‘Flying Fuel Tank’ : Home-Grown Airplane Is Like No Other

They flew around the world in a plane originally sketched on the back of a napkin. The Voyager was home-grown, the product of two brothers obsessed with flying. The airplane they created looks like nothing else ever flown, and it may change aviation’s future.

When the Voyager glided to a halt on the dry lake bed here Tuesday morning carrying co-pilots Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, it came home to good company. The sound barrier was first broken here, the X-15 first explored the edge of space here, the space shuttle lands here.

Built by Volunteers

Yet there was a difference. The Voyager was built by volunteers in a donated hangar 20 miles away. The tiny engine was smaller than the one that drove Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis. Except for a momentary fuel lapse on the last day, its four cylinders fired 57 million times without fail.

The Voyager was not the product of corporate enterprise, the military or a space agency. Spurned at first by corporate sponsors, the Rutan brothers and their friends built it themselves, piece by piece, over four years. When they had money for a wing, they built a wing; when they didn’t, they waited and worried.

“We spent a year and a half trying to find support,” Dick Rutan said Tuesday after the flight. “Our non-success is something I’m proud of. We did it on our own with the people that really mattered. We found ways to do it without money.”

The plane they built was a strange, beautiful creature born out of Burt Rutan’s imagination. After it was finished, Dick Rutan and Yeager--colleagues, co-pilots and living companions--climbed in and circumnavigated Earth on a single load of fuel. Chugging over continents and oceans at an average speed of 115 m.p.h., it was an adventure both goofy and wildly romantic.

Asked at the post-flight press conference how it went in the tube-like cockpit for nine straight days, Rutan grinned at Yeager. “I’d fly with her again, any time.” Yeager grinned back.

Austere, Brilliant

If there were two iconoclasts flying the plane, there was another who designed it. Burt Rutan’s Voyager, by all accounts, is an austere, brilliant solution to the problem of flying incredible distances without refueling. It is also revolutionary, different from anything built by Boeing or Lockheed.

For example, the Voyager is not made of metal; its wings, fuselage and outriggers are constructed of hardened paper and graphite fiber. The paper, fashioned into a thin honeycomb, is covered on both sides with strips of graphite and the whole thing is cured to extraordinary hardness.

The advantage of such materials is their extreme light weight. Without engines or instruments or crew, the Voyager weighs 939 pounds, less than a Volkswagen. Yet it can carry 4 1/2 tons of high-octane gasoline.

“During the construction, the question always was, ‘Could we build it as light as I said?’ ” Burt Rutan recalled in an interview. The answer was yes; the finished plane was four pounds lighter than he had predicted.

Nor is the Voyager pulled through the air by its propeller, like most airplanes. Although there is a forward engine, it is used only for take-off and landing; basically the plane is pushed along by an engine mounted at the rear.

‘More Efficient’

“A pusher plane is more efficient because the wings are always encountering smooth air,” said Fergus Fay, a retired Rockwell International engineer who helped construct the Voyager. “With a front-prop plane the wings are fighting chopped, torn air. Of course, you need a canard to make it work right.”

The small front--or canard--wing is the trademark of many of Burt Rutan’s designs. Until he came along, the canard wing and its advantages had tempted many many aeronautical designers, including the U.S. Air Force. Burt Rutan made it work.

The canard eliminates the need for a tail wing and fits nicely into airplane designs with pusher engines: There is no tail to struggle against the prop wash of the rear engine. In addition, it virtually eliminates unintentional aerodynamic stall.

For a decade Burt Rutan has sold his plane designs for small, fast aircraft using pusher propellers and canard wings. Known as the VariEze and the Long-EZ, they have collected many speed and distance trophies and changed forever the look of sporty, private planes.

Although Burt Rutan used the canard wing dramatically in the Voyager, it is not a plane built for sport or speed. In fact, the Voyager’s flying characteristics have been the subject of humor and horror at Hangar 77 in Mojave. Yeager, who was made airsick for the first time in her life by the Voyager, once described the plane’s aerial behavior as “terrible.”

Pitches and Heaves

In even light turbulence, the Voyager pitches and heaves like a rubber boat in an ocean squall. The wonderful graphite that is so light and strong also flexes easily. The wings, as long as a Boeing 727’s, roll in waves of motion.

“In turbulence you can see one wing go up while the other one is going down,” Dick Rutan once said. “You don’t get airsick, you get seasick.”

Once, for a film crew, Dick Rutan and Yeager crawled into a mock-up of the Voyager cabin. It is a space with a volume and shape roughly equivalent to a telephone booth’s.

One person is presumed to “rest” in a rear compartment while the other pilots. Stretching out is virtually impossible; sitting erect can be accomplished only by when the pilot sticks his head in a viewing bubble at the top of the cockpit. Otherwise the pilot--like Lindbergh in the Spirit of St. Louis--cannot see forward while he is at the controls. He stares only at a bank of instruments.

Depending on the viewer’s level of claustrophobia, watching Dick Rutan and Yeager enclosed in the smothering tightness of the mock-up cabin produces high humor or terror. At a viewing of the film clip recently, there were some titters; there were also many silences.

During the flight, the gruesome realities took their toll. At times, in utter fatigue, the co-pilots could not read the instruments in front of them. In other times the severe turbulence left them beaten and bruised.

‘It’s Pure’

The Voyager was, after all, a plane built without the usual compromises. “Every other plane has a long list of trade-offs,” said Mike Melville, an employee of Rutan Aircraft Factory who helped construct the Voyager. “You sacrifice distance to get speed, to get comfort, to get easy handling. Virtually all planes do it, except this one. It’s pure, and it’s a bitch.”

Even the purity was not easy to achieve. The now-famous story of the Voyager’s origins is true, by and large: Dick and Burt Rutan are eating lunch at one of the wind-blasted coffee shops in Mojave in 1981; Burt Rutan mentions the idea of an Earth-circling flight and begins to doodle the design of a odd airplane on a restaurant napkin.

It happened, but not that simply. After the napkin doodle there were others. One concept fastened on the notion of a flying wing; it was rejected because it would have required wind-dragging fuel pods.

Another idea featured the glider design with long thin wings and a center fuselage. Again, Burt Rutan concluded that this airplane would need large fuel pods hanging from each wing.

Finally, according to Fay, Burt Rutan revealed his genius. Instead of doggedly sticking to his first designs, he saw that the fuel pods were not an irritating problem but the answer. He designed a plane that started with the pods and worked from there.

Ultimately the pods became the outrigger booms that flank the fuselage. “He put wings on pods and figured out to fly it with an enormous weight,” Fay said. “The pilot and co-pilot are secondary in the design. It’s a flying fuel tank like nothing else that’s ever been seen in the air.”

Corporate Sponsors

Eventually, of course, there were some sponsors. Mobil Oil Co. donated the engine oil; Audi threw in a couple cars for Yeager and Dick Rutan; two chemical companies gave them enough graphite and resin to make the body.

But it was mostly small potatoes. There was never a Boeing or a General Electric to take financial responsibility for the project. The money came dribbling in from a makeshift souvenir shop at Hangar 77 and from people who just liked the idea that someone out there was crazy enough to try to fly around the world without gassing up.

For the Rutans, Yeager and their friends, the days were often gruesome. Fay recalls that it took two to three weeks to build the mold--just the mold--for an engine cowling. The cowling was extra.

“We worked on it until we couldn’t work any more,” said Bruce Evans, the project crew chief.

It was an obsession turned into work; the obsession is now, temporarily, satisfied. But did the flight of the Voyager prove anything else?

Some have said that it does not. Former test pilot Chuck Yeager, no relation to Jeana Yeager, said last week that the Voyager’s flight meant very little. He added that the designers were not pushing the frontier and had used existing technology.

Serious Exception

Burt Rutan takes serious exception to this evaluation. The Voyager experiment combined a variety of high-risk design features, he said, that will point the way to changes in commercial aircraft.

The Voyager, he noted, took off with a freight load that amounted to 80% of its entire weight. In this case the freight was fuel, but it could be anything from medicine to electronics.

No other plane can come close to that standard, he said; a B-52 can lift a load that amounts to 68% of its weight.

“When someone demonstrates what can be done,” he said, “other people say, ‘Hey, that’s the new level.’

“I think we’re going to see, by the turn of the century, cargo planes able to haul big loads halfway around the world without refueling, which is very expensive. And we’re going to see reconnaissance drones able to stay at high altitudes for weeks.

“These planes are going to have 30% to 40% better performance. And they’re going to look a lot like the Voyager.”