Science: Voyager's Triumph

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The California desert wind was gusty last week, and the chase plane radioed the pilot that he was coming in a little high on final approach to Mojave Airport, 75 miles north of Los Angeles. But Dick Rutan, 48, was determined not to be waved off. "You betcha I'm going to land the first time," he said, and brought his graceful, eye-catching craft in for a perfect landing. Rutan, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, could be excused for being impatient. He and his copilot, Jeana Yeager, 34, had just spent 111 hours aboard the experimental aircraft Voyager without stopping or refueling, flying 11,600 miles and unofficially breaking a 1931 record of 84 hours aloft and a 1962 mark of 11,337 miles in a closed circuit.

Despite that lofty feat, last week's flight was only a warm-up. In September, Rutan and Yeager, an experienced pilot and design engineer, will try to shatter the open course record of 12,532 miles by flying Voyager on a twelve-day, nonstop, unrefueled flight around the world.

The September mission will be the ultimate test of both Voyager and its pilots. On their 4 1/2-day flight, Rutan and Yeager were confined to a cabin that is only 2 ft. wide at its narrowest and 7 1/2 ft. long, just enough room for the passenger to lie alongside the pilot, who can sit only halfway upright. While spelling each other at the controls during their 580-mile laps over the California coast between San Luis Obispo and San Francisco, the pilots could not relax; Voyager is so light that it is easily buffeted by the wind and needs constant piloting. Says Yeager: "It's a lot more exercise than you can imagine." The pilots' discomfort was heightened by the roar of the engines, which reached a noisy 105 decibels (louder than a lawnmower). As a result, neither flyer got much sleep during the first 36 hours.

But the mission's undisputed star was Voyager, a distinctive, almost ethereal craft, whose shell weighs only 938 lbs.; add engines and other equipment, and it is still shy of a ton -- lighter than most small cars. The rest of its takeoff weight of nearly 6,200 lbs. (which will be closer to 12,000 lbs. for the around-the-world flight) is mostly fuel, distributed evenly in 17 tanks, located in the wings, fuselage and "outriggers" that flank the cabin.

Voyager began life in 1981 as a sketch on a napkin at the weather-beaten Mojave Inn, near the airport. The sketcher was Burt Rutan, 43, an engineer with an established reputation for building quirky-looking but aerodynamically ingenious planes. With his brother Dick and Jeana Yeager (no relation, believes Jeana, to famous Test Pilot Chuck), Rutan had decided to attempt the around-the-world flight.

The key to such a marathon would clearly be a lightweight, efficient, flying fuel tank. Eighteen months and many sketches later, when Voyager assumed its basic shape, it was a textbook example of featherweight design and construction. The shell is made from quarter-inch-thick panels of Hexcel honeycomb, a resin-coated, paper-like polymer, covered with graphite fibers embedded in epoxy. The panels weigh just 4 oz. per sq. ft. but have remarkable tensile strength; the ends of the craft's thin, 110-ft. single wing can flex up and down as much as 35 ft. without breaking.