AT SCALED COMPOSITES, BURT SHIFTED FROM DESIGNING AND
SELLING PLANS TO HOMEBUILDERS TO DOING CONTRACT RESEARCH
AND DEVELOPMENT WORK. “BURT WAS ABLE TO MAKE MONEY
DOING ONE-OF-A-KIND RESEARCH PROJECTS, WHICH I DON’T
THINK ANYBODY’S EVER DONE,” MIKE SAID.
FORMING SCALED COMPOSITES
Ten years after the VariViggen debuted at
Oshkosh in 1972, Burt was getting bored,
Mike said. “He couldn’t think of new things
to do—new, innovative, clever, more effi-
cient, better things. In the back of his mind, I
really think he was looking for something
new and different.”
Enter Herb Iverson. He was with a
French company that built a jet engine
called the microturbo. Fairchild Republic
wanted to design an aircraft around the
engine to bid on the Air Force’s next genera-
tion trainer (NGT) to replace the T- 37
Tweety Bird. “Herb had this engine, but
nothing to put it on,” Mike said. “Burt said
he could easily design an airplane around
one or two of these engines, and it could do
whatever the heck these guys wanted.”
It took about 10 months from the day
RAF started designing the NGT until the
flight testing of the three-fifths scale model
was completed. Fairchild Republic was the
only bidder with a flying prototype, and it
won the $2.2 billion contract over competi-
tors like Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop,
although the project was canceled before the
aircraft went into production. “People went,
‘Holy cow! Look what this guy builds in four,
five months,’” Mike said. “He saw this as an
opportunity to get into another business.
The little NGT, that’s what started Scaled.”
The quick production process became a
hallmark of the new company. “If you look at
the early Scaled work—the Starship, Lotus
airplane, the crop duster, and the DARPA
airplane—all of them were done in a real
short period of time,” Burt said.
In fact, Scaled has produced and flown on
average one entirely new aircraft design each
year. “We’ve done almost 30 airplanes in the
same number of years, and we keep doing that.
We’ll have a first flight very soon of something
new,” Burt said. “Bottom line, no one else has
come close to introducing a new type every
year, and we’ve done it consistently, if you
include RAF, since the early ’70s.”
When Herb and Burt formed Scaled in
1982, Burt said in a Sport Aviation interview
that he wanted to keep the company small—
no more than 30 employees so he could
personally be involved in every aspect of the
business. He never dreamed 30 years later it
would grow to 380 employees.
“We never did any planning. Scaled grew
strictly from the fact that customers showed
up at our door wanting us to do something,”
Burt said. “If it looked like fun, and it looked
like we could do it and add technical value,
and it was affordable, then we did it.” In fact,
Scaled was so successful it couldn’t keep up
with the demand and for several years
stopped taking on new projects.
What Burt did is become successful doing
research and development for customers who
could afford to pay. Typically, the R&D
“All alone on the ramp, [Burt] would give me
a rundown that was literally subtitles, short
descriptions. ‘This is what you need to look
out for. Be careful of this. This will be fine.’
Very detailed. And I have to tell you, he has
never been wrong.” – Mike Melvill
Burt and Mike talk in the pre-dawn hours on September 29, 2004, before the first of two flights
of SpaceShipOne that resulted in winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize.
