Enter Walt Jones, a salesman for Hercules,
who wanted the company to provide the
materials. “He repeatedly got thrown out of
the boss’ office, probably a dozen times,
before the boss relented to support the program,” Dick said.
When it came time to choose the engines,
the Magic Door opened again. Don Bigler,
the CEO of Teledyne Continental Motors,
offered Dick the use of a liquid-cooled
engine under development. “Had he not
done that, we couldn’t have made it around
the world,” Dick said.
Possibly the most dramatic example of
the Magic Door was the day Dick had his
hand on the phone, ready to dial Ed King to
ask him to donate $250,000 worth of avionics. “The phone rang underneath my hand,
and it was Ed,” Dick recalled. “He said, ‘I
know what you’re doing, and I would be
proud if you would use my equipment.’”
FLYING THE AIRPLANE
In 1984, the test-flight phase began. “The air-
plane was the most horrible flying quality
airplane in all aspects—its handling qualities,
its structural margins, its systems—it just was
a terrible airplane,” Dick said. “I don’t say that
to say my brother who designed the airplane
screwed up. Burt had to make those compro-
mises to achieve the 29,000-mile range
capability the airplane had.”
Even in the slightest winds the wings
would flex up and down, tossing the occu-
pants all over a cabin the size of a telephone
booth. There were times it was not control-
lable enough to even land.
Dick had nightmares that he would die in
the Voyager. “It was an airplane that preyed
on me a lot,” he said. “Once my butt hit the
floor and I started throwing switches, then
the fear about that was gone. But before and
after, I had a lot of problems with that. You
know I just hated it. Once I got inside the
airplane, then I was a pilot and I don’t
remember being afraid.”
In 67 test flights covering 354 hours
there were several failures that forced the
Voyager to land. The flight plan for the cir-
cumnavigation attempt called for 225 hours
of flight time, mostly over water. Statistically,
they were bound to have problems that
would force them down.
On one test flight, the Voyager flew
through a rain shower. The laminar flow
over the canard was disturbed, and the plane
would not hold altitude. John Roncz fixed
the problem with vortex generators. But
they were never tested—until the Voyager
flew into Typhoon Marge over the Pacific,
and they worked perfectly!
WOULD IT GET OFF THE GROUND?
On the morning of the flight, Dick ordered
300 pounds more fuel put on board the
Voyager, bringing the aircraft weight to 9,697
pounds— 20 percent heavier than it had ever
been flown before. At heavy weights the
Voyager became dynamically unstable. The
thin, 110-foot wings would flex up and down
as much as 30 feet in a flapping motion in the
slightest turbulence. If these oscillations
occurred on takeoff it could prove disastrous.
President Ronald Reagan awarded Burt, Jeana, and Dick the Presidential Citizens Medal, saying, “You reminded us
all that aviation history is still being written by men and women with the spirit of adventure and derring-do.”
