Word: rutan
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...most popular U.S. curiosities at the show were round-the-world Flyers Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager. But Voyager, the unique lightweight airplane in which the duo circled the globe nonstop without refueling, was not at Le Bourget. Rutan and Yeager could not raise enough money to bring the aircraft along. A plan to fly Voyager to Paris on an Air Force cargo plane was rejected by a bureaucrat labeled a "pinhead" by an industry journal. What the U.S. chose to display instead was the B-1B bomber, a dark and menacing $285 million war machine. The B-1B, designed...
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...
...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...
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...
...full, true grandeur. Even if the plane does not make it all the way back, Yeager says, she will still feel a sense of achievement. "If we made the attempt and something happened to the airplane," she said, "I would be satisfied that we at least tried." But Rutan is hell-bent for immortality. As he circles the planet, the names circling in his head are Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. He too aims to fly into history's blue yonder. "Milestones," Rutan says, "are something that can never be broken...