Dick Rutan Breaks a Promise

By the mid 1980s, all of the aviation records that had so challenged the imaginations of pilots and the public alike had been achieved… except for one. Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic. Aircraft had flown to both poles. Even the vast Pacific had been conquered. American jet bombers had flown around the world, but only after multiple refueling events. The only thing left to do that had not been done was to fly around the world, non-stop, on a single tank of gas. Dick Rutan had been a fighter pilot over Vietnam. He and his friend Mike Melville, who would go on to become the first private citizen in space, had flown around the world in the starkly original, otherworldly aircraft designed by his younger brother, Burt Rutan. Together with a relatively inexperienced pilot named Jenna Yeager, Dick Rutan started to plan for this impossible flight, assuming that his legendary younger brother could design a plane that could do it. The result was a bizarre, insect-like creation named Voyager; a flying fuel tank with about as much interior space as a telephone booth. At 8:01 am Pacific on the morning of December 14th, 1986, Dick Rutan and Jenna Yeager sealed themselves into Voyager and took off from Edwards Air Force base in California’s Mojave Desert and headed west. The plan was for each pilot to fly three hour legs, but it immediately became clear that Voyager was so fragile and unstable that Dick would do virtually all of the flying. The world had marveled at Charles Lindbergh for remaining awake for his 33 hour flight, but when Voyager, which had taken off into the west, arrived over Mojave coming in from the east, Dick Rutan had been flying for 216 hours pretty much non-stop. The last of the great aviation records had fallen due to the courage, endurance and persistence of Dick Rutan and the design genius of his brilliant younger brother, Burt.

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