Skip Holm's Bear: affordable warbird: even those who can afford real warbirds don't fly them much. The Bear 360 addresses that in an affordable package that any Walter Mitty can actually handle.(AIRCRAFT INNOVATIONS)

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If money were no object and you Could afford a hangar full of airplanes, would one of them be a warbird, say a P-51 or an F4U Corsair? Probably. lust as likely, the airplane would sit in the hangar, kept airworthy by an expert mechanic, but rarely exercised. Why is that? It's one of the natural laws of vintage aircraft ownership and also one of the reasons the airplane pictured above--the Bear 360--was designed and built.

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The Bear is, as far as we're able to determine, a unique animal indeed: a newly manufactured military-feel aircraft built by a foreign industrial power, formerly a Cold War enemy. Eastern bloc imports like the L-39 and the Yak trainers have similar antecedents, but they aren't new and they aren't purpose-built to be high-performance fly-for-fun airplanes, which the Bear is. We stumbled upon this airplane at EAA AirVenture this year vaguely thinking we had seen it before (we had), but now the company that's marketing the airplane is taking orders for U.S. deliveries. Interestingly, as new airplanes go, it's not especially expensive and as warbirds go, it's a mere pittance.

At a distance, the Bear looks not unlike its namesake, the Grumman Bearcat, a late World War II Navy fighter that's a relative rarity on the warbird circuit, compared to the P51, at least. The design springs from famed air racer and combat pilot Skip Holm, who paired with Russian designer Sergey Yakovlev to build a modern, robust military-like aircraft, but with operational costs that don't envision 60 GPH fuel burns and $100,000 engine overhauls.

Holm told us that there's a market among warbird owners or would be owners who can afford to own vintage aircraft but don't fly them much, not so much because of the cost, but a combination of that and the considerable effort required to remain current enough in a World War II fighter to stay alive.

The project owes its roots to the thawing of the Cold War in the early 1990s, after which Holm found himself in the former Soviet Union doing aviation-related business. (He didn't tell us exactly what that was.) During that period, he met Russian designer Sergey Yakovlev, whose established design bureau developed numerous eastern bloc aircraft …