The Ultimate Flight : Plane Designed to Be First to Circle Globe Without Refueling

In a drafty Mojave hangar where the high desert winds howl like the ghost of some phantom aviator sits Voyager, a spidery-looking aircraft that a few dreamers hope will set the final aviation record--a round-the-world nonstop flight without refueling.

“You never get used to the wind,” said test pilot Dick Rutan as he performed a test on the experimental airplane’s forward engine. “You never get used to it. You endure.”

For nearly five years, Rutan has endured the winds blowing through the hangar, the challenges of flight tests and the difficulties of fund raising.

From Dream to Obsession

The idea of round-the-world, non-refueled flight has been transformed from dream to obsession. “Maybe if I had known how long it would take, I’d have been dissuaded,” Rutan said.

But neither the time the flight will take--about 12 days--nor its cost has deterred him. The project has cost more than $1 million so far and is not tax-deductible. It subsists on contributions and the dedicated efforts of a staff paid on a shoestring and help from volunteers, Rutan said.

“We go from month to month and hand to mouth, and that’s the way it’s been since Day 1,” he said. “We sell T-shirts and trinkets. It’s mainly volunteer support.

“We were not able to generate funding for the entire project. Unfortunately, we’ve had to spend most of the time trying to meet the rent and that hurt us quite a bit. The alternative was to abandon the project, and that was unthinkable.”

Rutan, 46, is not discouraged. He is determined. The lean, silver-haired former Air Force fighter pilot wants to go into the history books with pilots like Charles Lindbergh and Wiley Post, the globe-trotting, one-eyed pilot who died in a plane crash with humorist Will Rogers in 1935.

Rutan believed in 1981 that the task would be relatively simple, when he formed Voyager Aircraft Inc. with his friend and co-pilot, Jeana Yeager, who is not related to Chuck Yeager, the test pilot who first broke the sound barrier.

The pair hope to depart from Edwards Air Force Base on Sept. 14 and circle the globe following the equatorial trade wind route, in the same way that Christopher Columbus reached America, Rutan said.

The Voyager was the brainchild of Rutan’s brother, Burt, one of the world’s foremost designers of revolutionary aircraft. Burt Rutan already had designed commercially successful lightweight planes that employed small engines and unconventional wing designs to dramatically improve fuel efficiency.

It took more than two years, including 22,000 hours of labor, to build the Voyager, a plane with a 110-foot wingspan that weighs 939 pounds without fuel. Because of its revolutionary design, the craft carries 8,934 pounds of fuel.

The Voyager, which is almost entirely constructed of super-light graphite material, sits in Hangar 77 at Mojave Airport in the high desert 75 miles north of Los Angeles, looking like a dream of what is possible.

To date, no one has ever flown an airplane around the world nonstop without refueling--no government, no aerospace company, no individual. No one, ever, the project’s literature declares, almost defiantly.

‘Interesting Concept’

“It’s a very interesting concept,” said Ned Crain, a quality supervisor for Boeing in Seattle and one of the many visitors who made a pilgrimage to Hangar 77 to see the strange plane. “I wouldn’t want to fly in something where the fuel weighed more than the aircraft.”

The reason that the undertaking has not been accomplished is that to date the technical means have seemed out of reach. Voyager, powered by two small engines, will circle the globe because of its ability to carry more than five times its weight in fuel. It will poke along at about 100 m.p.h., the speed of a small, private plane.

Although Voyager has a beautiful, strange, almost crane-like appearance, it is no joy to fly, Rutan said. But, he and his comrades believe it incorporates the technology to get the job done: It can take off, land, climb and turn.

“We thought it might take a year and a half at the outside to finish it, at maybe one-tenth the cost. All we did was we figured out we could build an aircraft capable of flying that kind of range.

“When you think about it, the idea is just so exciting you couldn’t walk away from it. It just became a total obsession.”

The difficulty in bringing such a project to fruition is that there is no margin for error. An initial failure that both fliers survive could preclude further efforts.

The other possibility is that both fliers could die in the attempt. Over a 12-day period, in a tiny cabin and cockpit, the pair will fly 25,000 miles.

In 1937, Amelia Earhart died attempting such a flight. And she was making stops to refuel.

The nonstop aspect of the flight necessitates a few discomforts. For example, their “toilet” facilities are patterned after the system designed for the Gemini astronauts, and their bodily wastes will be periodically jettisoned.

Rutan is a test pilot who served 20 years in the Air Force and was shot down over Vietnam on his last combat mission. He earned the Silver Star, five Distinguished Flying Crosses and the Purple Heart.

Yeager, 32, has taken Air Force sea survival training in Florida. She is taking advanced instrument flying courses at Beech Aircraft Co. in Wichita, Kan.

Such training increases the chance for success, but the undertaking is complex and dangerous. A tiny plane will be at the mercy of world weather patterns for nearly two weeks. It also must avoid Soviet and Chinese airspace.

“It’s certainly not risk-free,” Rutan said. “There’s a lot of area where engine failure or bad weather could terminate the mission in disaster. There are a lot of things that can happen to you. Hopefully it’s well thought out and tested.

“Anything worth doing, there’s some risk involved. The historical perspective is the Wright brothers in 1909 set a record for speed and distance, something less than 50 m.p.h. and less than 100 miles.

“Now if nobody would have came along to break those records, we as a population would be looking over the ends of oxen . . . instead of enjoying the transportation devices that we have right now.”

The dream hovers elusively on the horizon, and Rutan hopes it will not disappear like a mirage on the desert. Money, always in short supply to support the venture, is at barely adequate levels to continue operations, he said.

The fliers have pinned their hopes for corporate financial support on breaking a previous world flight record before they take off on the round-the-world mission.

The record they hope to set will be for flying a so-called closed-course in which they take off from a point, fly a charted route and return. They hope to accomplish that during the spring.