Round the world in nine airborne days

Montagu Curzon

VOYAGER: THE FLYING ADVENTURE OF A LIFETIME by Jeana Yeager and Dick Rutan, with Phil Patton

Heinemann, f12.95

Everyone familiar with the The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe's book or the film, will prick up his ears at the mention of the name Yeager, that of the great General Chuck Yeager, the world's first supersonic pilot and ultimate repository of the said Stuff.

But here is a different Yeager, slim, pretty, and no relation, other than in sharing a plenitude of right stuff. Her qualities of technical skill, courage, ex- treme determination, and low weight make her close to the aeronaut's dream of woman. She met (at an airshow) and fell in love with Dick Rutan, another name to conjure with, at least in the world of light aircraft, Dick's brother Burt Rutan being the brilliantly innovative designer of a string of strange looking and high perform- ing home-built planes. Dick and Jeana together conceived the idea of making the first non-stop, non-refuelled flight around the world, 'the last milestone in aviation'.

This is the story of how they did it, flying nine days solid from 14-23 December, 1986, from Edwards Air Force Base in California round the globe and back, in a plane so slim the cabin was like 'a horizon- tal telephone booth' and with wings so wide and slender that in turbulance they flapped 'like a great gull', and they could not bear to look at them.

Records, it might be said, and the prodigious efforts people expend to make or break them, are not all that interesting to outsiders, nor is self-inflicted torture

particularly sympathetic. But lay such carpings aside: this is a famous adventure, to be marvelled at far beyond the confines of flying-club bars, an epic of courage and perseverance, a triumph of amateurism in this corporatist age, plus a singular inst- ance of equality between the sexes.

Starting, as tradition demands, on a napkin, Burt Rutan designed the aircraft, and Dick and Jeana and a band of equally impassioned volunteers built it, at Mojave airfield out in the California desert. Its shape is very graceful, a pencil thin fusel- age with engines fore and aft, wings that seem to taper away to infinity, and twin booms like a catamaran (or the wartime P38 Lightning') holding the canard fore- plane and the fins. The trick, of course, was to pack enough fuel for a 28,000-mile range into a structure strong enough to carry it and two people and withstand the stress of the flight, yet light enough to get off the ground. No one had done it before because it was impossible.

The' appearance of composites gave the Rutans their chance: 'Voyager' was built of graphite and composite materials, with no significant metal parts outside the engines and, eventually, the propellers.

Much of the book catalogues their strug- gles to finance, build and test 'Voyager' and, inevitably, these were considerable. Mechanical breakdowns, human failures, financial disappointments dogged every step, and here the reader has to display an iota of the perseverance of the protagon- ists; but that is only fair, if he is to share the drama to come.

The trials of construction were, how- ever, as nothing compared to the terror of the test flights. Dick Rutan, a superb pilot, who had gone solo on his 16th birthday, and flown fighters for years in the USAF, was before long reduced to jelly. On take-off 'Voyager' would tend to oscillate, pitching up and-down like a porpoise with a violence which, if not overcome, would rapidly tear the machine to pieces. Since there was no known way to control it, he had to improvise. Even without the dreaded porpoising, the machine was in- herently unsafe, a great floating, flapping fuel-tank-cum-flying-bomb, it 'felt like herding a bunch of sheep around on threads'. For each landing they had to brace themselves as if for combat, diving into the turbulent air with which moun- tainous California abounds, knowing that the machine might well be buffeted termi- nally out of control, and that too low to bale out. A propeller blade ripped off, almost vibrating them to bits. Ordeal followed ordeal, but they were 'too in- volved to quit', could not let down all their colleagues. 'We began to sense that the dream had a nightmare side to it.' Dick admitted that 'it was the only airplane he had ever feared.' In fact he hated it, 'swore he never wanted to see 'Voyager' again and threatened to burn the airplane and take a train home.'

At last the great day dawned and off they roared down the Edwards runway, between lines of their loyal supporters. But the wings were so laden with fuel that their tips scraped the ground and when, after 14 of the 15,000 feet of runway had gone by, `Voyager' was coaxed into the air, the wing tips were ground to dust, their little wing- lets were hanging by a thread, and these had to be shaken off. Not an auspicious beginning. Now, for the armchair Biggles, to whom the miseries of the preparations were all too credible, comes the reward: the book becomes a thriller, unspoilt by knowing the ending, tightening its grip as 'Voyager' inches its way round the globe.

For days and nights they flew, hardly at 100 mph, across the Pacific, dodging storms, working constantly, ever more tired. Delicately they skirted a typhoon so as to be accelerated by its surrounding winds, anxiously they calculated fuel con- sumption. Two friends flew to Thailand to inspect them from the air in another aircraft, only to be grounded by a ratty official. Over the Indian Ocean, talking to Mojave via satellite, they became con- vinced they had lost fuel and would have to land. An engine coolant leak made leaving the Sri Lankan coast, and an inviting looking runway, seem tantamount to suicide. Approaching Africa in darkness, a Somalian MIG seemed about to shoot them down, but was Venus. More friends flew up from Nairobi to chat to them and hearts were high again.

Their greatest peril was the weather, despite the best guidance from Mojave, for, unlike airliners cruising smoothly up high, they were at about 10,000 feet, down in the meteorological jungle and it was far worse than they had anticipated. Over the African mountains the choice was between massive storm clouds boiling up around Lake Victoria and ferocious regimes to the north: they veered over Entebbe. Then more thunderstorms ensnared them, each one certain death, and their struggle round and over these surging clouds reads like a battle. At one point Dick thought Jeana was dead, passed out from exhaustion and lack of oxygen, and tried to revive her with one hand and fly with the other. Somehow they flew on, through a malodorous haze over the Congo, celebrated the end of Africa by nearly hitting two mountains in the dark, and reaching the Atlantic, burst into tears.

Worse was to follow. A red light came on over the ocean, announcing a major drama. Then they were caught, off Brazil, between two lines of thunderstorms, 'like two fleets of battleships squaring off for combat'; 'Voyager' was flung on its side, and they really thought they were done for. By now the reader, his armchair buf- feted, is almost numb and the remaining days and nights, though rich in appalling frights, pass in a daze, through which emotion mounts with the approach of California. One prays for them to land, and when, arriving over a vast welcoming crowd at Edwards, Dick wants to do an air display one could (and perhaps Jeana felt the same) strangle him.

Beyond the thrills and spills, this story is a hymn to the great American spirit of individualism, harking back to the fron- tiersmen and to the earliest hunters and trappers, of people who hold to their 'dream' with the tenacity of the religious.

Lindbergh and the vanished Amelia Earhart are of that pantheon, to which Yeager and Rutan now justly belong. And behind them are the volunteers in the factory, the experts in every field, the firms doing prodigies of work. 'It could only have been done by people who were working for nothing.' It is grass-roots.

America at its best, open-hearted, keen as mustard, resourceful, and bombing no one. And through the aerospeak can be heard even older themes: man against Nature, the little against the big, and one (or two) against the many, and they are even more welcome for playing in hi-tech guise.

The European parallel is St Exupery, and Voyager should be on the same shelf as Vol de Nuit and Courrier Sud. St Exupery

would have cheered these two to the echo, and written a much better book about them than their rather repetitive ghost, but had he been in the cabin he would prob- ably have gone into a poetic reverie, misprogrammed his avionics, and never been seen again, and we would have had no book at all. For a different age, diffe- rent heroes, but what a relief that the breed is not extinct, just mutated.