Voyager's Triumph

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

The California desert wind was gusty last week, and the chase plane radioed the pilot that he was coming in a little high on final approach to Mojave Airport, 75 miles north of Los Angeles. But Dick Rutan, 48, was determined not to be waved off. "You betcha I'm going to land the first time," he said, and brought his graceful, eye-catching craft in for a perfect landing. Rutan, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, could be excused for being impatient. He and his copilot, Jeana Yeager, 34, had just spent 111 hours aboard the experimental aircraft Voyager without stopping or refueling, flying 11,600 miles and unofficially breaking a 1931 record of 84 hours aloft and a 1962 mark of 11,337 miles in a closed circuit.

Despite that lofty feat, last week's flight was only a warm-up. In September, Rutan and Yeager, an experienced pilot and design engineer, will try to shatter the open course record of 12,532 miles by flying Voyager on a twelve-day, nonstop, unrefueled flight around the world.

The September mission will be the ultimate test of both Voyager and its pilots. On their 4 1/2-day flight, Rutan and Yeager were confined to a cabin that is only 2 ft. wide at its narrowest and 7 1/2 ft. long, just enough room for the passenger to lie alongside the pilot, who can sit only halfway upright. While spelling each other at the controls during their 580-mile laps over the California coast between San Luis Obispo and San Francisco, the pilots could not relax; Voyager is so light that it is easily buffeted by the wind and needs constant piloting. Says Yeager: "It's a lot more exercise than you can imagine." The pilots' discomfort was heightened by the roar of the engines, which reached a noisy 105 decibels (louder than a lawnmower). As a result, neither flyer got much sleep during the first 36 hours.

But the mission's undisputed star was Voyager, a distinctive, almost ethereal craft, whose shell weighs only 938 lbs.; add engines and other equipment, and it is still shy of a ton -- lighter than most small cars. The rest of its takeoff weight of nearly 6,200 lbs. (which will be closer to 12,000 lbs. for the around-the-world flight) is mostly fuel, distributed evenly in 17 tanks, located in the wings, fuselage and "outriggers" that flank the cabin.

Voyager began life in 1981 as a sketch on a napkin at the weather-beaten Mojave Inn, near the airport. The sketcher was Burt Rutan, 43, an engineer with an established reputation for building quirky-looking but aerodynamically ingenious planes. With his brother Dick and Jeana Yeager (no relation, believes Jeana, to famous Test Pilot Chuck), Rutan had decided to attempt the around-the-world flight.

The key to such a marathon would clearly be a lightweight, efficient, flying fuel tank. Eighteen months and many sketches later, when Voyager assumed its basic shape, it was a textbook example of featherweight design and construction. The shell is made from quarter-inch-thick panels of Hexcel honeycomb, a resin-coated, paper-like polymer, covered with graphite fibers embedded in epoxy. The panels weigh just 4 oz. per sq. ft. but have remarkable tensile strength; the ends of the craft's thin, 110-ft. single wing can flex up and down as much as 35 ft. without breaking.

Another key to fuel efficiency was a small, light motor. (Voyager actually has two engines, one at each end of the fuselage; the forward motor was used only for extra power on takeoff and during maneuvering.) But a small motor means a slow plane -- the average speed on last week's run was only 103 m.p.h. -- so Burt Rutan included a canard, the extra wing at the front of the fuselage that is his trademark. Reason: If a plane flies too slowly, its wings lose lift, causing it to stall and perhaps crash. But the canard is tilted more steeply than the main wing, so it loses lift first. When that happens, the nose drops, and the resulting minidive immediately speeds the plane up, thus providing extra lift. For increased strength, both canard and main wing are attached to the fuselage and outriggers.

Dick Rutan is particularly proud of the team that assembled and maintained the craft. "It was done by individual Americans," he says, "and not by a corporation and not by a government." Although corporate sponsors provided equipment and expertise, much of the project's financing came from private donations. Among the volunteers who worked seven-day-a-week shifts setting up mission control, weather and communications systems and making last minute preparations were retired pilots in their 50s, 60s and even 70s.

If the rewards of a globe-circling flight are greater, so are the dangers. Rutan and Yeager will face nearly two weeks of cramped conditions, 95% of the course will be over water, and the plane is bound to run into more turbulent weather than it encountered over the California coastline. But Rutan was ready to talk about the next flight before last week's had been completed. Still over the Pacific Ocean, just west of San Francisco, he radioed, "This time we really had our act together, and we know we're ready for the big one."

With reporting by Scott Brown/Mojave