Word: yeager
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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...
...mission came about through the faith of three principals: the two pilots, Dick Rutan, 48, and Jeana Yeager, 34; and Rutan's brother Burt, 43, who designed the plane. Burt Rutan, one of the U.S.'s most innovative designers, is president of his own firm, Rutan Aircraft Factory; Dick is a gaunt and prickly pilot par excellence, much decorated for his 325 combat missions in Viet Nam, who had been chafing as a test flyer for his younger brother; Yeager, Dick's constant companion, is a shy, petite former engineering-design draftsman who holds nine world flight records after just...
...While contemporary travel makes the world a smaller place as the Concorde zips from New York to Paris in less than four hours, the flight of Voyager seems to restore the planet to its 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...
...rewards of a globe-circling flight are greater, so are the dangers. Rutan and Yeager will face nearly two weeks of cramped conditions, 95% of the course will be over water, and the plane is bound to run into more turbulent weather than it encountered over the California coastline. But Rutan was ready to talk about the next flight before last week's had been completed. Still over the Pacific Ocean, just west of San Francisco, he radioed, "This time we really had our act together, and we know we're ready...