The Rutan Model 76 Voyager was the first

aircraft An aircraft ( aircraft) is a vehicle that is able to flight, fly by gaining support from the Atmosphere of Earth, air. It counters the force of gravity by using either Buoyancy, static lift or the Lift (force), dynamic lift of an airfoil, or, i ...

to fly around the world without stopping or refueling. It was piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager. The flight took off from

Edwards Air Force Base Edwards Air Force Base (AFB) is a United States Air Force installation in California. Most of the base sits in Kern County, California, Kern County, but its eastern end is in San Bernardino County, California, San Bernardino County and a souther ...

's 15,000 foot (4,600 m) runway in the

Mojave Desert The Mojave Desert (; ; ) is a desert in the rain shadow of the southern Sierra Nevada mountains and Transverse Ranges in the Southwestern United States. Named for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, indigenous Mohave people, it is located pr ...

on December 14, 1986, and ended 9 days, 3 minutes and 44 seconds later on December 23, setting a flight endurance record. The aircraft flew westbound 26,366 statute miles (42,432 km; the FAI accredited distance is 40,212 km) at an average altitude of 11,000 feet (3,350 m).

Design and development

The aircraft was first imagined by

Burt Rutan Elbert Leander "Burt" Rutan (; born June 17, 1943) is a retired American aerospace engineer and entrepreneur noted for his originality in designing light, strong, unusual-looking, and energy-efficient air and space craft. He designed the recor ...

and his brother Dick Rutan in 1980. Burt sketched his concept for the aircraft for Dick and Jeana Yeager during a lunch in 1981. The idea was sketched out on the back of a napkin. Voyager was built in Mojave, California over a period of five years, mainly by volunteers working under both the Rutan Aircraft Factory and an organization named Voyager Aircraft.

served as the lead designer for the project, and the chief aerodynamicist was John Roncz. The

airframe The mechanical structure of an aircraft is known as the airframe. This structure is typically considered to include the fuselage, undercarriage, empennage and wings, and excludes the propulsion system. Airframe design is a field of aeros ...

made of

fiberglass Fiberglass (American English) or fibreglass (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English) is a common type of fibre-reinforced plastic, fiber-reinforced plastic using glass fiber. The fibers may be randomly arranged, flattened i ...

carbon fiber Carbon fiber-reinforced polymers (American English), carbon-fibre-reinforced polymers ( Commonwealth English), carbon-fiber-reinforced plastics, carbon-fiber reinforced-thermoplastic (CFRP, CRP, CFRTP), also known as carbon fiber, carbon comp ...

, and

Kevlar Kevlar (para-aramid) is a strong, heat-resistant synthetic fiber, related to other aramids such as Nomex and Technora. Developed by Stephanie Kwolek at DuPont in 1965, the high-strength material was first used commercially in the early 1970s as ...

weighed when empty. With the engines included, the unladen weight of the plane was . When it was fully loaded with fuel for its historic flight it weighed .Rutan VoyagerSmithsonian National Air and Space Museum
. The aircraft had an estimated

lift-to-drag ratio In aerodynamics, the lift-to-drag ratio (or L/D ratio) is the Lift (force), lift generated by an aerodynamic body such as an aerofoil or aircraft, divided by the aerodynamic drag caused by moving through air. It describes the aerodynamic efficie ...

(L/D) of 27. The canard and wing airfoils were custom-designed, and the aircraft was analyzed using

computational fluid dynamics Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical analysis and data structures to analyze and solve problems that involve fluid dynamics, fluid flows. Computers are used to perform the calculations required ...

Vortex generator A vortex generator (VG) is an aerodynamic device, consisting of a small wikt:vane, vane usually attached to a lifting surface (or airfoil, such as an aircraft, aircraft wing) or a rotor blade of a wind turbine.canard to reduce sensitivity to surface contamination by rain. Voyager had front and rear propellers, powered by separate engines. It was originally flown on June 22, 1984, powered by

Lycoming O-235 The Lycoming O-235 is a family of four-cylinder, air-cooled, horizontally opposed, piston aircraft engines that produce , derived from the earlier O-233 engine.Textron Lycoming: ''Operator's Manual, Textron Lycoming Aircraft Engines, Series O-2 ...

engines with fixed-pitch propellers. In November 1985, the aircraft was rolled out, fitted with world-flight engines, an air-cooled Teledyne Continental O-240 in the forward location and a liquid-cooled Teledyne Continental IOL-200 in the aft location. Both were firstly fitted with wooden, variable-pitch electrically actuated MT-Propellers. The plan was for the rear engine to be operated throughout the flight. The front engine was intended to provide additional power for takeoff and the initial part of the flight under heavy load. On July 15, 1986, Dick Rutan and Yeager completed a test flight off the coast of California, in which they flew for 111 hours and 44 minutes, traveling in twenty circuits between

San Luis Obispo ; ; ; Chumashan languages, Chumash: ''tiłhini'') is a city and county seat of San Luis Obispo County, California, United States. Located on the Central Coast (California), Central Coast of California, San Luis Obispo is roughly halfway betwee ...

and Stewarts Point, breaking the previous record held since 28 May 1931 by a Bellanca CH-300 fitted with a Packard DR-980 diesel engine, piloted by Walter Edwin Lees and Frederic Brossy which had set a record by staying aloft for 84 hours and 32 minutes without being refueled. The first attempt at the Voyager test flight was ended by the failure of a propeller pitch-change motor that resulted in an emergency landing at

Vandenberg Air Force Base Vandenberg may refer to: * Vandenberg (surname), including a list of people with the name * USNS ''General Hoyt S. Vandenberg'' (T-AGM-10), transport ship in the United States Navy, sank as an artificial reef in Key West, Florida * Vandenberg S ...

. On a test flight on September 29, 1986, the airplane had to make an emergency landing due to a propeller blade departing the aircraft. As a result, the decision was made to switch to aluminium Hartzell hydraulically actuated propellers. In a crash program, Hartzell made custom propellers for the aircraft, which were first flown on November 15, 1986.Roncz, John G., "Propeller Development for the Rutan Voyager", SAE paper 891034, presented at the SAE General Aviation Aircraft Meeting & Exposition, Wichita, Kansas, April 1989.

World flight

Voyager's world flight takeoff took place on the longest runway at Edwards AFB at 8:01 am local time on December 14, 1986, with 3,500 of the world's press in attendance. As the plane accelerated, the tips of the wings, which were heavily loaded with

fuel A fuel is any material that can be made to react with other substances so that it releases energy as thermal energy or to be used for work (physics), work. The concept was originally applied solely to those materials capable of releasing chem ...

, were damaged as they unexpectedly flew down and scraped against the runway, ultimately causing pieces (winglets) to break off at both ends (the pilot had wanted to gain enough speed for the inner wings, rather than the fragile outer wings, to lift the plane; in 67 test flights, the plane had never been loaded to capacity). The aircraft accelerated very slowly and needed approximately 14,200 feet (2.7 mi; 4.3 km) of the runway to gain enough speed to lift from the ground, the wings arching up dramatically just before take-off. The two damaged winglets remained attached to the wings by only a thin layer of carbon fiber and were removed by flying the Voyager in a slip, which introduced side-loading, tearing the winglets off completely. Some of the carbon fiber skin was pulled off in the process, exposing the blue foam core. Burt Rutan following with pilot

Mike Melvill Michael Winston Melvill (born November 30, 1940, in Johannesburg, South Africa) is a world-record-breaking pilot and one of the test pilots for SpaceShipOne, the experimental spaceplane developed by Scaled Composites. Melvill piloted SpaceShip ...

determined that Voyager was still within its performance specifications despite the damage and decided to allow the flight to continue. During the flight, the two pilots had to deal with extremely cramped quarters. To reduce stress, the two had originally intended to fly the plane in three-hour shifts, but flight handling characteristics while the plane was heavy prevented routine changeovers, and they became very fatigued. Dick Rutan reportedly stayed at the controls without relief for almost the first three days of the flight. VoyagerAircraftWingtipAtNASM

The plane also continuously reminded the pilots of its pitch instability and fragility. They had to maneuver around bad weather numerous times, most perilously around the Typhoon Marge.Joint Typhoon Warning Center (1987)
Chapter 3: Northwest Pacific and North Indian Ocean Tropical Cyclones
. Retrieved on 2007-12-19.

Libya Libya, officially the State of Libya, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to Egypt–Libya border, the east, Sudan to Libya–Sudan border, the southeast, Chad to Chad–L ...

denied access to the country's

airspace Airspace is the portion of the atmosphere controlled by a country above its territory, including its territorial waters or, more generally, any specific three-dimensional portion of the atmosphere. It is not the same as outer space which is t ...

in response to Operation El Dorado Canyon earlier that year. There were contentious radio conversations between the Rutan brothers as Dick flew around weather and, at one time, turned around and began doubling back. As they neared

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

to land, a

fuel pump A Fuel pump is a component used in many liquid-fuelled engines (such as petrol/gasoline or diesel engines) to transfer the fuel from the fuel tank to the device where it is mixed with the intake air (such as the carburetor or fuel inject ...

failed and had to be replaced with its twin pumping fuel from the other side of the aircraft. In front of 55,000 spectators and a large press contingent, including 23 live feeds breaking into scheduled broadcasting across Europe and North America, the plane safely came back to earth, touching down at 8:06 a.m. at the same airfield 9 days after take-off. Rutan made three low passes over the landing field before putting Voyager down. The average speed for the flight was . There were of fuel remaining in the tanks, only about 1.5% of the fuel they had at take-off. Sanctioned by the FAI and the

AOPA The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) is a Frederick, Maryland-based American non-profit political organization that advocates for general aviation. AOPA's membership consists mainly of general aviation pilots in the United States ...

, the flight was the first successful aerial nonstop, non-refueled circumnavigation of the Earth that included two passes over the Equator (as opposed to shorter ostensible "circumnavigations" circling the North or South Pole). This feat has since been accomplished only one other time, by

Steve Fossett James Stephen Fossett (April 22, 1944 – September 3, 2007) was an American businessman and a record-setting aviator, sailor, and adventurer. He was the first person to fly solo nonstop around the world in a balloon and in a fixed-wing aircraf ...

in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer (also designed by Rutan). For the feat, Yeager, the Rutans, and crew chief/builder Bruce Evans received the 1986

Collier Trophy The Robert J. Collier Trophy is awarded annually "for the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America, with respect to improving the performance, efficiency, and safety of air or space vehicles, the value of which has been t ...

., p. 84.

Specifications

References

Notes

Bibliography

* David H. Onkst
Dick Rutan, Jeana Yeager, and the Flight of the Voyager
U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission. * * *

External links

*
Flight path
{{Authority control Voyager 1980s United States experimental aircraft Individual aircraft in the Smithsonian Institution Canard aircraft Twin-engined push-pull aircraft Twin-boom aircraft Aircraft first flown in 1984 Circumnavigations