Nearly a quarter of a century ago, a B-52H jet bomber flew 12,532 miles from Okinawa to Spain to establish the distance record for nonstop, unrefueled flight. That record has never been beaten.
But two private pilots, Richard G. Rutan and Jeana Yeager, have built an airplane based on new materials and design principles in which they intend to set the ultimate distance record. Their plan is to fly around the world
–25,000 miles–without landing or refueling.
The feather-light airplane on which their hopes and safety will ride is made largely of stiffened paper, and yet it is as large as an airliner. The craft weighs less than an automobile, and yet it can carry as much fuel as a gasoline tank truck.
Rutan and Yeager (no relation to famed test pilot Chuck Yeager) hope to make their flight early next year, if they can raise the money to complete the project. Assuming that they survive the 12-day ordeal, their plane, Voyager, is assured a place in the Smithsonian Institution`s Air and Space Museum, along with Charles A. Lindbergh`s Spirit of St. Louis and other trail-blazing aircraft.
No cash prize or trophy awaits them for setting a new distance record, and their only reward will be personal satisfaction. The venture, which has cost nearly $2 million over the past five years, has nearly exhausted their funds, raised mainly from small donors. The company founded by Rutan and Yeager, Voyager Aircraft Inc., is never likely to make a profit; its purpose will end once Voyager has completed its round-the-world flight.
A few fellow pilots have called Rutan and Yeager quixotic throwbacks to the time between the two world wars, when such fliers as Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, Howard Hughes, Wiley Post, and Amelia Earhart could thrill the world with their exploits. In those days, the daring aviator could win immense acclaim and rewards for risking tragic fate, often met. But times have changed; neither ticker tape parades nor fat prize purses go to record-breakers anymore.
Undeterred, Rutan, 46, and Yeager, 33, are pushing preparations in their hangar at Mojave Airport, about 60 miles north of Los Angeles.
”We`ve put our lives and careers on the line,” Yeager told a visitor,
”and we mean to finish what we`ve started.” With the help of Bruce Evans and a handful of other expert craftsmen–some paid, but all donating most of their time, skill, and labor–Rutan and Yeager are putting the finishing touches on the gleaming white Voyager.
Nearly the entire airplane–wings, booms, and fuselage–will be filled with the 1,489 gallons of 100-octane gasoline needed to fly 25,000 miles and provide an additional 3,000-mile fuel reserve. At takeoff, Voyager`s gasoline will weigh nearly five times as much as the 1,858-pound airplane itself, and to get into the air the machine will need a very long runway. The pilots plan to use nearby Edwards Air Force Base, rather than Mojave Airport, for the start of their trip.
The takeoff is likely to be hair-raising; Voyager`s long, thin wings are so flexible that the weight of the gasoline inside them will bend them downward about five feet, so that the tips will almost touch the ground.
The course Rutan and Yeager have charted leads westward over the Pacific, Australia, and the Indian Ocean, around the southern tip of Africa, then across the South Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the United States. The route will take advantage of trade winds wherever possible and will avoid all land, except for Australia and possibly South Africa.
Later this month the Voyager team plans to install two special engines. The cruising engine, unveiled by Teledyne Continental Motors in June at the Paris Air Show, was designed to run for 3,000 hours without overhaul, 1,000 hours longer than most aircraft piston engines. The maker says that the liquid-cooled, four-cylinder, 110-horsepower engine is very light (about 200 pounds), exceptionally sparing of fuel and, above all, reliable.
It will have to be. Although the Voyager has two engines, one in the nose to assist at takeoff and the special cruise motor at the rear of the fuselage, the forward engine will be running only during takeoff and for the first few thousand miles. After that, it will be shut down to conserve fuel, and the Voyager will putter along at about 80 miles an hour for the rest of the flight.
Special reversible-pitch propellers for Voyager`s engines, designed and built in West Germany, will help it slow down when it lands. The plane`s huge wings have neither flaps nor spoilers, and the machine is so light that it tends to float into the air at very low speeds.
Should its cruise engine fail, the plane would have to land or ditch. To save weight, electric starters were omitted, and once the takeoff engine is shut down it must remain dead weight for the rest of the flight.
The Voyager looks far too big for the two small engines. Its knife-like wings, with a span of 110.8 feet, are nearly three feet longer than those of a Boeing 727 airliner. Besides the main wings, which are joined to the rear of the tubular fuselage, the plane has a shorter set of canard wings, or horizontal stabilizers, near its nose.
Outlandish though the Voyager`s layout may appear, the plane was designed by one of the world`s most innovative aircraft builders, Rutan`s younger brother, Burt Rutan. Designs by Burt Rutan shaped Beech Aircraft Corp.`s revolutionary new Starship I executive transport, the first commercial canard plane to go into production.
Richard Rutan recalled a conversation that led to the Voyager project.
”My brother Burt and I were sitting in a Mojave coffee shop back in 1981,” he said, ”when we got to wondering whether it would be possible to build a plane that would fly around the world without refueling. He started sketching on a napkin, and it wasn`t long before we realized that it could be done–and that we were going to do it.”
Richard Rutan`s qualifications as a pilot are as impressive as his brother`s credentials as a designer. Richard, a former fighter pilot who was awarded a Silver Star and five Distinguished Flying Crosses for his 325 combat missions in Vietnam, is a seasoned test pilot. He holds six world records for speed and distance in various light-aircraft categories.
Yeager, his pilot partner, is a drafting engineer who established five world records piloting light aircraft on her own. She is not related to Chuck Yeager, the Air Force test pilot who was first to break the sound barrier.
The Voyager`s most radical departure from convention is its structure. Apart from engines, fasteners, cables, and fittings, there is no metal in the plane; it is built entirely of graphite fiber, resin-impregnated paper, and other space-age composite materials.
Starting with wood or plastic mock-ups of the plane`s components, Evans and other members of the Voyager team made casts of each section of the wings, booms and fuselage. Next, the casts were lined with graphite-fiber tape impregnated with epoxy resin. After fixing several layers of tape in place, the builders added an appropriate thickness of backing, a thick honeycomb of resin-impregnated paper called Nomex. Finally, another layer of graphite-fiber tape was laid over the Nomex to complete the sandwich. The material is impervious to gasoline, it can be used as an integral fuel reservoir, obviating the need for conventional gasoline tanks.
When Voyager flies, it twists, bends, and flaps its wings disconcertingly, giving occupants a singularly uncomfortable and exhausting ride. In flight, Rutan and Yeager change places from time to time, the duty pilot seated in a cramped cockpit in the right of the fuselage, the off-duty pilot lying prone in a tube-like bunk to the left.
The Rutan-Yeager project is not the only one competing for the round-the- world record. A half dozen other airplane builders, including Paul B. MacCready, builder of the first successful man-powered airplane, and Jerry Mullins, holder of the closed-circuit distance record for piston-powered aircraft, have entered the race in the past several years. Some have already built aircraft and one, Thomas Jewett, of Mojave, was killed in 1982 while testing his plane.
But the Voyager, which finished its preliminary flight tests last year, has a head start. Rutan and Yeager expect to begin the final phase of flight testing in August, gradually increasing the length of their hops until they can comfortably stay aloft for two days at a time. After that, they will assault the closed-course unrefueled distance record–11,337 miles–by flying the Voyager back and forth between San Diego and San Francisco. Finally, some time early next year, they hope to circle the Earth.
The trip will test the crew as sorely as their aircraft. On a 12-hour flight over the Rockies and Plains states last summer, Yeager, who had never suffered from airsickness before, became ill.
”It`s kind of claustrophobic inside the plane,” she said, ”and we were in severe turbulence the whole time. The way Voyager pitches, twists, and heaves, it feels more like being aboard a boat in a heavy sea than flying.”
That flight was so bad, in fact, that Rutan realized Voyager would have to fly at fairly high altitudes (20,000 feet or so) to escape the dangerous and uncomfortable turbulence closer to the ground. But higher altitudes will force the pilots to use oxygen, which ordinarily comes in heavy steel tanks. A supply sufficient to last nearly two weeks would substantially increase the weight of the plane, thereby diminishing its range.
But Rutan has found a way around the problem: a medical oxygen concentrator specially adapted for use by Voyager`s crew. The concentrator, much lighter than an oxygen tank, works by pumping ordinary air through a catalytic material. The latter absorbs most of the nitrogen but lets the oxygen through.
Voyager will carry a bare minumum of instruments, including an automatic pilot and a small weather radar unit. The pilots plan to leave their navigating to a mission control center operated by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., with which Voyager will be in continuous radio contact.
”We`re going to succeed,” Rutan said, ”partly because of the advanced technology in Voyager, and partly thanks to a lot of people who share our dream. They`ve helped us in large ways and small, and they`ll be flying with us in spirit.”
