Thousands Show Up to See History Touching Down

They came from as close as Mojave and as far as Texas and Canada to see what they called “history in the making.”

Schoolchildren, retirees, working people taking the day off and pilots by the busloads gathered in a public viewing area at Edwards Air Force Base long before dawn Tuesday to watch the Voyager pilots bring their aircraft home.

“We came to see the ending to the last great adventure in aviation,” said Neil Anderson, 50, a pilot from Visalia, “an adventure that didn’t need government support.”

By the time the wispy white plane first became visible in the gray morning clouds, 32,000 people had come to Edwards, an Air Force spokesman said. Those arriving before dawn found it took nearly an hour in a snake-like procession of cars to reach the hard, cracked surface of the dry lake bed, about a quarter of a mile from the actual landing site.

Up by the compass rose, a circle marked in black where the Voyager landed, more than 1,000 news media people gathered, along with the project’s sponsors, two busloads filled with Edwards personnel and their families and the Voyager ground team.

That team--the pilots’ families and the largely volunteer staff of 45--had gathered the night before at Hangar 77 at Mojave Airport. This was the place where Voyager had been built, where the 5-year-old dream had taken shape and was now about to end.

Many team members stayed at the hangar through the night, “lying on the desks, on the floors” in a futile attempt to get some rest as the final hours of the flight unwound, staff member Diane Herron said. When they couldn’t sleep, they collected each other’s signatures on souvenir posters and started a $1 pool to guess how many gallons of fuel would be left in the plane.

Finally, at 2 a.m., they boarded two yellow school buses for the trip to Edwards. There they joined the thousands of others waiting for the landing.

Out in the public area, Clem Sagert, a 65-year-old Canadian from Edmonton, Alberta, “500 miles off track” from his planned trip to Arizona, had staked out a spot on the lake bed at 8 p.m. Monday after spending the day at the base gate. He wanted to be the first in, he said, but made it second.

“I love anything to do with aviation,” he said. “I flew in the Second World War as a radio operator. I was hoping the war wouldn’t end, that’s how much I liked flying.”

Listened to Radio

Nearby, a small group gathered around a shortwave radio owned by Bob Bruce, a cellular phone salesman who’d driven down from Bakersfield. They hopped up and down in the 30-degree chill, listening to pilots Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager talk to their ground controllers.

Bruce said he enjoyed hearing the pilots “argue with them (mission control) about petty things. He (Dick Rutan) was in no mood to back off. At one point they wanted him to slow down and he said, ‘Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had a shower?’ ”

Many of the spectators were pilots: a charter bus with 40 members of the Tulare County Pilots Assn., for example, or retired Flying Tiger pilot Darrel Gibbins, who came from Fremont, Calif., with his son, Mike, a geophysicist from Houston.

Roger Ritchie, a 30-year-old electronics technician from Santa Ana, and Randy Beloff, 34, a machinist from Orange, were there as well. Private pilots, they are also members of the Voyager’s VIP Club, a group of more than 500 people who donated at least $100 to the privately sponsored effort.

‘Personal Experience’

“They allowed the general public to get involved, so it makes this a personal experience for us,” Ritchie said.

Mojave resident Suzi Clipperton brought her five children, ages 6 to 13.

“My kids have all visited the Voyager so many times on school trips,” she said. “They’ve seen it for years. This is really a final ending for us.”

“It’s flown over us at school when we’re out at recess” said her daughter, Rita, 11.

Close by the landing site, Jeanette Kern huddled in a beach chair, wrapped in blankets, while her father and mother, Jim and Barbara Kern, shielded their eyes against the rising sun, waiting for sight of Voyager.

They had driven in from Santa Paula, Calif., the night before.

“I can’t believe I stayed up all night,” 23-year-old Jeanette said.

Finally, there was the Voyager appearing pencil-thin in the distance.

“Look!” Kern exclaimed, as his daughter scrambled for her camera. “See them just at the cloud line?”

Wouldn’t Miss It

“It’s worth waiting for,” Kern said. “Wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

The 47-year-old head of his own airplane parts manufacturing company and a private pilot as well, he was one of the “original” sponsors five years ago, Kern said. A long-time family friend of the Rutans, he donated about $40,000 worth of tooling for the fuselage, he added.

“We did the moldings, we did the plugs. . . . Folks that haven’t been involved in this from the beginning, they don’t know the dedication involved,” he said.

Sponsors such as Kern seemed more or less eclipsed Tuesday by the large corporate sponsors, such as Mobil Corp., which donated the fuel and brought in a large hospitality motor home and several dozen executives from corporate headquarters in Virginia for the landing.

But Kern didn’t appear to care. “My friends, that’s all I care about,” he said. “This is worth waiting for.”

Parents on Hand

Also watching excitedly were Dick Rutan’s parents, Irene and George Rutan of Palmdale, along with Jeana Yeager’s father, Lee Yeager of Campbell, Tex., and her mother, Evaree Winters, of Fort Worth, Tex.

Rutan’s daughters from a former marriage, 22-year-old Holly, a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Jill, 16, who attends high school in nearby Lancaster, were also on hand. Neither flies, they said, although Holly, a business economics major, said she has been thinking about taking lessons.

So far, there were no holiday plans, Irene Rutan said.

“We’re just going to let things happen,” she said.

Having the two pilots safely returned was all she wanted, she added.

“Santa Claus brought me what I wanted ahead of time,” Lee Yeager said. “Dick and Jeana have come home safe.”