EAA Sport Aviation - April 2011

landed—with a world’s record to his credit and that of
his brother, Burt, for his design of the VariEze. To cap
off the week, Burt received the best new design award
for the VariEze.

Having been involved nearly all year in the VariEze introduction, I was able to write a detailed account of the record flight and all that led up to it. (Visit www.SportAviation.org for a direct link to the article on page 20 of the October 1975 issue.) The events of Oshkosh ’ 75 proved to be the real beginning of the Rutan Revolution.

That winter, as promised, Burt developed a new version of the VariEze, with a Continental O-200 for power, with ailerons on the wings instead of elevons on the canard, a belly board speed brake, and a number of other improvements. The prototype, N4EZ, was completed in just a few months and was flown for the first time on March 1 4, 1976. After thorough flight testing, Burt wrote and illustrated a set of building instructions, modeled after the step-by-step format of Simplicity dress patterns, and began offering them for sale in July 1976. Predictably, the orders flooded in.

The events of Oshkosh ’ 75
proved to be the real beginning
of the Rutan Revolution.

At Oshkosh ’ 76, Burt copped another prestigious award, The Professor August Raspet Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Advancement of the Design of Light Aircraft. Shortly afterward, he launched out on a nationwide series of builders’ seminars and followed those with seminars in England and France.

THE LONG-EZ AND MORE

The instantaneous success of the VariEze was like throwing gasoline on the fire of Burt’s creativity. It provided him with the financial resources to begin designing and building seemingly every new aircraft that came to his mind. One of them, however, could almost have been considered a retrograde step. Despite Burt’s urgent pleas to builders not to make changes in their Ezes, many did so, and topping the list was the use of larger engines. Burt’s response was the Long-EZ, which was designed around the Lycoming O-235. The prototype, N79RA, was flown for the first time on July 13, 1979, and initially was a test bed for all sorts of new ideas, including a “rhino rudder”

mounted just ahead of the canopy. Scores of changes and a new, longer wing were incorporated before the definitive Long-EZ emerged and was made available to builders, but the effort proved to be more than worthwhile. Today, Burt considers the Long-EZ to be the best of all his designs for homebuilders.

Amazingly, the late 1970s saw all sorts of new designs coming out of the RAF. In 1977 Burt designed the Quickie in collaboration with Tom Jewett and Gene Sheehan. It would fly for the first time on November 15, 1977, and would win the Outstanding New Design award at Oshkosh in 1978. At the same time he was designing a centerline thrust twin, the Defiant, which made its debut at Oshkosh ’ 79, along with the new Long-EZ.

In the early 1980s came the Amsoil biplane class racer, the really unusual Grizzly bushplane, and the Solitaire powered sailplane that won a Soaring Society of America design contest. By this time, however, Burt was already operating on a second, parallel path. In 1976 he had been contracted to design a proof-of-concept, jet-powered skew-wing aircraft, the AD- 1, for NASA , a scaled-down Next Generation Trainer for Fairchild, and a joined-wing ag plane called the Predator for a private individual. Burt quickly realized that these contracted jobs held great promise, businesswise, so in 1982 he formed a new company, Scaled Composites, to do that sort of work. An 85-percent scale Starship for Beech Aircraft was an immediate result. Scaled Composites would, in fact, become so successful that in the July 1985 issue of his Canard Pusher newsletter, Burt announced that he was getting out of the homebuilt business. At that point, more than 12,000 sets of building instructions for the VariEze and Long-EZ had been sold, but bigger things lay in the future, culminating with SpaceShipOne.

It was not a matter of Burt abandoning EAAers, however. He continued to attend the EAA convention each year, presenting talks before standing room only audiences and taking part in many other activities. A number of his Scaled Composites–developed aircraft have been flown to Oshkosh for display—the Catbird, Boomerang, and others—that while not intended as homebuilts, have been of great technical interest to his fellow EAAers.