Burt Rutan -- A soloist with his own wings

In 1984 when I interviewed the icon and 'radical' airplane designer at his hanger in the desert north of LA, he was already a legend.

Burt Rutan, says Wikipedia, 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.”

The founder of Scaled Composites LLC, he designed and built SpaceShipOne. In 2004 it became the first privately owned craft to enter outer space; its second and third flights that year won him the $10 million Ansari XPrize.

The prize was a competition designed “to lower the risk and cost of going to space by incentivizing the creation of a reliable, reusable, privately-financed, manned spaceship that finally made private space travel commercially viable.”

Rutan was already an aviation legend when I visited him in 1984 in the Mojave Desert north of LA, where he designed and tested his stuff. Sadly, he did not give me a ride in one of his homebuilt planes.

Here’s a long interview I had with him from 2023. Here’s a video of him talking to the homebuilt community in OshKosh, Wisconsin. At 81, he’s still coming out with new designs.

Burt Rutan

SKYLITE — Butler Aviation’s Corporate Inflight Magazine

February 1984

Bill Steigerwald

When Burt Rutan builds a better mousetrap, it's beautiful and it flies.

And though the innovative airplane designer is based in the middle of nowhere —in a pair of undistinguished buildings at Mojave Airport in Mojave, California — a media parade has beaten a path to Rutan's hangar door.

Good Morning America and Omni magazine's New Frontiers found and fea- tured the publicity-shy Rutan. The name Rutan and photos of his strangely futuristic airplanes regularly grace the covers of such magazines as Popular Science, Private Pilot and Aviation Week & Space Technology.

The 40-year-old aeronautical engineer was described by Peter Ustinov on the Omni program as a "radical, solitary thinker" who "reinvented the airplane and flew it into the year 2000."

Rutan has come a long way since he built his first plane in his garage in 1972, while working for the Air Force as a civilian flight-test engineer at Edwards Air Force Base.

Today his name is on about 100 experimental designs, he's president of two companies and he's doing research work for NASA and major airplane manufacturers.

Rutan first gained attention in the early 1970s by designing low-cost light air- planes for do-it-yourself plane builders planes that usually fly better, cost less to build and maintain, and are more economical and inherently safer than conventional light planes. His elegant, odd creations are easy to identify and hard to forget.

Their trademarks are canards (small lifting wings located in front of the main wing that are aligned to make his planes virtually stall-proof) and Whitcomb winglets at the wing tips for greater stability.

Rutan's sturdy but lightweight airframes built of composite materials —plastic foam cores that support thin fiberglass skins — are an important application of the same idea used in making the surfboard. Use of composites makes it cheaper and easier to build homemade airplanes and experimental prototypes.

You can find Rutan-designed planes at places like the annual midsummer fly-in of the Experimental Aircraft Association in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where his two- place VariEze (pronounced "very easy") and its larger brother, the 800-pound Long-EZ, usually outnumber other types of homebuilts.

Or for $200 you can purchase the plans for Rutan designs such as the Quickie, an ultralight that can get 100 miles a gallon at a cruising speed of 180 mph, or the Sol- itaire, a self-launching sailplane that features an engine package that folds into the nose after it pulls it to soaring altitude, and build one yourself — if you've also got about $10,000 for parts and materials and about 1,000 hours of spare time.

But though the inventive Rutan has become one of the best-known names in aviation, building one of his planes is almost easier than getting to talk to him. It's no accident that his headquarters are in windy Mojave, at the edge of the desert where the weather is good for flying and the crowds of Los Angeles are 100 miles over the mountains. He doesn't like to be distracted from what he enjoys doing so much designing and flying and testing airplanes. A model-plane nut as a kid who had his pilot's license at 16 and his aeronautical degree from Cal Poly in 1965, Rutan started the homebuilder business after he started taking his garage-built plane (the wood-and-metal pusher-propeller VariViggen) to air shows.

The fuss people made over it convinced Rutan that selling plans to hobbyists would be a great way to make a living. He set up Rutan Aircraft Factory (RAF) as a full-time business in 1974, and since then the company has sold more than 6,500 sets of plans, mostly VariEzes and Long-EZes. About 510 are actually flying worldwide. Today, RAF sells plans and takes good care of the extended Rutan homebuilder family, answering phone calls and letters from around the world and mailing out a quarterly newsletter that keeps 3,500 builders up to date on the design changes and in touch with one another on a social basis.

On Saturday mornings free construction seminars in the RAF hangar — open to the public and usually followed by a mini-air show put on by a couple of Rutan Long-EZes — provide advice and encouragement to builders.

RAF also builds and tests designs by Rutan and others. Past projects include a scaled-down demonstrator version of NASA's AD-1, whose pivoting wing is be- ing used to test the efficiency of flying at transsonic speeds with one wing swept forward and the other back.

And next door, Rutan and Herb Iversen, former vice president of Ames Industrial Corp., recently started Scaled Composites, Inc., a company set up to build and flight test experimental prototypes such as the 85 percent scale version of Beech Aircraft's Starship, an eight- to ten-seat, twin-engine turboprop made of composites that employs canards and winglets and is due out in 1985.

In November, Rutan was spending most of his work week — which usually runs 80 to 90 hours - on the Starship, including two hours of flight testing a day. But on a chilly Saturday afternoon in the RAF building, the lanky dentist's son from Dinuba, California, sat still long enough to answer some questions.

Rutan knows homebuilders well, and his loyalty to them is understandable. After all, he was and essentially still is one himself, as were the Wright Brothers. And he knows that the homebuilder's commitment goes far beyond money and time.

"It probably affects his life more than just about anything a person does, besides possibly getting married. He goes from being an average husband or housewife to something kind of special. He's a hero to the neighbors. He gets into his airplane and flies nonstop to Chicago. That's a pretty big thing." Rutan explained.

Of all his designs, Rutan's favorite is his Defiant, a pusher-puller, five-passenger twin that gets 12 miles a gallon while cruising 1,200 miles at 220 mph. De- signed with engines in both ends of the fuselage to reduce some of the inherent safety problems of twin-engine planes, the Defiant is Rutan's personal plane.

He considered having it manufactured, but without improvements in methods of mass-producing composites, he said, it would cost too much and take up too much of his time. He also decided that doing "development work was more fun."

Rutan may use banks of computers (since 1978, he has owned various Apples, IBMs, Hewlett-Packards and others), and hang around at NASA, but in many ways he's still an old-fashioned, no-nonsense, rugged individualist.

While he uses his computers for relaxation, he also refines his designs with them. He's also a generous man: It's important to him that when he develops a more efficient, higher performing airplane, he can let home-builders share the experience of building and flying it.

Rutan seems to get a kick out of freezing his ideas and spreading them around. He wants a lot more people to fly and thinks that small, basic manufactured planes should cost about $12,000 — not $25,000 or $30,000.

If he ran Cessna, he said, "I'd try to develop a structure for a small, basic airplane that would have a low parts count that could be built with machinery at considerably lower cost. The experience of manufacturers has been that when the market is good, they can sell all the planes they can make and when it's bad they won't spend research and development money to develop new ones. They're historically conservative in R&D, so they build through evolution rather than revolution."

There's nothing significant being done to use state-of-the-art in smaller planes, he noted. "Piper, for example, has developed a new plane, the Malibu. It's designed from scratch, a brand new airplane, but it uses airfoils and structural materials and manufacturing methods that were designed back in the '40s. But it's the latest light plane. It's pressurized and cruises efficiently and has good performance, but it costs a couple hundred thousand dollars."

Rutan attributes a part of his success in developing new airplane designs to the fact that he's his own boss. He hasn't had to design by committee or deal with a lot of paperwork or regulations. "When we develop an airplane at RAF or at Scaled, for that matter, we make our own rules. Our airplanes aren't sold to the public. They're just developmental planes, so we don't have to get the FAA's permission or some other designer's ideas or permission. We can take a very straightforward approach and that's why we're able to develop airplanes without spending too much time," he stated.

Rutan doesn't file for many patents because they "just get in the way of some- thing being used and provide money for lawyers," whom he seems to avoid as much as possible.

"I'll do a $1-million, fixed-price contract with somebody and not involve a lawyer at all. I won't get a lawyer to look at it — it's wasted. If you know that you want to do and your customer appreciates and knows what to expect from you, all you need is a handshake," he declared with conviction.

Rutan's not especially politically minded. The only television he watches is the news. He's not a registered voter, but he's got strong views. Not too surprisingly, he believes "government ought to exist to provide for a national defense and almost everything else it does it shouldn't be doing.”

He's critical of one of his customers, NASA, because it's "not cost-efficient anymore. The Shuttle program is managed so inefficiently. It's costing way too much to do what they're doing. The private sector has to come in if it's to be low- cost. NASA should get out of it and do research. Where its research doesn't assist private industry, we shouldn't spend any money on it," he emphasized.

NASA's problems aren't a result of too little money, Rutan said, but of bureau- cracy. "They don't do things like they did when Chuck Yeager was flying the X-1. There's too much paperwork, too much committee design. Too many people who are promoted."

Rutan, who knows Yeager from his time at Edwards Air Force Base in the mid-1960s, drove all the way to Hollywood to see the movie The Right Stuff. He thought the movie was "outstanding. It did a good job of conveying to the audience how indeed Yeager was a hero and had no publicity associated with him at all; the astronauts were over-publicized for what they did. The movie was well done.”

Time, for Rutan, is the greatest nonrenewable resource. Like so many successful individuals, he can't get enough of it and he hates wasting it, perhaps even more than he dislikes lawyers or driving cars. He rarely takes a vacation and he built a racquetball court inside the Scaled facility so he wouldn't waste time driving to play.

"I don't have time for a family," said Rutan, who's been married and divorced twice. He readily admits that in his first wife's case, "It was either her or that airplane and it was one of the easiest decisions I ever made.

“I don't make a very good husband with the working hours I keep. I haven't mowed a lawn since 1973. That sort of thing is not an efficient use of time. It's not that I make efficient use of all my time, but I've got an enormous stack of things I've got to do. Every hour."

For the future, there is talk of a 36-passenger commuter plane and the Voyager, a plane that would fly around the world in ten days without refueling. And someday, he'd like to be able to buy a ticket on TWA and ride on a more efficient airplane that he played a big part in designing.

"I want to continue to develop configurations and new designs in all phases of aviation — light, personal aviation or jet fighters or airliners or agricultural air- planes or business jets or whatever."

For now, Rutan has plenty to keep him busy. Scaled Composites has been turn- ing down three-fourths of the work that comes its way because he said, "We try to accept the work we feel we can do a real good job on and keep our reputation."

Flight testing and doing evaluations of flying qualities data are what Rutan likes best, and writing technical reports and talking to journalists are among his least enjoyable duties.

"But," he added, "I do what I want to do. I don't have to do this. When you have 20 people depending on you for a certain part of an important program, it's a commitment, no question. But I don't call it work."