The Man from Wild Blue Yonder

Mojave is a truck-stop kind of town, more weigh station than destination, a wind-swept stretch of commercial sprawl where the main drag is a state highway and the main attraction is the desert beyond. In a window booth of a Denny’s, Mojave’s most celebrated resident sobs quietly over a plate of mashed potatoes and gravy. “I’m sorry,” Burt Rutan croaks. “But when I got on the radio and told Dick to turn off the strobe light, and we saw the light go off. . . .”

In the silence, the clinking of silverware is oppressively loud. A plaintive country ballad oozes out of the restaurant’s speakers. Rutan shakes his head. “After everything we’d gone through over the previous nine days--the engine failure, the fuel leak, the crew’s mental state--the reality that. . . .” He stops to dab his eyes. “The reality that there they were--even though we knew they were going to be there--it was just so damn powerful.” He half-laughs through his tears. “To this day, it’s the only thing I can’t talk about without breaking down.”

*

Twelve years have passed since Rutan got his first glimpse of his most famous creation, the Voyager, as it completed its unprecedented around-the-world journey without refueling. For nine days, while his brother, Dick, and co-pilot Jeana Yeager manned the controls in the torturously cramped cockpit, Rutan had followed the epic flight by radio and radar. For the final leg of the trip, as the media swarmed over Edwards Air Force Base, he and fellow aircraft builder Mike Melvill had taken off in their own plane to rendezvous with the Voyager off the coast of San Diego. When he spotted the Voyager’s strobe winking in the darkened sky, Rutan wept. With relief? With joy? Both? “To this day,” he confesses, his improbably blue eyes glistening, “I have no idea.”

The flight of the Voyager in 1986 is generally considered the last great milestone of powered flight. Today, the plane’s slender fuselage and long, willowy wings hang over the lobby of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Building on the Voyager’s success, Rutan has graduated from running a mom-and-pop airplane design firm to serving as the CEO of a 107-employee aerospace corporation, Scaled Composites. He has designed and/or built spacecraft, missiles, military landing craft, even a show car for General Motors and a “wing” sail for the boat that won the 1988 America’s Cup. And still the strange, almost perversely contrarian airplanes that made him famous continue to emanate from his endlessly fertile imagination. At his shop sits a lopsided prototype called the Boomerang that should, Rutan says, cause the light twin-engine airplane as we know it to go the way of the dinosaurs. Parked next to it is a dragonfly-like jet dubbed the Proteus that will, he insists, help launch 40,000 people into space by 2010.

By virtue of his groundbreaking accomplishments and outlandish pronouncements, Rutan has emerged as a celebrity in a field where even the best and brightest rarely see the spotlight. He is the most influential airplane designer of his generation. He helped propel homebuilt aircraft from the weirdo fringe to the mainstream; almost single-handedly popularized the canard, a sort of secondary wing ahead of the main one that limits a common form of pilot error; and pioneered the use of composite materials such as fiberglass and carbon fiber instead of aluminum. In doing so, he has defied just about every rule there is, while making up new ones, so it seems, just to break them himself. “Burt is the most productive and most imaginative designer who’s ever worked in this field,” says Peter Garrison, a contributing editor of Flying magazine and an aircraft builder in his own right. “Airplane designers are very conservative, by and large. They like to refine things. Burt thinks outside of the box. He has a different concept of what can fly, and that allows him to come up with designs that are completely unexpected. At the same time, he loves novelty for its own sake. It’s almost comical to see the lengths he’ll go to to create something different.”

Unconventional, uncompromising and a bit of a loose cannon, Rutan is an easy target for criticism. Skeptics note that the much-ballyhooed Voyager was a technological dead-end and point out with great relish that his only design to make it into production--the Beech Starship--was a colossal failure. It doesn’t help, of course, that he’s not only the smartest kid in his class, but that he wants everybody to know it. And while his ready accessibility and relentless quotability make him a media darling, he can be distant and impatient on a personal level. It’s no coincidence, perhaps, that he is working on his fourth marriage.

*

Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager had sunk not only their life savings but also their souls into the Voyager. As far as Burt was concerned, though, it was just another airplane, something to slap together on nights and weekends--Model 76 by his internal accounting. (The Boomerang is Model 202; the Proteus, Model 281.) Even as Rutan’s cohorts slaved over the Voyager, his own focus shifted to the Starship, which was supposed to vault him into the corridors of corporate America. As he and Melvill hooked up with the triumphant Voyager in the predawn darkness, Rutan saw both an end and a beginning.

“After a while,” he says, still hunched over his plate, his uneaten mashed potatoes hardened into brown peaks, “the sun started coming up, and we could make out the airplane in the light. Remember, the last time we’d seen it, the wings were drooping down because of all the fuel they were carrying. Now they were perfectly flat. It was droning along with both engines running, and the air was so smooth, so serene, so gorgeous, and we had all these lights around us--the L.A. Basin in front of us, San Diego behind. And here was this airplane, just perfectly still, just perfectly. . . . just. . . .” He takes a deep breath, then spits it out: “Just perfect.”

*

A seven-story building at Mojave Airport houses the Roton, a spacecraft that lands like a helicopter. Elsewhere on the flight line are a World War II-era Hawker Sea Fury, a Vietnam War-era MiG-21 and an old Boeing 747 being used to test engines for the new 777. But of all the weird and wonderful sights at Mojave, none is more intriguing than the contents of Scaled Composites. Predictably, the facility is surrounded by wire mesh fencing bearing “Keep Out” and “Restricted Area” placards, and everybody who visits has to sign a nondisclosure statement to get beyond the lobby. At the moment, the company is working on more than a dozen projects, including, incidentally, the composite shell for the Roton.

Rutan works out of a disorderly corner office with dated wood paneling and permanently shuttered windows. As always, he is dressed in a denim shirt, blue jeans and sandals. “If I want to look dressed up,” he says, “I’ll wear a leather jacket.” Even sitting down, he looks long and lanky. His most distinctive feature is a prominent set of mutton chops that--white hair aside--would have looked right at home at Graceland circa 1970. When he smiles, his face seems surprisingly boyish for a 56-year-old workaholic who suffered a mild heart attack last year. “My number one priority is having fun,” he insists as he scans his perpetually full e-mail in-box. “If you’re having fun, you’re more likely to be productive. If you’re being productive, you’re more likely to be competitive. By putting the F-word up front, I’ve been able to attract talented people to work here even though they could make as much, if not more at, say, Lockheed or Boeing. Having fun is how I’ve managed to create a profitable company.”

Most of Scaled Composites’ revenue comes from contract work for the government and big business on aerospace design, engineering, fabrication, assembly, research and development, or any combination thereof. But the projects that truly energize Rutan are the ones he undertakes on his own, where the only person he has to please is himself. “Most customers don’t want to take risks,” he explains. “The Boomerang is a perfect example. There is no way I could have found a customer on the basis of the concept design.” To be honest, he would have had trouble finding passengers. At first glance, the Boomerang looks like a horrible mistake, either the mutant offspring of a P-38 Lightning--the famous twin-boom World War II fighter--or a flying version of an outrigger canoe. One engine is attached to the fuselage, or main body, where the pilot and passengers sit. A second engine is mounted farther back and to the left, on a smaller boom--sort of a withered fuselage, perfect for lugging, say, skis. As a result, the airplane is deliberately asymmetrical. Orville and Wilbur Wright must be spinning like contra-rotating propellers in their graves, but Rutan insists that the Boomerang’s very asymmetry rectifies the signal flaw of the light twin--its inclination to crash when one engine fails at low speeds. Flight tests of the Boomerang prototype support this claim, and Rutan is working with a company that plans to produce the plane. Still, a lot of designers say he could have achieved the same result with a conventional design. “Burt sometimes seems to think that if it’s radical, it’s better,” says John Roncz, an aerodynamicist who worked with him on the Voyager and Proteus. “He designs some airplanes for shock value. It’s a good marketing ploy, and he’s a good marketing man. He knows how to create the kind of shapes that get on the covers of magazines.”

The Boomerang’s gotten plenty of ink, all right. But the suggestion that it’s merely a PR coup causes Rutan’s eyes to turn arctic. “Conventional wisdom,” he says, “is just another word for something that looks like it might work. If you’re doing something conventional, you’re just revisiting something that somebody else has thought of. That’s not creative. If I had the choice between something conventional and something different, and both of them produced the same result, I’d try something different. Because that’s how we learn. That’s how we make progress.”

Rutan swivels over to a filing cabinet and pulls out a folder bulging with the earliest drawings he’s been able to find of every one of his projects. Some are computer-generated. Many are scribbled on scrap paper. Altogether, they form an Information Age version of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. “The media overplayed the whole thing about me drawing the Voyager on a napkin,” he complains as he leafs through the pages. “That wasn’t true.” He suddenly freezes. “Actually, here’s one that is drawn on a napkin,” he says, amazed.

Having a fine old time, Rutan shuffles through the folder. He points to a rendering of a balloon gondola: “This was for a Hollywood guy who wanted to set a world record for free fall. He wanted to drop from 200,000 feet or something like that.” He pauses over a fighter concept: “Here’s the little airplane we were going to do for Joint Strike.” Then he taps a sketch of something vaguely helicopterish: “Here’s one that could take off from your yard, fly nonstop to Chicago and land on a roof. He lingers longest on the drawings of the Proteus, his biggest current project. The design brief called for a plane to fly at high altitude for extended periods while carrying a giant antenna pod, the idea being that it could serve as a low-cost alternative to a telecommunications satellite. Most designers would have started with a conventional airplane and then figured out how to carry the telecommunications pod. Rutan, ever the contrarian, reversed the engineering: His cartoonish initial concept depicts an enormous pod with wings sticking out of it.

Rutan lopes out of his office into Scaled Composites’ spacious, spotless shop and stops underneath the canard of the Proteus, recently back from a test flight at 49,000 feet. “We hope it will be used for telecommunications, reconnaissance, ozone-sniffing and so on,” Rutan says. “But it’s also uniquely suited for space tourism. My goal is to make 40,000 spaceship pilots in four years [after the Proteus is fully operational].”

That’s no misprint. Rutan plans to mount a rocket on the Proteus and air-launch the sucker into space from an altitude of 35,000 feet. These paying “trainee spaceship pilots” would take turns at the controls of the rocket and spend a few minutes beyond the 100-km threshold that marks the boundary of space. It sounds plausible. In theory. But 40,000 astronauts? In four years? A piece of cake, according to Rutan. “Spaceflight will prove to be less dangerous than developing the airplane was,” he says blithely. “As it is, hundreds of people are killed every year climbing Everest, rafting down rivers, jumping motorcycles over cars. They can decide for themselves what kind of risks to take. That’s the kind of attitude that pushes creativity, productivity and technology. We need a goal. We need a challenge. We may even need to be scared. Once we lose the courage and curiosity to explore, we sink into mediocrity, and we’re just a few generations down the path to being nothing but savage animals.”

*

Visitors don’t need an air-traffic controller to find Rutan’s home in suburban Mojave. He lives on Rutan Street. His mailbox is fashioned out of the discarded tail section of an airplane he designed, built and flew for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But the dead giveaway is the house itself, an angular anomaly among the tract housing and Joshua trees of the high desert. Although an architect drew up the plans, the house is obviously the product of the same design aesthetic that Rutan applies to his airplanes--inventive, unorthodox and virtually without precedent.

Rutan lives in a modern pyramid--technically, it’s a hexagon that comes to a single point--with a stone chimney bursting out of the roof. When it was built 10 years ago, it graced the cover of Popular Science. As he leads a grand tour, Rutan proudly points out the eccentric dearth of right angles: The pool table is skewed into the form of a parallelogram, the cast-epoxy dining room table (and matching chandelier) into a trapezoid. Parked in the garage is Rutan’s GM EV1, the first electric car in the Antelope Valley. Rutan sinks into a sleek sofa--of his own design, naturally. He seems relaxed, content, prosperous. Since his heart attack and subsequent angioplasty, he’s stopped setting his alarm clock in the morning, and he and his wife, Tonya, spend Sundays on the golf course next door. These days, the drafting table in his house is used mostly for storage. When he lounges in his home office, he’s usually surfing the Net or playing with Winglet, his African gray parrot. Nothing in his manner suggests the dynamo of the ‘70s and ‘80s whose obsessive commitment to his career helped undermine his first marriage. “I was spending all my time building the VariViggen in my garage,” he recalls. “At one point, my [first] wife said, ‘It’s either me or that airplane.’ God, that was an easy decision.”

If ever a man was born to design and build aircraft, it was Burt Rutan. His father, a dentist, was a private pilot. Brother Dick, five years older than Burt, became a decorated fighter jock. Burt himself soloed at 16 and later was his own test pilot. But designing planes, rather than flying them, was always his passion. “He used to build models,” Dick recalls. “Not kits. He just wanted the wood so he could design his own and enter them in model competitions. They had to change the rules because of him. You see, most people avoid chaos. That’s why all airplanes look alike. But from the beginning, Burt needed to do something different, something profound, something that challenged his intellect.”

He found it in homebuilts, a frontier that was, in its own way, every bit as promising as outer space. By the ‘70s, virtually all general aviation airplanes were built by corporate giants such as Beech and Cessna to rigorous FAA standards. But the FAA dramatically relaxed these standards for planes that were at least half-built by their owners for research or recreation. These so-called homebuilts were permitted to fly with “experimental” designations, and they gave do-it-yourselfers plenty of room for, well, experimentation. The Experimental Aircraft Assn. was formed in 1953 to support the movement. Over the years, engineering plans for homebuilts became available on a limited basis. But transforming these blueprints into real live flying machines demanded advanced carpentry and metalworking skills, not to mention oodles of time and money.

Rutan rewrote the rules of the game. A version of his first homebuilt, the VariViggen, won the EAA’s Outstanding New Design Award in 1975. Emboldened, he formed the Rutan Aircraft Factory, which, despite the grandiose name, consisted solely of Rutan and his second wife. Rutan worked around the clock, occasionally helped at night by a moonlighting sailplane fabricator. “We’d work until we got tired, and then I’d buy him dinner.” Rutan laughs. “That’s how the VariEze was built. It took us 3 1/2 months.” The plane was the EAA’s Outstanding New Design of 1976. The homebuilt community would never be the same.

The VariEze was the first civilian airplane built out of a composite, fiberglass, which was easier and cheaper to work with than aluminum. Its other startling feature was a wing-like appendage at the front of the fuselage. Known as a canard, it theoretically prevented the wing from stalling--that is, losing lift and taking on the flying qualities of a 2-by-4. By standards of the day, the plane was fast and efficient and, damn, it looked slick, with its novel canard, swept wing and smooth bodywork. The first prototype was enshrined in the EAA AirVenture Museum; the second, in the National Air and Space Museum. Before long, canard-type composite airplanes were the rule rather than the exception.

Rutan didn’t manufacture planes for sale. He simply designed and built prototypes, which then served as flying advertisements for the engineering plans he sold to homebuilders eager to create dream machines of their own. Operating largely on intuition, without the benefit of the computer simulation, wind tunnel testing and computational fluid dynamics analysis that are staples of aircraft design, he produced the Long-EZ, the Defiant and the Quickie, planes that transformed the homebuilt community.

Altogether, Rutan sold 8,000 sets of plans. About 1,500 RAF-designed planes were flown. But by the mid-’80s, he was tired of homebuilts. Although he says he has never lost a product liability lawsuit or paid out a penny in settlements, he worried constantly about the possibility. Anyway, he had bigger fish to fry and bigger planes to fly. So he effectively shuttered RAF (though Tonya continues to publish a company newsletter, The Canard Pusher). In 1982, with $750,000 in venture capital, he formed Scaled Composites. Beech bought the company in 1985, making Rutan a director, then sold it four years later to Wyman-Gordon, with Rutan still running it.

Since then, Rutan has been involved with dozens of projects. “The aircraft people focus on the new configurations I’ve tried,” Rutan says, “but I think I’ll be remembered most for the sheer volume of new airplanes I’ve done. It all gets back to the F-word. If I’d gone to work for Boeing or Lockheed, I might have designed doors. If I’d gotten in at the start of the F-111 program, I could have spent 10 or 12 years working on it.” He sinks back into the sofa, chastened by this vision of indentured servitude. “In the last five years, we’ve done four new-from-scratch airplanes--five, if you count [NASA’s] X-38,” he says. “And I don’t think that’s good enough. I think we ought to be doing something more fun, something more challenging.”

So, oddly enough, do some corporate types, the anonymous engineers stabled in rooms filled with quietly humming CAD/CAM terminals. “He’s done a lot of excellent work,” says aircraft designer and aviation historian David B. Thurston. “But he’s never certified a light aircraft, which, in my opinion, is a critical aspect of airplane design.”

Procuring FAA certification for a production airplane is a Kafkaesque process that requires immense amounts of money and almost limitless endurance. Critics argue that Rutan, a big-picture thinker with little patience for details, is temperamentally unsuited to navigating these treacherous bureaucratic waters. Exhibit A is the notorious Starship. Scaled Composites’ 85%-scale, proof-of-concept model was a stunner, but the production model bombed after undergoing countless changes during the certification process. The Starship remains the ugliest blot on his resume. Much as he downplays his disappointment, the episode still rankles. Every now and then, he even makes not-very-convincing noises about putting planes into production. He’s of an age, perhaps, when he’s more eager to cement his place in history than to write new chapters. “To tell you the truth,” he confides, “I’m getting bored with airplanes.”

Bored? Burt Rutan? He leans forward on the sofa and smiles mischievously. “But what if I could do for deep sea exploration what I did for homebuilt airplanes?” he asks. “I’m not talking about recreational submarines. I’m talking about pressure vessels that could withstand 6,000 pounds per square inch. People could go down and visit the Titanic in something that costs no more than a Long-EZ. I’ve already got some preliminary designs. . . .”

He goes on for a while, sometimes off the record, sometimes off on tangents. Then he stops, suddenly dead serious. “You know what would be really great? If someday The Canard Pusher announced that one of our homebuilders had discovered Atlantis. That’s what I’m waiting for.”

He leans back and grins, still the brightest kid in his class, still convinced that there isn’t anything he can’t do.