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Rutan voyager: the first plane to circumnavigate the world without refueling or stopping.

The Rutan Voygaer holds the record for the longest flight in the world even today.

The Rutan Voyager Model 76 was the first plane to successfully circumnavigate the globe without making any stops at all. The thin airframe took five years to develop and set off on its journey on December 14th, 1986, landing a full nine days later on December 23rd. Here's a look at this record-breaking aircraft.

From a napkin to the skies

The Voyager was built by Burt Rutan, Dick Rutan, and Jeana Yaeger. Burt reportedly first sketched the design of the plane on a paper napkin in 1981 and started work not long after in Mojave, California under the banner of its aerospace company. Dick Rutan and Jeana Yaeger were the pilots of the historic flight.

To sustain flight over 216 hours, keeping the weight of the aircraft at a minimum was essential. To do this, Rutan used a combination of composite materials like kevlar and fiberglass to bring the airframe weight to just 426kgs. The engines alone weighed more than this at 594kgs, with two propellers running in the middle section on either end.

At first glance, the Voyager Model 76 is unlike any commercial aircraft design , having no clear tail or fuselage, instead seeing one long wing cutting across three fuselage sections and a parallel connector for the trio. Rutan's design was built to maximize lift to drag ratio, which would be crucial to keeping the plane in the skies for days.

The design process took over five years until the plane was ready to take to the skies in June 1986 for the first time.

Testing to takeoff

Burt Rutan's design proved to be a successful one, with the two pilots using the Model 76 to break the record for the longest flight in the world in testing in July 1986 alone. However, the trio hoped to take the voyager on a journey like no other, circumnavigating the globe without any refueling or technical stops.

After over 60 test flights, the Rutan Voyager set off for its nonstop global flight on December 14th, 1986 from Edwards Air Force Base. However, things did not go too smoothly from the beginning, with the tips of the wings hitting the runway surface and eventually ripping off in the initial stages of the flight. However, the pilots opted to continue given the plane still met its technical range even without the tips.

The pair of pilots flew heroically, avoiding closed airspace, storms, and other weather events to ensure the plane's performance was not hampered significantly. With little space in the cockpit, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yaeger were only able to switch over controls occasionally, with days passing at times.

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After a fuel pump failure toward the end of the flight, the two pilots managed to complete the voyage successfully at 08:06 AM on 23rd December at Edwards AFB, with a recorded journey time of over 216 hours and circumnavigating the globe. 38 years later, this record remains in place, with no endurance flight even close to beating the Rutan Model 76 Voyager.

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Dick Rutan, Jeana Yeager and Burt Rutan

Inducted in 1987

Voyager, first to circumnavigate the globe non-stop without refueling, 1986, burt rutan, 1943 –, dick rutan, 1938 –, jeana yeager, 1952 –.

The “Voyager” was the first airplane to circumnavigate the globe non-stop, without refueling. The journey began on December 14, 1986, at Edwards Air Force Base, California, and ended nine days later at the same place.

Designer Burt Rutan and pilots Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager had devoted five years to building and flight-testing the airplane. Constructed of composite materials, Voyager’s total weight was 9,000 pounds, including 7,000 pounds of fuel. The canard wing design, or forward elevator, similar to that successfully used by the Wright brothers in 1903, provided additional lift and improved the plane’s efficiency and range.

The Voyager opened the door for a new generation of airplanes. Capable of flying over 28,000 miles without refueling, it’s performance far surpassed the range of other aircraft.

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AIR & SPACE MAGAZINE

A retrospective of burt rutan’s high-performance art.

Design by Rutan

The Editors

You can always tell a Burt Rutan airplane, just as you can always tell a Dr. Seuss drawing or a Beatles song. It’s not only the configurations — though canards, winglets, or twin booms sometimes give them away. It’s not just the materials, though composites have been key to Rutan’s achievements and helped make him the hero of the homebuilder. And it’s not just the futurism, though Rutan designs always look like they flew in from a decade off in the distance. There’s some other quality rolled up with those three that makes you know it’s a Rutan. We think of it as playfulness.

Consider SpaceShipOne , Rutan’s best-known creation, which made history in 2004 as the world’s first private spaceship. It looks the way it does for sound engineering reasons: Its famous tail feathers were deployed to slow and control its atmospheric reentry, its tubby fuselage has a diameter of five feet to accommodate an oxidizer tank of similar dimension and a comfortable cabin, and its pointy little nose is sprinkled with small round windows so that the pilot could see the horizon at all times during the flight up to 60 miles and back. But SpaceShipOne is also toy-like. Can anyone doubt kids would be delighted by a small model of it?

Last April, Rutan retired from Scaled Composites, the California company he founded in 1982 (10 years after designing his first full-scale airplane), leaving a legacy of 38 piloted craft, among them Voyager , the first to fly around the world without stopping or refueling. (He also designed a half-dozen unpiloted craft as well as re-entry vehicles, round-the-world balloon gondolas, the structure for a four-passenger automobile, and the blades for a wind turbine.) Five Rutan designs are in the National Air and Space Museum.

As playful as Rutan’s work is, it tackled serious goals: safety, efficiency, endurance, opening space travel to everyman. On the next pages, we describe his designs, from the first to the…well, according to the designer himself, we haven’t seen the last. He recently told a group of admirers that when he retired to Idaho last spring, he took along his drawing board. — The Editors

1. VariViggen During Rutan’s first job, as a U.S. Air Force flight test engineer, he designed an airplane for himself inspired by his favorite fighter at the time, the Swedish Saab Viggen, a Mach 2 delta-wing craft that used a canard to increase its lift on takeoff and landing. Rutan employed the canard to prevent the main wing from stalling and large ailerons to vary the wing’s camber (thus the name VariViggen).

2. VariEze Rutan reasoned that an airplane that wouldn’t stall would be far less likely to crash, and the continuing quest for stall resistance led him to the canard design of the VariEze, which was also the first airplane to fly with winglets (to counter drag created by wingtip vortices). He was also seeking an airplane that was easy to build; he made the VariEze of styrofoam covered in fiberglass, in under four months. In 1975, with a Volks-wagen engine and Rutan’s brother Dick serving as the pilot, the VariEze set a world distance record in its weight class by flying 1,638 miles. The flight lasted more than 13 hours.

3. VariViggen SP The 1975 VariViggen earned the suffix SP (special performance) because it doubled the range of the original. Rutan did it by increasing the wing area and making it and the rudder of lighter-weight foam and fiberglass instead of aluminum—and by adding fuel tanks in the wing and attached to the belly.

4. VariEze Homebuilt After the VariEze created a sensation at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Oshkosh, Wisconsin fly-in, Rutan enlarged it (every dimension changed), redesigned it for a 100-horsepower Continental airplane engine, and, doing business as the Rutan Aircraft Factory, started selling plans, based on the step-by-step instructions of Simplicity dress patterns. Interested in the airplane’s spin resistance, NASA bought plans and built two: for flight test and wind tunnel research.

5. Quickie Empty, it weighed 240 pounds, and could carry a pilot who weighed almost as much. In the wake of the VariEze craze, Rutan began to be approached by others for design services. The Quickie was his first design-for-hire, smaller than the VariEze and as quick, cheap, and easy to build and fly. (It got 100 miles per gallon in cruise.) His two customers formed the Quickie Aircraft Corporation to sell plans. A few of its oddities: main gear housed in wingtips, reverse stagger in the wings, and a resemblance to the X-wing fighters of Star Wars , a movie released the year the Quickie first flew.

6. Defiant Ah, the serenity that comes with two engines: Lose one, and the other can keep you in the air. But most twins have an engine hung on each wing; if one shuts down, the pilot has to deal with a violent yaw. Rutan designed the Defiant with one engine at the rear to push, the other at the nose to pull. He built the four-place, 1,300-mile-range airplane for himself and decided later to sell plans. Very few were built; one was recently offered on the Internet for $85,000. (In 1984, plans sold for $490, and the cost of construction was estimated at $40,000.)

7. Long-EZ Rutan’s best-selling homebuilt, the Long-EZ is a pumped-up VariEze with a range of 2,000 miles. Dick Rutan and test pilot Mike Melvill flew two around the world in 1997 (the year that John Denver crashed his and died). In 2001, XCOR Aerospace replaced the pusher engine with a rocket, and seven years later, former NASA astronaut Rick Searfoss flew a demonstration of the EZ-Rocket at EAA’s AirVenture fly-in to promote a league for rocket racing, which never caught on.

8. AD-1 After the Quickie Aircraft Corporation, Rutan’s next customer was NASA. The agency wanted to experiment with an oblique wing, which, according to the late, ingenious Robert T. Jones, an engineer at the agency’s Ames Research Center in California, would experience less drag at transonic and supersonic speeds. At low speeds, the wing was perpendicular to the fuselage; as the airplane gained speed, the wing pivoted up to 60 degrees. Research pilots at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards, California, flew the AD-1 (named for Ames-Dryden) 79 times.

9. AMS/OIL Biplane Racer Rutan designed the race plane to compete in the biplane class at the National Championship Air Races in Reno, Nevada. In 1982, the customer, Danny Mortensen, set a speed record of 235 mph in the airplane, which shared characteristics with the Quickie but was larger and 150 mph faster. In 1983, Mortensen crashed it during a race while flying at 200 mph. The aircraft was lost, but the pilot walked away.

10. Next Generation Trainer In 1981, to get flight test data to support its proposal to the Air Force to provide a light jet trainer, Fairchild Republic hired the Rutan Aircraft Factory to design a 62 percent scale ver­sion of what would become Fairchild’s H-tail T-46 Eaglet. Rutan designed the model, procured two small jet engines (from Ames Industrial Corporation, which had built the same engine for the BD-5J microjet), and conducted an eight-week flight test program. Fairchild won the contract, but after only three were built, the program was cancelled.

11. Grizzly The Griz failed as a bushplane; its low wing made it unsuitable for landing anywhere but paved runways. It succeeded, however, as a research project to test the performance of high-lift flaps on tandem wings and techniques for composite construction. Both Grizzly wings used the VariEze’s styrofoam-with-fiberglass-skin construction, but the booms’ skins were PVC core with fiberglass facings. The large wing area and flaps gave the Grizzly the capability for short takeoffs and landings. In a way, the Grizzly anticipated the Voyager round-the-world aircraft: In both, the booms that functioned as torsional braces between canard and wings doubled as fuel tanks.

12. Solitaire In 1982, Rutan’s canard (of course) sailplane with a glide ratio of 32 to 1 and a retractable engine won the 1982 Soaring Society of America self-propelled sailplane competition, as well as a society award for outstanding design.

13. Microlight Designed for Colin Chapman, the founder of the British sports car company Lotus, the 300-pound Microlight had side-by-side seating for two and a 25-hp engine. Chapman died the day before the prototype flew, and Lotus eventually discontinued development.

14. Starship One of the first projects undertaken by Scaled Composites was an 85 percent scale model of what would become the Beech eight-passenger, twin- turboprop Starship with a variable-sweep canard (see “Beached Starship,” Aug./Sept. 2004). Though aviation journalists loved it—“the most exciting aircraft to emerge from the Beech stable,” crowed the British magazine Flight International in 1986—Beech sold only 11.

15. Voyager The VariEze introduced Rutan to aviation fans; Voyager introduced him to the world. Two years after its first flight, in 1984, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager flew Voyager on a nine-day journey, the first nonstop, unrefueled circumnavigation of the globe (see Moments & Milestones ).

16. Predator While Rutan was readying Voyager for its first flight, he designed a canard cropduster with a tractor engine and chemical hopper in the forward fuselage. After the prototype crashed, the customer, Advanced Technology Aircraft Company, didn’t proceed with production.

17. CM-44 In 1987, California Microwave Inc. (CMI), a reconnaissance systems company now located near Baltimore, Maryland, requested a scaled-up, optionally piloted Long-EZ to test airborne sensors and cameras. After accepting the CM-44, CMI had the aircraft wing and canard redesigned. The aircraft did not enter production, but the U.S. Army and Navy contracted for its use as a flying testbed for surveillance equipment.

18. ATTT The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) approached Rutan in 1987 for a 62 percent scale model to test a design with extreme short-takeoff-and-landing capability to fly special operations forces into and out of tight spots. Rutan designed a tandem-wing, twin-turboprop aircraft with a T-tail. The Advanced Technology Tactical Transport model was able to take off in 680 feet; the agency calculated that the full-scale aircraft would take off in 1,000 feet.

19. Catbird Winner of the 1988 CAFE 400, an efficiency race determining which aircraft gets the highest speed consuming the least fuel, the Catbird had been briefly considered by Beech Aircraft CEO Jim Walsh as a production follow-on to the Bonanza. When that didn’t come to be, Rutan flew the five-place, single-engine airplane as his own, and parked it in 1996. This year a Scaled Composites engineer led a restoration of it and flew the airplane to EAA’s Oshkosh fly-in as part of the association’s tribute to Rutan.

20. Triumph A Rutan business jet, the eight-passenger, twin-turbofan Triumph was tested to 41,000 feet and 0.69 Mach in 1988, when Scaled Composites was still owned by Raytheon’s Beech Aircraft division. When the companies divorced, Scaled got custody of the Triumph, but never put it into production. The Triumph test program marked the first flight of the Williams FJ44 engine.

21. ATTT Bronco Tail According to a 1998 DARPA report, flight tests of the cruciform-tail Advanced Technology Tactical Transport showed problems with stability, and with control of the airplane when one engine was out. Rutan corrected the problems by extending the engine nacelles and joining them with a high tail like that on the Air Force’s OV-10 Bronco.

22. ARES In response to a 1985 Army requirement for a light attack aircraft, Scaled offered a compound wing-and-canard jet that carried a 25-mm Gatling gun on the right side of the fuselage. To keep the powerplant, a 3,000-pound-thrust turbofan, from ingesting the gun’s smoke, the intake was placed on the fuselage’s left side. The design wasn’t selected, but the airplane did perform in a Hollywood feature film: the 1991 Aces, Iron Eagle III , starring Lou Gossett Jr.

23. Lima 1 When Toyota needed a testbed for a Lexus engine that the car company planned to use on an airplane, it called Scaled Composites. For the top-secret project, Rutan integrated the engine as one powerplant on a conventional twin, possibly a Piper Aztec.

24. Pond Racer Businessman and airplane collector Bob Pond shook up the 1991 Reno Unlimited class races by fielding this all-composite, twin-boom racer, powered by two V-6 automobile engines and fueled by methanol. Pilot Rick Brickert qualified the racer at 400 mph that year and won second place in the bronze Unlimited race the following year. In 1993, the airplane crashed during a qualifying heat, and Brickert was killed.

25. Lima 2 After flight testing a 250-hp Lexus V-8 engine on Lima 1, Rutan designed an airplane around it. 26. Raptor D-1 Designed to be a remotely piloted air vehicle under a contract with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the long-winged, high-altitude Raptor conducted its early test fights with a pilot on board—emphasis on the word “on.” The test pilot sat outside on a saddle, straddling the airplane’s fuselage at the point where the wings intersected. The pilots could override the UAV’s control system. The high-altitude, long-endurance aircraft was flown to test the feasibility of firing a small missile that would destroy a tactical ballistic missile during the boost phase of its flight.

27. Raptor D-2 The second Raptor was large enough for its test pilot to fit inside. Beginning in 1995, it was one of several aircraft to fly in the NASA Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor Technology program.

28. Boomerang Rutan calls it his best design for general aviation. It is also the strangest in a stable of strange creatures. Like the Defiant before it, the Boomerang is an approach to the problem of making a twin-engine airplane safe in the event of an engine failure. In this case, one engine is on the fuselage, the other is on a boom that houses a baggage compartment.

29. VisionAire Vantage In 1993, hoping to get a jump on the entry-level jet market, VisionAire Corporation ordered a proof-of-concept vehicle from Scaled Composites, acquired 500 investors, and built a factory in Ames, Iowa. Six years later, it went out of business.

30. V-Jet II With support from NASA’s General Aviation Propulsion program, Williams International created in the early 1990s a tiny turbofan, weighing just 100 pounds and producing 700 pounds of thrust. Williams went to Scaled Composites for an airplane to demonstrate the engine, and the V-Jet II, a five-place, V-tail twin, convinced 1997 Oshkosh-goers and plenty of investors that the age of the personal jet was at hand. Buyers weren’t as convinced.

31. Proteus Rutan’s 31st airplane, the mantis-like Proteus is multi-mission but one of a kind. Invented as a broadband tower in the sky, it has flown instead as a high-altitude (above 60,000 feet) research aircraft that can loiter for up to 14 hours. As a mothership for hire, it has tested dozens of sensors and systems, including a target pod for an airborne laser, a rocket-release trapeze/lanyard for a private space company, and, for NASA, a collision-avoidance system for unpiloted aircraft.

32. Adam 309 With the centerline thrust of the Defiant and the Bronco tail of the ATTT, the Adam 309 went into production at Adam Aircraft Industries in Denver, Colorado. The five-passenger transport won an appearance in the 2006 Michael Mann film Miami Vice, but after delivering only seven aircraft, Adam entered bankruptcy.

33. Rodie LEZ According to Rutan biographer Dan Linehan, somewhere out there is a Long-EZ modified for purposes only Rutan and his collaborators then at McDonnell Douglas know—and they’re not talking.

34. White Knight With a wingspan of 93 feet, the twin-turbojet mothership carried SpaceShipOne on a one-hour climb to 50,000 feet and released it into history. Now Scaled Composites is offering the high-altitude flier as a research platform or booster stage for other small launchers. In 2005 and 2006, it launched the Boeing X-37 mini-spaceplane (see “ Space Shuttle Jr. ,” Dec. 2009/Jan. 2010) for drop and landing tests.

35. SpaceShipOne Winner of the $10 million Ansari X-Prize for repeated flights in a privately developed reusable spacecraft, SpaceShipOne rode into space on a hybrid rocket motor with a solid fuel and liquid oxidizer. From launch to landing, its first flight, on June 21, 2004, lasted 24 minutes. Rutan credits his successors at Scaled with the design of SpaceShipTwo and its booster.

36. Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer Earth is wonderful the second time around, and faster when you’ve got a jet engine. In 2005, the late adventurer Steve Fossett became the first to fly solo on a nonstop, unrefueled flight around the world. He did it in under three days in the second world-circling Rutan-designed airplane, the GlobalFlyer. Lovelier than its piston-engine forebear Voyager, it has a sailplane-like wing with a span of 114 feet, twin booms, which held most of its gas, and a central pod for the pilot.

37. Pulse-detonation LEZ The first airplane to fly powered by a pulse-detonation engine (see “ Son of a Buzz Bomb ,” Sept. 2007) was a Long-EZ, so modified that it looked like a flying house, with the engine carried in a faired pod beneath the short fuselage. The single flight was an Air Force research lab project, and the airplane is now in the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.

38. BiPod Race planes, transports, gliders, homebuilts, spaceships: What was left for Rutan to create? A flying car. The BiPod is a two-seat hybrid-electric roadable aircraft with a 760-mile range at a flying speed of 100 mph. On the road, with wings stowed between the pods, it’s designed to go 820 miles on one tank of gas, or 35 miles on batteries alone. Flight controls are in the right pod; driver’s steering wheel and brakes are in the left.

Photographer and filmmaker Jim Sugar has been photographing Burt Rutan and his flying machines since the earliest days of the Rutan Aircraft Factory and Scaled Composites.

Further reading: Burt Rutan’s Race to Space , Dan Linehan, Zenith Press, 2011. Burt Rutan: Aeronautical and Space Legend , Daniel Alef, Kindle eBook, 2011.

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This Day In History : December 23

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Voyager completes global flight

After nine days and four minutes in the sky, the experimental aircraft Voyager lands at Edwards Air Force Base in California, completing the first nonstop flight around the globe on one load of fuel. Piloted by Americans Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, Voyager was made mostly of plastic and stiffened paper and carried more than three times its weight in fuel when it took off from Edwards Air Force Base on December 14. By the time it returned, after flying 25,012 miles around the planet, it had just five gallons of fuel left in its remaining operational fuel tank.

Voyager was built by Burt Rutan of the Rutan Aircraft Company without government support and with minimal corporate sponsorship. Dick Rutan, Burt’s brother and a decorated Vietnam War pilot, joined the project early on, as did Dick’s friend Jeanna Yeager (no relation to aviator Chuck Yeager ). Voyager ‘s extremely light yet strong body was made of layers of carbon-fiber tape and paper impregnated with epoxy resin. Its wingspan was 111 feet, and it had its horizontal stabilizer wing on the plane’s nose rather than its rear–a trademark of many of Rutan’s aircraft designs. Essentially a flying fuel tank, every possible area was used for fuel storage and much modern aircraft technology was foregone in the effort to reduce weight.

When Voyager took off from Edwards Air Force at 8:02 a.m. PST on December 14, its wings were so heavy with fuel that their tips scraped along the ground and caused minor damage. The plane made it into the air, however, and headed west. On the second day, Voyager ran into severe turbulence caused by two tropical storms in the Pacific. Dick Rutan had been concerned about flying the aircraft at more than a 15-degree angle, but he soon found the plane could fly on its side at 90 degrees, which occurred when the wind tossed it back and forth.

Rutan and Yeager shared the controls, but Rutan, a more experienced pilot, did most of the flying owing to the long periods of turbulence encountered at various points in the journey. With weak stomachs, they ate only a fraction of the food brought along, and each lost about 10 pounds.

On December 23, when Voyager was flying north along the Baja California coast and just 450 miles short of its goal, the engine it was using went out, and the aircraft plunged from 8,500 to 5,000 feet before an alternate engine was started up.

Almost nine days to the minute after it lifted off, Voyager appeared over Edwards Air Force Base and circled as Yeager turned a primitive crank that lowered the landing gear. Then, to the cheers of 23,000 spectators, the plane landed safely with a few gallons of fuel to spare, completing the first nonstop circumnavigation of the earth by an aircraft that was not refueled in the air.

Voyager is on permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

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On a wing and a dream, a small group of people set out to achieve the impossible — to fly around the world without stopping and without refueling. It was originally believed the project would take about 18 months. Design, construction, flight route and permissions, and testing stretched that 18 month projection to nearly six years.

In early December of 1986, Voyager was flown to Edwards Air Force Base in California. She was fueled for hours and on December 14, 1986, Voyager took off on what would become The World's Longest Flight.

Voyager's flight was the first-ever, non-stop, unrefueled flight around the world. It took place between December 14 and December 23, 1986.

This milestone flight took 9 days, 3 minutes and 44 seconds.

The absolute world distance records set during that flight remain unchallenged today.

To this day, no aircraft has flown more air miles than the Voyager's 26,358 statute miles. Not even close. (The FAI accredited distance at 40,212 km.

The structural weight of the Voyager aircraft was only 939 pounds.

When the airplane took off full of fuel, pilots and supplies, the gross take off weight was 9,694.5 pounds. The average altitude flown was about 11,000 feet. The Voyager took off from and landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

There were two crew members on board, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager. Dick's brother, Burt Rutan, who is a world-renowned airplane designer, designed the airplane.

The Voyager was built in Mojave, California. It took five years to build and test the airplane before taking off on its remarkable record-setting flight.

There were 99 ground volunteers that participated in the flight with weather, communications, fabrication, office staff, gift shop staff and more.

Primarily individual contributions, and a few product equipment sponsors financed the Voyager. The project did not receive any government sponsorship.

Four days after landing, President Ronald Reagan presented the Voyager crew and it's designer with the Presidential Citizenship Medal. Awarded only 16 times previously in history.

To find out more about the Voyager project and flight, we suggest you order Dick's new book The Next Five Minutes .

To view items in this collection, use the Online Finding Aid

On December 23, 1986 the unique Voyager aircraft completed the first nonstop, non-refueled circumnavigation of the globe. Voyager's designer, Burt Rutan, its pilots for the nine-day historic flight, Richard "Dick" Rutan and Jeana Yeager, as well as crew chief Bruce Evans, were all to win the Collier Trophy for their accomplishment of one of aviation's last "firsts."

NASM.2000.0054

Riva, Peter

Peter Riva, Gift, 2000, 2000-0054, unknown

9.89 Cubic feet ((1 letter document box) (8 records center boxes) (2 shoeboxes) (1 flatbox))

National Air and Space Museum Archives

This collection consists of the records kept by project manager Peter Riva and includes legal files, general office files, audio tapes, videotapes, newspaper and magazine accounts of the flight and transcripts of the account that would become the book, Voyager by Jeana Yeager and Dick Rutan with Phil Patton, published by Knopf in 1987.

Material is subject to Smithsonian Terms of Use. Should you wish to use NASM material in any medium, please submit an Application for Permission to Reproduce NASM Material, available at Permissions Requests

See accession file.

Rutan Model 76 Voyager

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• Enshrined: 1995
• Birth: June 17, 1943

Elbert “Burt” Rutan

• Employed as a civilian flight test project engineer with the United States Air Force at Edwards Air Force Base in California where he worked on nine different Air Force research projects.
• Became the Director of Development at the Bede Test Center in Newton, Kansas in 1972. Projects there included the BD-5, the BD-6 and the BD-J5 or “pocket rocket” jet, which has since been featured in movies and numerous air shows worldwide.
• Started the Rutan Aircraft Factory which developed and marketed innovative “canard” airplane designs for aviators interested in building their own light craft at home. He also created ground-breaking planes as the VariViggen, the VariEze, the Quickie, the Solitaire, the AD-1, the Amsoil Racer, the Defiant, the Long-EZ, and the world-renowned Voyager.
• Designed, built and tested 17 manned prototype research aircraft and several unmanned aerospace projects for both commercial and government clients.
• Founded Scaled Composites, Inc. in 1982 which designed and produced the 108 foot wing sail for the 1988 America’s Cup Challenge Race.
• Created the Voyager, the first airplane to fly around the world nonstop without refueling, covering 24,986 miles in 216 hours in December 1986.
• Awarded the FAI Gold Medal, the 1987 Collier Trophy and the Society of Experimental Test Pilots’ Doolittle Trophy for his work on the Voyager.
• Logged over 3000 hours pilot time and flew all his 26 manned aircraft designs (except the Raptor and the Voyager).

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Where Science Meets the Art of Warfare

Aviator Dick Rutan Tells of Record-Breaking Flight Aboard the Voyager

News stories archives, null aviator dick rutan tells of record-breaking flight aboard the voyager.

Amanda Stein   |  April 14, 2010

Renowned aviator and retired Air Force pilot Dick Rutan shares with NPS students, faculty and guests the story of his nearly 25,000-mile record-breaking, non-stop trip around the world aboard the Voyager, an aircraft designed for the feat by Rutan, his brother Burt and Jeana Yeager.

In early April, renowned aviator and retired Air Force Lt. Col. Richard Glenn “Dick” Rutan spoke to a packed audience in the MAE Auditorium at NPS about his time in the Armed Forces and his record-breaking flight around the world. Rutan made aviation history in 1986 when he flew the first non-stop flight around the world alongside Jeana Yeager aboard the Voyager, an airplane designed by his brother Burt Rutan, and built by Burt, Dick and Jeana.

On December 14, 1986, the Voyager took off from Edwards Air Force Base and returned to the same airport nine days, three minutes and 44 seconds later, without stopping to refuel. The team traveled 24,986 miles, breaking the distance record of 12,532 miles previously held by a B-52 Stratofortress bomber. The flight secured their place in aviation history, and earned the Voyager a spot in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where the record-setting aircraft is on permanent display.

With a passion for flying that was ignited as a child, Rutan spoke about his time in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, and the code of conduct that has stuck with him since his retirement from the service. “I still remember what it said: ‘I’m an American fighting man. And I serve in the force, which guards my country and my way of life. And I am willing to give my life in their defense.’” He added, “What a profound statement. What a huge meaning that is. That you are willing to give your life for the flag, for your liberty, and for what it means.” Rutan took his oath to heart and flew over 100 high-risk classified missions, and was even shot down over North Vietnam in 1968.

After 20 years of service, 325 missions, and being awarded the Silver Star, five Distinguished Flying Crosses, 16 Air Medals and a Purple Heart, Rutan retired from the Air Force in 1978 and joined his younger brother’s aircraft company, Rutan Aircraft Factory, in Mojave, Calif. With few safety regulations and restrictions for aviation in the early 80s, the barren high desert proved to be a great place to try new things and push the boundaries of design and performance.

It was there that Dick’s brother Burt had established himself as an innovative aircraft designer, and thrived on doing the seemingly impossible. “My brother, he is a visionary. He is a consummate designer, thinking, trying to do something different,” said Rutan. “One of his faults is that he won’t do anything that anyone else has done. Whether it’s better than what [someone else] did or not, it’s gotta be different.”

Aviator Dick Rutan shares the details of his non-stop un-refueled flight around the world. On April 2nd, Rutan spoke with NPS students, faculty and guests about the monumental task of designing and building a plane that could handle the trip.

It was no surprise then when Yeager and the Rutan brothers were out to lunch together one day in 1980 and Burt brought up the idea of building a plane that could fly non-stop around the world. A quick sketch on a napkin was the start of a six-year project that took over 50 volunteers and dozens of private donations to see to fruition.

Burt designed the plane, with a 110-ft. wingspan and 17 fuel tanks. “I laid up every single strand of carbon fiber on that airplane personally. I thought if this thing breaks or if there’s a mistake made in the structure, when the airplane is spinning in, there will be only one person to blame, and that will be myself,” said Rutan. “Besides that, we didn’t have any money to hire anybody.”  Designed for maximum fuel efficiency, there were doubts about the structural integrity of an aircraft weighing only 939lbs (unloaded) and carrying 7,011lbs of fuel. After two years of construction, the Voyager began extensive test flights.

With every ounce of weight being accounted for, the team was forced to cut out any excess fuel or material that might weigh the plane down. “There was a big argument between my brother and I about the amount of fuel. I thought he was too conservative and I ordered 300 more pounds of fuel be put aboard the plane. It increased the risk in getting airborne, but I thought it was a greater risk to run out of fuel in Mexico and have to do the whole darn thing over again. I wanted the darn thing over with.”

After a mishap on a test run left the cabin filled with fuel fumes, Rutan landed safely and wondered if he would ever see the Voyager complete the trip around the world. “I landed, I got out of the airplane, and I thought: It’s gonna take us a year to fix this. I’ve got another year to live.” He said, “I really, honestly thought that I would die in this airplane. I didn’t think that there was any way it could fly ten days without a major malfunction of the airplane itself. We had no backups for anything. Everything had to be absolutely ultralight.”

The weight factor also forced the team to equip the plane with minimal safety gear, should they need to jump to safety. The plane held two small pouches with an inflatable navy life raft and parachutes that were barely adequate for a safe water landing. Flexible wings and rough handling also added to the stress of flying the Voyager. “The airplane was really a handful to fly,” said Rutan, “I hated flying it. In fact, I loathed flying it.”

After 68 test flights and 360 hours in the air, the weather team gave the go-ahead and the crew scrambled to get everything ready for takeoff. On December 14, 1986, the Voyager took off to circumnavigate the globe. With limited resources and a heightened sense of anxiety, Rutan and Yeager got little sleep in the cramped cabin space and the controls needed constant attention to correct it if the plane started to gallop. Set on a route largely determined by the weather, they maintained an average altitude of 11,000 ft, and kept a sharp eye for cumulus clouds that threatened to tear the wings off of their fragile plane.  

“Every time the sun would come up, I was totally amazed that we were still flying. We’re little homebuilders. We’re not a government, space program, or some multi-billion dollar contract going on out there. We’re just a couple of homebuilders with this hokey little airplane,” said Rutan. “We had done it, and I absolutely could not believe it. It was actually successful.”

After nearly nine days in the air, Rutan prepared to touch down at Edwards Air Force Base for the successful end to what he long expected to be the final flight of his life. With only 18 gallons of fuel remaining, a few wing tips missing, a broken fuel pump and a dehydrated and exhausted crew, the Voyager had covered 24, 986 miles in 9 days. Upon completing the monumental flight, Rutan and Yeager were flooded with offers for interviews, endorsements and opportunities. Not expecting any attention, let alone attention of this magnitude, they were ill prepared for big corporations looking to take advantage of them and to monopolize on the Voyager story. Court battles ensued, but for Rutan, knowing that they had succeeded was enough of a reward.

“The airplane hangs in the National Air and Space Museum as a tribute to free spirit. If you can dream it, you can do it if you’ve got enough guts to try it. Anytime I feel sorry for myself, I walk into the museum and I look up at that airplane, and realize that we built it.” He said, “I built that son of a gun, and I flew it around the world. And that’s the only thing that matters. And that’s the only thing that those attorneys and those agents couldn’t steal from us. And that turned out to be the only thing that was worth a darn. And that’s the Voyager story.”

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Today@NPS Archives

Burt Rutan: Scaled Composites Founder

Burt Rutan is the founder of Scaled Composites, which is helping to build SpaceShipTwo– Virgin Galactic's spaceship for tourists to experience suborbital flights.

He and his company vaulted into the public attention in the 1980s. His aircraft – the Rutan Voyager – became the first to fly around the world without stopping or refuelling in 1986.

In spaceflight, Rutan's most prominent success was designing SpaceShipOne , the spacecraft that made it into space twice and won the Ansari X-Prize. It was the first non-governmental human spacecraft to make the journey.

Although Rutan retired from Scaled Composites in 2011, his legacy continues. The SpaceShipTwo spacecraft – the successor for SpaceShipOne – is aiming to begin its first flights around 2014. It will carry tourists from Virgin Galactic , which also has a hand in the spacecraft's manufacturing.

Four of Rutan's designed aircraft and spacecraft are on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., including Voyager and SpaceShipOne. The museum's airport annex hosts Rutan's Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer.

Hobby flying and round-the-world trips

For a man who spent so much of his life working in the high-tech field of aerospace, Rutan spent his childhood in a more low-tech environment. He was born in 1943, and grew up in a farm in a rural area southeast of Portland, Oregon. The family home reportedly had no plumbing.

However, his father – a dentist – partially owned a private airplane, providing the young Rutan an avenue to explore his love of flight. (Rutan's siblings are also in the aviation industry.) He did his first solo in 1959, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology biography , and was third in his class of aeronautical engineers at the California Institute of Technology in 1965.

Rutan spent his early career at Edwards Air Force Base, working on several flight test programs for the U.S. Air Force until 1972. Two years later, he founded his first company: Rutan Aircraft Factory. Working mainly with two-seat aircraft, Rutan's designs were used by everyone from private hobbyists to NASA.

In 1986, Burt's brother Dick and aviator Jeana Yeager piloted one of Rutan's planes all the way around the world without stopping or refuelling. The Voyager aircraft, as it was known, spent more than nine days in flight.

The feat garnered the team the prestigious aerospace Collier Trophy in 1986. Funny enough, Rutan was also behind another successful attempt to do this in 2005. Steve Fossett's two days in flight in Rutan's Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer smashed the previous record. The GlobalFlyer ultimately made it three times around the world on separate flights before being retired.

SpaceShipOne success

In spaceflight, Rutan had a vision of launching in a different fashion than the usual rockets. Under his company Scaled Composites (founded in 1982), Rutan's team sketched out a design to bring the spaceship under a carrier aircraft and launch, so to speak, from mid-air.

Rutan convinced Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to invest in the project, giving Scaled a legitimate shot at having the resources available to pursue the Ansari X-Prize. Shortly before Rutan's design won the prize in 2004, Virgin founder Richard Branson announced plans to run a space tourism company using a successor spaceship.

"We hope to create thousands of astronauts over the next few years and bring alive their dream of seeing the majestic beauty of our planet from above, the stars in all their glory and the amazing sensation of weightlessness," Branson said at the time.

"The development will also allow every country in the world to have their own astronauts rather than the privileged few."

Despite the now high-profile attention on Scaled, at least one of Rutan's biographers pointed out that his personality remained the same at his company.

"Burt Rutan has a confident mien that speaks volumes about his achievements," noted Daniel Alef, who did a biographical sketch of Rutan in 2011.

"More so, he retains a warmth and charm that lead all who meet him to see a very humane and easy-going man who is as comfortable with Paul Allen and Sir Richard Branson as with the men in the shop."

Scaled remains involved with the successor spacecraft's development, SpaceShipTwo, but will pull out when the test flights cease and normal operations begin around 2014. Rutan himself retired from Scaled in 2011. On his website, Rutan wrote that he is mostly interested in making himself available for lectures.

More spaceflight work

Although Rutan is no longer as active at Scaled, he's still involved in space exploration in other ventures. He recently joined the board of Stratolaunch Systems , an air-to-orbit launch system that is slated to have its first test flight in 2017.

The company – which also has financial backing from Allen – initially planned a system that would work with a SpaceX rocket. It aimed to bring 6,100 kilograms to low Earth orbit or 2,300 kg into geosynchronous orbit.

Scaled is involved in the project as well, as it is building a 490,000 pound (222,000 kg) "mothership" airplane able to fly up to about 1,500 miles (2,400 km) before releasing the rocket. But the system may undergo some changes amid a shakeup in late 2012. SpaceX announced it would pull out, and Orbital Sciences Corp. is now going to step in to try to keep the project on track.

"We have been engaging Orbital over the past few months and have them under a study contract through early next year with specific design deliverables," Stratolaunch chief executive Gary Wentz wrote in a November 2012 e-mail to SPACE.com partner Space News.

The companies provided few details about the potential pact. "They are currently evaluating several alternative configurations that appear promising," Wentz added. "We expect more information to be available in the February 2013 timeframe."

Rutan is also keeping busy with an idea for a hybrid flying car, which was revealed publicly amid a short test flight in 2011. Its advertised range is 760 miles (1223 km) in air, and 820 miles (1320 km) when skimming the ground.

The car, also a Scaled project, was unveiled to seek interest from potential customers. Company officials cautioned it was best not to get excited yet, but if it does come true, Rutan could be the architect of the long-held dream of flying cars.

— Elizabeth Howell, SPACE.com Contributor

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Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022 covering diversity, education and gaming as well. She was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years before joining full-time. Elizabeth's reporting includes multiple exclusives with the White House and Office of the Vice-President of the United States, an exclusive conversation with aspiring space tourist (and NSYNC bassist) Lance Bass, speaking several times with the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches on two continents, flying parabolic, working inside a spacesuit, and participating in a simulated Mars mission. Her latest book, " Why Am I Taller ?", is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams. Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Space Studies from the University of North Dakota, a Bachelor of Journalism from Canada's Carleton University and a Bachelor of History from Canada's Athabasca University. Elizabeth is also a post-secondary instructor in communications and science at several institutions since 2015; her experience includes developing and teaching an astronomy course at Canada's Algonquin College (with Indigenous content as well) to more than 1,000 students since 2020. Elizabeth first got interested in space after watching the movie Apollo 13 in 1996, and still wants to be an astronaut someday. Mastodon: https://qoto.org/@howellspace

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