Round-the-world flight was first of its kind
For nine days in December 1986, Dick Rutan and co-pilot Jeana Yeager lived out of a cabin the size of a phone booth, flying an experimental plane non-stop around the world.
Their aircraft, the Voyager, was so heavy with fuel that when it took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California the wing tips dragged along the runway. When it returned, it was so light it hardly kicked up any dust.
Together, Rutan and Yeager became the first pilots to circumnavigate the globe without stopping or refuelling. “This was the last ‘first’ — the last major event in atmospheric flying,” Rutan told reporters after climbing out of the plane, exhausted, to cheers from more than 20,000 spectators. “As soon as people stop breaking records,” he added, “that’s a world I don’t care to live in.”
Rutan, who later tested rocket-powered aircraft and attempted to become the first person to fly non-stop around the world in a balloon, was 85 when he died May 3 at a hospital in Coeur d’alene, Idaho. The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, which he developed as a complication of long COVID, according to his friend Bill Whittle, a family representative.
Long before he took the controls of the Voyager, Rutan was known for his “velvet arm,” the smooth flying style he demonstrated in high-performance aircraft. He flew 325 combat missions over Vietnam as a U.S. Air Force pilot, and later worked as a test pilot for an aerospace company founded by his younger brother, Burt Rutan, who came up with the initial idea for the Voyager over lunch in 1981, sketching a design on a napkin.
Rutan said he figured it would take about 18 months and $250,000 to refine the concept and build the plane. Instead, it took five years and nearly $2 million, by his estimate, as he and his brother struggled to secure financial backing and to fine-tune an unorthodox aircraft that loosely resembled the letter E.
The shape was almost comical, wrote New Yorker journalist Burton Bernstein — “like a Disney birdling that sprouted adult wings prematurely.” Yet it was also extraordinarily effective. Constructed from an ultralightweight sandwich of paper honeycomb and graphite fibre, the plane effectively functioned as a flying fuel tank, carrying more than 7,000 pounds of fuel — more than three times the weight of the aircraft — balanced between two torpedo-like structures and a smaller fuselage in the middle, occupied by Rutan and Yeager. (She was unrelated to test pilot Chuck Yeager.)
The pilots took turns flying the plane and resting in a narrow, noisy 2-by-7 ½-foot cabin adjoining the even smaller cockpit. As in the Spirit of St. Louis, the single-engine plane that Charles Lindbergh used to make the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic, the pilot had no forward view and instead faced an instrument bank. At night, the crew relied on moonlight that streamed in through side windows and a cockpit viewing bubble. In lieu of toilets, they used plastic bags.
While Rutan was supremely confident, boasting to journalists that the trip would be a “piece of cake,” the flight got off to a rough start. The plane’s winglets, which were designed to prevent fuel from draining onto the ground, dragged on the runway during takeoff and were soon dislodged; one landed on a yard about five miles from the base.
The Voyager appeared to be on a collision course for Typhoon Marge near the Philippines, although Rutan and Yeager were able to skirt the storm and use the winds to their advantage, picking up speed over Southeast Asia and crossing the Indian Ocean into Africa. They rose from 8,000 feet to as high as 20,500 feet while soaring over thunderstorms near Lake Victoria. Less than eight hours from home, their rear engine went out for a few minutes, causing the plane to lose several thousand feet in altitude before the pilots were able to restart the front engine.
“I’ve got tooth marks on my heart,” a crew member radioed from the ground.
The flight was further complicated by the tumultuous romance between the two pilots, who lived with one another and were in a relationship, although they seldom discussed it with the media. Interviewed by the Los Angeles Times a year after they completed the flight, they said they had broken up under the strains of the Voyager project but tried to remain united for the sake of the mission.
“Most people break up and go their separate ways. We broke up and stayed together,” said Rutan, who added that Yeager proved a soothing force in the aircraft, calming him down when his judgment became warped by fear or anxiety. “She’d settle me down,” he said, “and tell me just to fly the airplane.”
Rutan, his brother and Yeager were together awarded the Collier Trophy, considered the highest honour in American aviation. They also received the Presidential Citizens Medal, a top civilian honour, by then-president Ronald Reagan, who called the Voyager’s return home — a few minutes after 8 a.m. on Dec. 23 — “just about the best Christmas present America could have had.”
The oldest of three children, Richard Glenn Rutan was born in Loma Linda, Calif., on July 1, 1938. He grew up in Dinuba, in the San Joaquin Valley, where his father was a dentist and his mother was a homemaker.
“Whenever I saw an airplane as a kid, I wanted to get up there in it,” he recalled. “Those contrails of the big jets overwhelmed me. It was my destiny to fly.”
He began taking flying lessons at 15, soloed on his 16th birthday and had a commercial pilot’s licence and flight instructor’s rating by the time he graduated from high school.
Soon after, he joined the air force. Dispatched to Vietnam, he flew more than 100 missions as a member of an all-volunteer aircrew unit known by their radio call sign, Misty.
Rutan was awarded the Silver Star for valour for directing an attack on anti-aircraft sites in May 1968, cited for “his phenomenal aggressiveness, superb airmanship, and complete disregard for his personal safety in the face of intense ground fire.”
He became a test pilot for his brother’s aircraft company and met Yeager at an air show in 1980. He soon quit his brother’s company, although they reunited to work on the Voyager.
After the success of the Voyager, Rutan hit the lecture circuit and ran for Congress in Southern California as a conservative Republican, losing to incumbent George Brown Jr., a Democrat. He later said he felt “totally aimless” before he returned to aviation.
Rutan obtained a balloon pilot’s licence and joined fellow balloonist Dave Melton in attempting to circumnavigate the globe. They were forced to end their quest just a few hours after launch in 1998, when they parachuted into a cactus-filled field outside Albuquerque after part of their balloon ruptured.
WHENEVER I SAW AN AIRPLANE AS A KID, I WANTED TO GET UP THERE IN IT. THOSE CONTRAILS OF THE BIG JETS OVERWHELMED ME. IT WAS MY DESTINY TO FLY.
— PILOT DICK RUTAN