Aviation: Coming Home

Wearing a black cowboy hat, blue pants and a blue sweatshirt, Pilot Dick Rutan signaled a jaunty thumbs-up last week as he emerged from the phone booth-size cockpit of his spindly aircraft Voyager. For Rutan, 48, and his copilot Jeana Yeager, 34, the landing at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., marked the completion of an extraordinary mission: a 25,012-mile global trip in 9 days, 3 min. and 44 sec., the first time that a plane had circled the earth nonstop without refueling.

At a press conference some three hours after touchdown, Rutan, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel, said he felt wobbly, but declared elatedly, “Life is an opportunity. It’s only limited by what you can dream about.” Said Yeager, Rutan’s companion for the past six years: “We got rest but not a lot of sleep.” The flight, she added, “was a lot more difficult than we ever imagined.”

It surely was. Flying mostly at altitudes of 8,000 ft. to 15,000 ft. and averaging 115 m.p.h., Voyager was beset by storms that battered the plane and severely jostled both pilots over stretches as long as 18 hours. The most precarious moment occurred near the end of the voyage, over western Mexico, when the plane’s rear engine, the only one running at the time, temporarily died. Over the next 90 sec., before the front engine was started to compensate for the loss, the craft plummeted from 8,500 ft. to about 5,000 ft.

This week Ronald Reagan will present the Presidential Citizens Medal to Yeager, Rutan and his brother Burt, 43, Voyager’s designer. Voyager, which reportedly cost $2 million and took five years to build, could wind up in the Smithsonian Institution. There, it would rest alongside such other craft as Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and the Mercury space capsule, an inspiration for future record breakers.