Aiming for a Big Prize in the Skies

MOJAVE — “I guess,” remarks Dick Rutan, in the drowsy manner of the test pilot, “I guess we can’t come home without at least one roll.”

Oh.

“See, you just pull the nose up a little and she just goes right over. . . nice and . . . easy.”

Ugh.

The horizon clocks around. Through the bubble canopy, the blue of the sky disappears and the brown of the California desert emerges underhead. Then sky crawls around from beneath again. Momentarily, the stomach catches up.

“Another?” he asks.

Next, 59-year-old Rutan arcs downward, reduces throttle and returns his bug-like Long-EZ to Earth with the faintest chirp of tires on the oversized runway of Mojave’s Civilian Flight Test Center. Six hours in the air with Dick Rutan: jouncing through North Coast mountains in a storm, over the Bay Area airfield where he flew to Vietnam, past the Sacramento Valley site where this very plane once crashed, dropping down on the deck and buzzing his old haunts in the Central Valley and now an exuberant roll over the high borax desert.

Ah.

One of America’s great adventurers is at it again.

Eleven years ago Rutan commanded the flight of the Voyager. Along with partner Jeana Yeager, they were the first, and so far only, people to pilot an airplane around the world without stopping or refueling. The spidery Voyager dangles from the ceiling in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum--a tribute to the glory of shade-tree high-tech and dreams with afterburners.

Now, Rutan has sights on what may be the last significant aeronautical prize of the century: first around the world nonstop in a balloon.

In a small hangar here at the former Marine Corps air base at Mojave, Rutan and a handful of engineers work 15 hours a day fabricating the 8-foot spherical gondola in which he and a new partner expect to try for the elusive prize, to hang in the jetstream winds six miles high, riding east, across two, maybe three oceans, a couple-dozen countries, some of them unfriendly, and returning to cross the same longitude as at the start.

The goal of circumnavigation has absorbed balloonists for a decade. Five, maybe six, teams around the world are scrambling this winter to be first. Rutan is hoping to launch from Albuquerque sometime in December. Flight time: nine days to 2 1/2 weeks.

It is a risky proposition, a little zany too, although there is $1 million awaiting the first to succeed. In the era of space flight, at a time when governments spend billions to probe and command the skies, when many people think of legroom whenever the subject of world travel is raised, the Lindbergh spirit of aviation does not always engage the public the way it once did.

No matter. Look into Dick Rutan’s eyes, past the trifocals, to the glint. “The thing about balloon flying is that when you squeeze the gas burner you haven’t the foggiest idea where you’re going to land.”

Imagine floating around the world on the whim of the winds inside a orb you assembled yourself out of advanced composites and Kmart accessories without so much as a rudder pedal. Your destination anywhere on the face of the planet from the Arctic to the Sahara, then surviving until teammates can retrieve you.

If everything goes according to plan, Rutan will claim the record with a soft landing in northern Saskatchewan. Or, perhaps, in the coastal waters off Mexico.

Two Basic Varieties of Balloon Used

Humans have been riding beneath balloons for 214 years, and so far they have invented two basic varieties. Some are pulled aloft by lighter-than-air gas, like helium. The others rise by the power of heated air. The gas balloon is enclosed to contain the lifting gas. The air balloon is open at the bottom so heat can be injected by means of powerful burners. Dick Rutan will fly a hybrid of the two, called a Roziere, after the first man to fly a balloon. Also, the first man to die in a balloon, Rutan likes to add.

The airship begins with a 420,000-cubic-foot cell of helium encased in a long, cone-like skirt. Beneath hangs a fierce array of propane burners, the gondola, a solar panel and a cluster of 18 propane tanks with 50-gallon capacity. Helium is not explosive, propane is.

The helium will lift the balloon. Warmed in the sun, the gas expands and the craft rises. At nightfall, the helium cools and the balloon will want to descend. But propane burners will be ignited and great, roaring stabs of flame will heat air in the skirt underneath and maintain altitude.

Along the way, as propane is burned, the craft becomes lighter. To keep the balloon from rising too high, helium will have to be vented into the atmosphere, “valved,” they call it. Maintaining this balance between gas and weight is critical and will occupy the pilots during the long days.

Some long-distance balloonists travel relatively low in the sky, where temperatures are bearable and there is no need for a pressurized capsule. But in this earthly troposphere, voyagers must face the violent caprice of weather. Other balloonists covet the high stratosphere of inner space, where winds are steady and weather absent, but life support is vastly more complex and dicey.

Rutan intends to seek the boundary between the troposphere and stratosphere. Here at 30,000 to 35,000 feet, only the most towering storms can reach. The jetstream races at 200 miles an hour, straight left to right across the map at latitudes between 20 and 50 degrees. Sort of, on good days. Other times, the jetstream wanders and snakes, and fizzles out, spilling winds over entire oceans and continents in great thousand-mile eddies and swirls.

Balloonists choose winter because jetstream winds are stronger and thunderstorms fewer. Every launch is calculated according to forecast hunches of wind and weather, and to the diplomatic success in achieving overflight permission from foreign governments.

The uniquely absurd thing about balloons is that for all of modern innovation, it remains impossible to steer one. The best you can do is raise or lower yourself in the sky, searching for favorable crosscurrents of breeze. When flying the jetstream, the secret is working currents to get to the northern side of this vast river of wind, or the southern side, or to stay the middle--thereby positioning yourself to arrive in the vicinity of where you desire, or at least avoid those giant whirlpools of winds that will send you spinning off course, say to the North Pole.

At six miles high, Rutan will need a sealed life-support system, like a spacecraft. Breathable air will come from liquid oxygen tanks; carbon dioxide and moisture will have to be scrubbed out. Technical problems are many, like maintaining livable temperatures and preventing leaks. Rutan still has no idea whether he will be hot or cold during flight.

It stands to reason that the longer one can remain aloft, the greater become chances for success. Sooner or later, any balloon that stays in the air is likely to drift around the globe, no matter how erratic the winds. However, each day airborne means more fuel, oxygen, food, weight, expense--and danger.

What danger? Detonation of leaking propane. A rip in the tissue-thin fabric of the balloon. A nighttime midair collision with a 500-mile-an-hour jetliner. A bolt of lightning. Downdrafts in the Himalayas. A 39-cent fitting. The list of possible disasters is enough to loosen one’s stomach from its moorings.

“But all this is purely theoretical,” says Rutan, grinning. “Nobody’s done it yet.”

In recent years, there have been several tries at circumnavigation. Two fancy attempts failed last January, one after only hours aloft and another after a day. At the same time, Chicago adventurer Steve Fossett flew an unpressurized Roziere balloon from St. Louis to India in six days before landing about halfway to his goal. This is the current record. Fossett is back again this winter.

“The only way we can lose,” Rutan says, now serious, “is if we quit. Or we get beat. The biggest threat to our success is that someone will get there first.”

Wind Tunnel Tests Aided by Mother

In the Central Valley of California after World War II, the story is told of a woman speeding aimlessly up and down back roads so her boys, Dick and Burt, could use the roof of the family station wagon as a wind tunnel to test model airplane designs. These boys went on to be the most famous aeronautical siblings since the Wrights.

Burt, younger by five years, became the idiosyncratic designer of a generation of small avant-garde planes, built with composite materials and in fantastic shapes, canard wings in front, pusher engines behind, vertical winglets jutting from the sides. Among his impossible designs, the Voyager. Now at his company, Scaled Composites, just down the runway from Dick’s hangar, Burt has built the carbon-fiber sphere for the attempt on the balloon record.

Dick has always been lead pilot in the family. A natural pilot, in the vernacular. He has the touch, the eye, the direct-circuitry between stimulus and action, bypassing the ordinary mid-step of contemplation. He planned his 16th birthday for years, soloing aloft before going to get his automobile driver’s license. He used to buzz high school football games and string toilet paper from his cockpit.

He transferred out of a Seventh-day Adventist school because he thought the religion’s tradition of conscientious objection to war would contaminate his ambition. He wanted to be a fighter pilot. Like most things Dick Rutan sought in the sky, he was successful. He joined the Air Force out of high school, became a navigator and then pilot.

He flew 325 combat missions in Vietnam. Once, during a low-level reconnaissance pass, enemy fire ripped through his F-100. He slammed the throttle forward and barreled toward the coast, his aircraft a dying streak of flame in hostile skies. He bailed out and was rescued.

Twenty years in the Air Force. Silver star, five Distinguished Flying Crosses, 16 Air Medals, Purple Heart. He married, fathered two daughters, divorced. In Mojave, he built airplanes with his brother and test flew them. They quarreled, of course, and their relationship remains tempestuously intertwined. Head over heels, he fell for Jeana Yeager, a beauty and fellow adventurer. For six years, they flew and they loved. He was gangly and lean, she sleek. Together, they would make aviation history.

After 26,366 miles when Voyager landed back home in the desert, the crowd to greet them

was larger than Lindbergh’s in Paris.

“I was just a pimply-faced kid who nobody thought would do much,” he says. “ . . . Now, if I ever feel low, I can go to Washington and walk in the front door of the Smithsonian and look up and say to myself, I built that son-of-a-bitch and I flew it around the world.”

But his relationship with Yeager did not survive the achievement. “She broke my heart.” For awhile, they kept up appearances in the speaking circuit. She went to Texas. He was a motivational speaker and made rounds as a “celebrity,” at golf tournaments, although he doesn’t golf. He ran for Congress as a Republican in 1992 and lost.

Aimless? “Totally aimless,” he replies.

Balloons caught his interest three years ago. In aviation, you see, there are many records for speed and distance. But there are few milestones. Ballooning is among the last of the milestones that individuals can aspire to, and the rush is on because “remember, the second man to go around the world in a balloon will be rewarded with eternal obscurity.”

Restless Eyes and Boundless Curiosity

He has gray hair now and his sideburns are white. He is a grandfather. This past autumn, he walked around with darkened overglasses like the elderly wear, muttering about a medical “procedure.”

The man of action reveals himself subtly in restless eyes, in the voltage of his movements, his big hawk nose poking into everyone’s work, curious, encouraging, demanding. He has the comfortable manners of a squire, a storyteller’s sense of timing, a desert rat’s dry wit, and a 13-year-old’s comprehension of rules and mortality.

“Adventure is the essence of life.”

“Nothing worthwhile was ever accomplished without risk and danger.”

“A person’s ability to deal with chaos defines his creativity.”

And yes, he has a philosophy to govern his actions and can express it clearly in words.

Of itself, that separates Dick Rutan from many others. He has a standard by which to judge himself.

“People say to me, ‘How can you do this?’ To them, I say, ‘How can you not?’ ”

Talk to those who have gone on vacation outdoors with him. He will not hike on established trails. Stale footprints and donkey dung there. He expresses theories about religion and aliens from outer space that seem designed for effect. He decries “tree-huggers” with vehemence, but allows that trees like the giant sequoias are more noble than some people he knows.

Rutan is checklist-meticulous, no doubt a sensible strategy when a man is drawn to be original in his risks. He is also fatalistic. He encourages failure--the more of it that can be endured and overcome, the closer one gets to creative success.

Once, his assistant was embarrassed to tell him he was turned down to be a convention speaker. So he set a quota. He wanted more rejections. That way his assistant would lose her dread and try harder, and end up with more success. “Every CEO should go through the company and demand, ‘What failures have you achieved? None? Then what the hell are you doing?’ ”

Last week, his entire flight program was turned upside down when his partner in the mission, record-setting balloonist Richard Abruzzo of Albuquerque, bowed out because his wife is pregnant.

“Isn’t it amazing?” Rutan says with detachment. “What a turn. Who would have guessed. This is really an interesting part of the story, eh?”

Rutan called up the checklist in his head. Partner fails? Get a new one. Although his logbook approaches 14,000 hours in airplanes, Rutan has only 60 flights in a balloon and wanted a more experienced co-pilot. Tentatively, he selected his team loadmaster, Dave Melton, a 39-year-old balloonist from rural northern New Mexico, who has twice attempted circumnavigation.

Even rougher was getting financing. Rutan believed that Voyager would bring him fame and fortune. “I found out the two were not synonymous.” He has been kissing frogs for more than two years to endow this balloon adventure. Finally, in September, business heir Barron Hilton, a lifelong aviation enthusiast, arranged sponsorship--one-third from him, a third from Hilton Hotels Corp. and a third from PepsiCo Inc. The craft is now called the “Global Hilton.” Slogan: A room with a view.

His budget, he says, will be about $1 million. Another $1 million is at stake in a prize put up by Anheuser-Busch Cos. for the first circumnavigation, half to the fliers and half to charity.

For all his cool, Rutan is also morbid. He recalls premonitions of dying in a midair collision. He tells about voices of exhaustion beckoning him to fly into the side of a mountain. Through one dinner, he speaks of nothing but plane crashes. He’s had two, both in F-100s: once shot down and later bailing out over England when his engine seized on landing approach.

He denies fear even as he talks of danger. “There have been times when I got out of the airplane and walked over and threw up on the ramp. But flying? Afraid? Never. The only thing I can admit to is being mildly anxious. Yes, mildly anxious.”

Which, of course, is central to the creed. Up here in the high desert, a listener would be uneasy hearing anything else. This is holy ground for aviators. This is where laconic became symbolic of pilot-hood, Edwards Air Force Base, Mojave, the X-1, Mach 1, the Voyager.

All around him at the airport are young Rutans in the making, a half-dozen or more at any one time gathered under the hot work-lights of his small hangar, sharing the same fascination for daring, speaking with the calm timbre of the microphone voice, walking with an aw-shucks slump of the shoulders.

One of his engineers just lost his father in the crash of an experimental airplane. The son of his long-time personal assistant, Kelly Hall, soloed on his 16th birthday. Rutan’s son-in-law is a test pilot at Edwards.

The highway welcome sign into town announces Mojave as the proud home of the Voyager. The headboards at Mojave’s Scottish Inn motel are carved with reliefs of the Voyager. At a store called Aviators World you can buy a single drop of Voyager’s crankcase oil, encased in presentation Lucite, for $150. Or an F-100 ejection seat for $565.

At what other airport in a town with only two stoplights can you see parked on the flight line a Catalina flying boat, a brace of MIG fighters, an F-86, a wing of F-4s, a Sherman tank and a 747? And, this morning on the taxi ramp, a spindly, baby-blue Long-EZ, built and flown by Dick Rutan, designed by his brother, Burt?

Question of Surviving in Jungle or Ocean

These days, his engineering team is absorbed with how to keep Rutan safely aloft: insulating the capsule, probing it for weakness, testing what can be tested, backing up what cannot be tested, racing off to Pep Boys and Radio Shack to supplement components fashioned by the famous names of ballooning.

Right now, Rutan is thinking of something else: What happens when the flight is over, when he comes down to Earth?

“The biggest concern is landing and post-landing. Surviving in a tropical jungle, or an Arctic ocean.”

So today he will fly to the North Coast town of Fortuna, near Eureka, to be fitted for an insulated rubber survival suit. He must inspect it himself. It cannot be too bulky, or too difficult to put on in a calamity. It cannot be made with adhesives that could leech fumes in the enclosed gondola.

The government classifies the tailless Long-EZ as experimental. Really it’s a misnomer. These high-performance, home-built airplanes have been flying for years. Among their virtues, they refuse to stall. For a getaway this spring, Rutan hopscotched the world in his. Of course, among non-aviators, such planes are viewed with doubt--a fact recently reinforced when John Denver was killed in his Long-EZ, for reasons still under inquiry.

Seating is fore-and-aft, with a clear Plexiglas canopy as in a fighter. Rutan uses a stubby control stick, no wheel. He wears blue jeans, a golf jacket and his lucky white corduroy ball cap. He goes through preflight over the cockpit microphone.

This is the best home he knows. Inside the hangar, he imposes a “seven-minute rule”--no one can be interrupted for more than seven minutes a day. Engineers do not work in teams because they would be tempted to shoot the breeze. Everyone is deployed individually and is therefore individually responsible. While not exactly tense, the atmosphere is plenty diligent. But in the well-worn sheepskin seat of his cockpit, he unwinds. Three hours to Fortuna and three hours back. Rutan jabbers like a schoolgirl on the telephone.

In the rain and buffeting clouds of an approaching storm, he threads through coastal mountains. A peaks materializes from the mist above him at 2 o’clock. Over at 10 o’clock a ridge looms. He shoots for a pass down the middle. “Exciting,” he says. Over Red Bluff, he banks and points to a section of freeway where Jeana Yeager made an emergency crash landing in this airplane a few years ago after a propeller tip broke off. “We had to put 400 miles on it in a truck. Would rather not do that again.”

Flying fast down the eastside of the Central Valley, joy rises in him. He turns off the chattering traffic-control radio and drops to just hundreds of feet off the ground, then lower still. The buzz of the little Lycoming piston engine becomes a soundtrack. He stands the plane on its side to appreciate large ranch houses. “Look at that.” Zooom. And another. Whoosh. He hugs the contours at the edge of the foothills and calls out power lines, the Long-EZ as flighty agile as a swallow.

Here and there, a stray bird shoots by at 170 miles an hour, looking something like the blur of a SAM missile. Suddenly, snap, we are aimed 45 degrees up, breath squeezed from the chest by the force. That bird was a little too close, had to dodge. Just a couple of hours ago, Rutan had explained that a collision with a bird could have caused a crash like John Denver’s. At this moment, a passenger might observe the absence of handholds in the back seat of a Long-EZ.

He swoops down, 10 feet off the runway of Reedley’s Great Western Airport, a little strip where he first soloed 43 years ago in a Cessna 140. At the end of the asphalt, he pulls ups and soars heavenward just as in a boy’s daydreams. Then, he sights the road where the brothers undertook their wind tests atop mom’s station wagon.

Angling the plane onto its side, he circles a nubbin of a mountain in the farmlands east of Fresno, looking. “There. It was right there. The tree was there!” His first love, in the back seat of a car parked under a tree on a warm night all those years ago. He remembers scratching her initials on the back of his hand with a penknife: DR loves BO.

“Then I thought, BO? Jeez . . . Now they’ve chopped down the tree too.”

Rutan Says Weather Is 50% of the Risk

After landing, Rutan puts in a full shift at the hangar. The team pressure-tests the gondola and discovers leaks. Good. At least he knows what does not work. At 10 p.m., he allows himself a beer over dinner at Mike’s roadside diner, where the windows shudder from the heavy truck and train traffic outside.

He talks about the challenge of this balloon quest. Of all the things that could go wrong, he figures the weather is 50% of the risk. Human error and mechanical failure he calculates at 25% each. He frets because he cannot reduce the odds, and he must break his own cardinal rule about flight testing his equipment first.

“The reason these other guys have failed is they didn’t test. Now here I am, Dick Rutan, late getting sponsorship, and I can’t test either. This violates everything in my life.”

The moment grows quiet, and a question comes to mind.

So, Dick, what next?

What after this round-the-world voyage? Your friends say you’ve never drawn a stale breath. What about your engagement to kindergarten teacher Kris Cremer over in Lancaster? Your approaching 60th birthday? Those aviation record books without any empty pages left?

No pause.

“I want to marry my girlfriend,” he says. “I want to move to Montana. To a little cabin where I can watch the chipmunks, and have a fire in the stove, and have a little footpath down to my own runway. . . . “

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Hot Air and Helium

The balloon Dick Rutan will use combines the traditional hot air balloon with a second helium chamber. A pressurized capsule will allow it to soar to 35,000 feet, out of reach of most storms.

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Researcher Anna Virtue assisted with this story.