EAA Sport Aviation - April 2011

BURT RUTAN: AN EAA PERSPECTIVE

Lancaster, California, in 1968, and it was nearly completed early in 1972 when it was loaded into a moving van and hauled to Newton, Kansas, where Burt had taken a job with Bede Aircraft as director of development and flight testing. The prototype VariViggen, N27VV, was flown for the first time in April of 1972—by Burt, who was the test pilot on all his early homebuilt designs.

When flown to Oshkosh three months later, Burt would receive the Stan Dzik Design Contribution award for the VariViggen, the first of many awards he would subsequently win at the annual EAA convention. EAAers puzzled over the airplane’s unfamiliar delta wing/canard configuration, but frequent flight demonstrations allayed any fears that this was some sort of far-out, dangerous airplane, and an article by Burt entitled “VariViggen… Designer/Builder Report” that appeared in the August 1973 issue of Sport Aviation answered the questions most had on the technical aspects of the design, its performance and handling characteristics. That issue also featured the first of many Rutan-designed aircraft that eventually appeared on the covers of Sport Aviation.

The VariViggen would prove to be popular enough that Burt was able to begin selling building instructions for it, and soon numbers of them were under construction around the world. That made it necessary to start a quarterly newsletter to answer builders’ questions…and to implore them to keep communications to a minimum so new development could take place.

The VariViggen’s success prompted Burt’s departure from Bede Aircraft after two years in Kansas. After checking out a number of airports in southern California for affordable facilities, he leased one of the “temporary” air base buildings left over from World War II at the Mojave Airport…the now legendary Building 13…and began operating there as the Rutan Aircraft Factory (RAF).

Americans love rags to riches stories, and
RAF certainly began as a prime example.
Building 13 was a thrown-up, minimal struc-
ture when new and had not improved over
time when Burt and his then wife, Carolyn,
hung out their shingle there in 1974. Their
facility was, in fact, so primitive that after my
wife, Golda, and I visited the Rutans there for
the first time, we wondered how we could
send them a care package of some sort with-
out offending them! Today, I wonder what we
would have thought if somehow we could
have been made aware that some three
decades into the future, SpaceShipOne would
be rolled out of a hangar just a short distance
away from Building 13! Although we always
believed Burt was destined for great things, in
our many subsequent visits to Mojave, we
always made it a point to drive by Building 13
to renew the perspective of just how far he
had come in the aviation world.

All that, however, was
just a prologue to what
was about to emerge
from ol’ Building 13.

The prototype VariViggen (N27VV) on location during the filming of Death Race 2000 in 1975. This prototype is currently on display in the EAA AirVenture Museum.