacturers did not need to do. Annual inspections took 80 hours. I worked on all of these seen in this video. The Chinese bought all the molds. The jet was way better but it was too late.
The op jet was in a hangar at the skagit airport in Washington State, I believe , and alleged chinese college students reverse-engineering it. for the proprietary carbon engineering and intellectual properties that they bought along with Plane
When I left the company, Rick was walking through the production floor and asked me what he could do to keep me. I told him "Put Rutan back on the project, your engineers are idiots."
I don’t really consider the fuel capacity to be a problem. So it’s got big tanks? Big deal. The king air 200 fully fueled can only carry one pilot. I’d rather have the fuel capacity when I’m not full and trying to balance the load rather than tell the line guy to top it off as I’m walking away. I’ve been flying the same private jet for ten years and have never ever filled it. Fuel planning is part of flying.
@@cargopilot747 in flight at altitude that is often the case but many Cessna Skymaster have been lost during take-off or climb out when the pilot failed to notice that the rear engine has stopped. Whilst engine failures are not common the lack of visual reference on the rear engine unlike a wing mounted engine has led to recovery actions not being initiated in time.
I get it but ultimately piston is just garbage and the twin tail compromise speaks to that. What he didn't realize is that he should have developed small turbofan engines which for an appropriately light plane can be very tiny and with pressurization and altitude can have surprisingly good fuel economy. Speaking of Rutan, the globalflyer based on a simple Williams FJ44-4 jet engine did 40000km at 500km/h on one tank of gas. That result simply voids any piston design. We should have had small turbofan jets in GA since 1960.
KISS seems to be a foreign concept for those seeking to revolutionize the established aviation industry. And when those thirsty twin pistons become inconvenient and too heavy…well then…upgrade to advanced jet engines…problems solved…oh…tail booms and canards look cool too…
How so? Name ONE Rutan/Scaled design that went into even limited production . SCALED produced aerodynamic evaluation airframes using hand building techniques unsuited to any economic manufacture so a complete redesign structurally or even material wise was then required --the in house projects like Solitaire/Ares/Grizzly/Vari Viggen /BiPod/Skigull /Boomerang etc functioned in the strict sense but were not compelling enough to develop for production --the aircraft built to client's designs or specifications also failed to be produced . the Vari Eze and developments only suceeded as hand built 'prototype copies' in the labourious foam/glass now dropped in homebuilding even (and arose as copies from the Fred Jiran built 'super snooper' drone ) One offs like the Voyager or Pond racer for a single point design acheived demonstration status for very esoteric 'uses' with no intention of reproduction so 'successful' has a very limited meaning in this context. The Adam 500 looked very heavy and clumsy to my eye and would seem better suited to the Defiant layout although that design also did not 'take off' - cracking the light aircraft market is a very hard nut and forseeing the reception and pitfalls awaiting a new entrant would require more perception than appears to have existed at SCALED, and lots of others, --knowing WHAT to build is crucial besides the knowledge of how to . A follow up on the failures in the eVTOL field would make for interesting viewing .
@@rossnolan7283 The Cozy Mark IV saw some limited success, and the Velocity is pretty good. Granted those are home built and not production. That's actually been my biggest complaint in the industry, we have all this tech and the likes of Cessna, Beech and Piper keep producing the same plane, just with a different avionics package. I hope for the day someone really designs something that can compete with the big three and actually be affordable. Rutan had some cool designs and I always hoped eventually one would make it to production. Wasn't Starship designed by Rutan, or was that an all Beech design, I don't recall. That plane was very cool, but plagued by so many issues. I wonder if they revived it if we'd have the tech to make it work.
Interesting view - the big three in US GA have survived by producing all round satisfactory aircraft and had the timing right . In 1947 the US lightplane industry collapsed wiping out scores of firms but not them , the much bigger wartime firms pulled out of GA and the Korean war kept them going plus the ongoing cold war -- demographics and post war prosperity favoured the established manufacturers to capitalize on their investment -- for about 30 years ( I went through Cessna Wichita in 1974 around peak production time --they were tooled up ) Small increases in cruise speed give realtively little return over even long flights and are hard to acheive at low cost so annual model changes like in the car market are absent -- any breakthrough GA design must look elsewhere for a real market expansion . the current 'eVTOL" rush is one attempt and roadability ,properly carried out, has been the perennial 'great white hope' still unsatisfied (Cessna dabbled in this idea just post war ) Starship was a Rutan design 'selected' from options given to Beech according to him - the Avanti flew rings around it and was 'tin' -- 'selecting' the right combination in design terms almost requires time reversal (you only know it was 'right' if it succeeds ) Rutan was surprised at how popular the VariEze was but that faded and the ubiquitous RV 'x' of conventional everything is dominant just as in GA (velocity,Cozy etc are considered to be VariEze spinoffs )@@brandonb417
@@rossnolan7283 As a pilot I would love to buy a plane and have the freedom to fly with my family for the $100 burger, but also go see my other family scattered all over the country. I see guys like Mike Patey, and other planes like Dark Aero, really only looking at faster and more expensive. Other companies like Cirrus went for bigger faster more expensive. And the great hope that was LSA fell short when even the small 2 seat planes are well over a quarter mil. The sport/hobby/passion has gotten so expensive it had driven most people out. Even marginally affordable airplanes are at least half again as old as I am and have an ancient avionics package. I would love to see some industry leaders bend their massive amounts of experience and expertise to create a less expensive plane that more people could afford. They don't need to be speed demons. Just don't look like a flying dumpster, have 4 seats and a basic IFR package. Even if they're just out of reach of most people, then at least flight clubs could buy them and rent them for less than a 172 now. Pretty soon the industry is going to price itself out and the only people flying are the ones paid for by the airlines when they are forced to open their aviation academies.
A very sad story indeed. There must be plenty of tough lessons to learn from all this, and my guess is that Mr Rutan washed his hands of the project early on ?
@@aircraftadventures-vids I wasn't thinking turboprop, I was thinking turbo jet, like the Vision Jet. Better power to weight ratio. Plus, all the changes they made should have been put into the initial design, not added later. Rutan's designs are good, but if you change them too much they get unbalanced.
Pusher/Puller is not a "fantastic" design. In reality it is horribly inefficient due to very messy aerodynamics (turbulent and twisting flow) that creates high drag from the fuselage and ruins the max lift available from the inboard portions of the wing.
The 500 was a solution to a government made problem. The destruction of piston engine evolution and innovation was a by product of FAA careerism and failure of Congressional oversight. The plane Adams wanted could have been a 400 to 500 hp single or could be powered by a couple much lighter 300hp engines. The plane was also likely a victim of FAA hand wringing over any new material usage. If you want to build a plane out of something not used before, they demand you build it multiple times stronger than needed to prove the material no matter how much science or engineering or non aviation history knowledge there is about it. Frankly, if the FAA had been formed twenty years earlier, we’d likely all be flying in Piper cubs.
Another Rutan flop. Remember the Starship Rutan designed with Beechcraft? Couldnt carry a load. Used to hear it buzzing around Wichita. King Air is still a remarkable airplane. The only airplane that was and is a real success coming out of Beech.
Oh, come now! "Only" $3.9 million in 1989 for a larger copy of the Long-EZ and slower than 2 competitors priced the same? Why, that makes the Adam almost a "bargain" at $1.2 million in 2007 dollars! Burton Rutan isn't really named "Burt", his mother named him Moe Ron.
Burt Rutan is literally a genius. The number of aircraft he has personally designed that hold Absolute World Records is impressive. Very time you see a Reaper or Global Hawk drone fly overhead... Oh wait you never will. Starship was and is a unique aircraft that ended up overweight because it had to be beefed up substantially to appeases the FAA. Because it was THE FIRST composite aircraft to be certified in that category. So it paved the way for all the others, including the B787. People don't bother to research the story behind anything. The Beech starship is THE ONLY FAA certified civil aircraft that has ZERO airworthiness directives. 35 years in service. The only one.
The “nobody’s” who achieve nothing of significance in life are always quick to judge a genius by his mistakes. Rutan is genius with many notable achievements behind his names. Something you will die without. 😂
Burt Rutan is great!! He’s the greatest. He designed the M309 is proof of concept for Mr. Adam…..Burt wasn’t to,d to market the aircraft. Mr. Adam took over from Burt. So, Burt did he part very well.
I'm glad this plane flopped. If you only knew the story. You'll have to research A.T.O.P. (Advanced Technology Observation Platform). During the early stages of the ATOP. It had a straight wing. The ATOP was designed to replace the OV-10. Our biological father was talking with Burt Rutan (No, I have nothing good to say about the Rutan's). Our biological father showed Burt his designs. The next month this design was published in a magazine. Rutan's Ares jet was something people on Mojave Airport used to call it Burt's Ass. The Rutan's are not very well liked in Mojave.
“Notorious” for rear engine overheating. FALSE The rear only overheats if the front isnt running, fanning cooling air rearward. Get your facts straight.
