Rutan’s Magnificent Flying Machines
When someone mentions Picasso, it is natural to think of an odd man who painted odd-shaped art. His before-their-time cubist works, to the untrained eye, are unnatural, occasionally irritating; like a crooked picture on a wall, you almost want to go in and tweak it to make it “straight”. Pablo Picasso had the sheer audacity not only to envision something different, but also to then actually paint it as true to his vision as he could. Standing in front of a Picasso piece, the artist’s opposition to the norm is palpable.
Burt Rutan has the audacity to design and build airborne machines that invoke a similar response.
Well and truly bitten by the aviation and aerospace bug very early in life, Rutan, by his own admission, was not as enamoured with flying as his older brother Dick, but far more interested in designing, creating, and building his own, in the form of model aeroplanes.
And it is clear, that after a career spanning six decades in aviation and aerospace engineering, design, entrepreneurship, innovation, and construction, all the while ignoring the norms, that to do things differently is Rutan’s “to infinity and beyond”.
SpaceShipOne
There has probably been no greater single Rutan design element that says “do things differently” than the feathered wing of SpaceShipOne.
“You take a supersonic airplane and fold it in half? That’s the most dumb thing I ever heard in my life,” said Mike Melvill – SpaceShipOne Pilot and Astronaut. Dumb? It was supersonically successful.
Further, the feather was only one of the three configurations employed during the
