Born 1939,
Loma Linda, California
Jeana Yeager
Born 1952,
Fort Worth, Texas
A fortunate coincidence brought Jeana Yeager and Dick Rutan to the same air show in California in 1980. They met, became friends, and soon began to work together. Eventually they shared a dream of piloting a plane around the world without stopping or refueling. In realizing that dream, they made history. Credit must also go to another member of the team, Dick’s brother Burt, who had a reputation as the most innovative airplane designer of his time.
Dick Rutan was born in Loma Linda, California, near Los Angeles in 1939. Following World War II his father, a dentist, moved the family to the small town of Dinuba near Fresno, where Dick and his brother Burt became obsessed with flying and airplanes. Rutan started taking flying lessons at the age of 15; he made his first solo flight and got his pilot’s license on his sixteenth birthday, the earliest legal age. When he graduated from high school he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and trained to become a navigator.
After serving in Vietnam Rutan was accepted for fighter pilot training; he returned to Vietnam in 1967. On his last combat mission he had to eject from a burning airplane. He was then assigned to Europe but resigned from the air force when he failed to receive a promotion he had sought. After he left the air force he separated from his wife and went to work as a test pilot for Burt’s company, which manufactured and sold experimental airplanes.
Jeana Yeager grew up in Texas, where her father was an engineer for a defense contractor. Her love of horses, which began when she was a very young girl, became a lifelong interest and, briefly, her profession. In 1972 Yeager married a deputy sheriff and moved to Rosenberg, Texas, near Houston. After five years of marriage she left her husband and moved to California, where she took a job drafting and surveying for a geothermal energy company in Santa Rosa. Pursuing her avid interest in flying, she received her pilot’s license in 1978. When she met Rutan at the air show in Chino, California, the Rutan company was demonstrating its experimental aircraft.
Yeager went to work with the Rutan Aircraft Factory and broke several speed records with the specially designed Rutan planes. Over lunch one day in 1981, the two Rutan brothers and Yeager came up with the idea of trying to break existing records by designing a plane that would fly around the world with no stops or refueling. It took five years of tremendous effort to build the plane that Burt Rutan designed.
Spending most of their time trying to raise money to finance the plane, which they had named the Voyager, Rutan and Yeager each lived a subsistence-level life. Initially they were frustrated in their efforts to interest large corporations in an opportunity to make aviation history because companies were reluctant to invest in risky ventures. Determined to make their project an all-American effort, Rutan and Yeager even turned down an offer of financial backing from another country. To raise money they sold T-shirts, spoke to service clubs, recruited volunteers, and formed the “Voyager Important People Club.” Just when they thought their prospects were hopeless, a financial contributor who had faith in the project kept it going a while longer.
Burt Rutan’s challenge was to build a very light airplane large enough to carry enough fuel for a round-the-world flight. His design was based on an H-shape with the main wing toward the rear and the stabilizing wing in front. The wingspan was 111 feet, longer than that of a 727 jetliner. There was little metal in the plane, since the body was made of a composite material consisting mainly of epoxy. The plane had two engines: the 110-horsepower engine in the rear could produce a cruising speed of 80 miles per hour, and the more powerful engine in front was used for takeoffs and landings.
In July 1986 Rutan and Yeager took the Voyager on a nonstop, four-and-a-half-day test flight up and down the California coast. During the flight one of the two pilots would sit at the controls while the other would stretch out and rest in the narrow, three-foot-wide space. It was difficult to eat and drink in such close quarters. Yeager, who consumed less than a gallon of water during the flight, fainted during the postflight press conference. She and Rutan had set a world record for distance and endurance.
The pilots continued their test flights in preparation for the round-the-world trip, scheduled for mid-September 1986. After one test, however, the trip was postponed because part of the plane’s front propeller had broken off. Rutan and Meager decided to reschedule the flight for December in spite of the fact that they would be flying around the Northern Hemisphere in winter.
Rutan and Yeager left Edwards Air Force Base in California on December 14, 1986. Since this was the first time the Voyager had been flown with a full load of fuel, the weight caused the tips of the wings to dip and to scrape off the winglets at right angles to the wings. Rutan, who piloted the plane throughout most of the trip, was able to shake off the damaged material and continue the flight.
They flew into the Pacific and, near the Philippines, ran into Typhoon Marge, which was producing 80 mile-per-hour winds. Yet this danger proved to be an advantage: the typhoon’s tail winds pushed the Voyager along so that it reached the fastest speed of the trip, 147 miles per hour. Rutan and Yeager slept for two or three hours at a time; they ate pre-cooked meals and took food supplements.
When they were over Malaysia on their way across the Indian Ocean and Africa, they ran into storms that forced them to fly at higher and less fuel-efficient altitudes than they had planned. Sometimes they had to use both engines in order to avoid turbulence. Yeager was badly bruised when the plane was tossed around by strong winds. The two pilots suffered mood swings that alternated from euphoria to despair, depending on the weather and the flight’s progress.
Off the west coast of Africa, they ran into an unexpected storm, and Rutan lost control of the plane for a short time. A little farther along, the oil warning light came on: one engine almost overheated because the pilots were so tired they forgot to check the oil level. They flew over Central America in the dark with Yeager at the controls. In spite of all their difficulties, they landed at Edwards Air Force Base on December 23, 1986, a day ahead of schedule, with Yeager cranking down the landing gear by hand. When the Voyager touched down on the runway it had only about 10 of its original 1,200 gallons of fuel. The nine-day flight had covered 25,012 miles, more than twice the distance of the previous record for an un-refueled flight.
Rutan and Yeager were received by enthusiastic crowds as they traveled around the United States. They were presented with a medal by President Ronald Reagan. Corporate sponsorships and a royalty advance on a book about the flight enabled them to pay off the debt they still owed from constructing the plane. The Voyager was placed in the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. This was an especially meaningful moment for Rutan and Yeager because it was in this museum that they had promised themselves the Voyager would be an American technological breakthrough. They had accomplished their feat in the best tradition of Orville and Wilbur Wright, Charles Lindbergh, and other heroes of American aviation.
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