Voyager Completes Historic Flight: Earth Circled Nonstop

Nine days, three minutes, and forty-four seconds after takeoff, an aircraft carrying just 106 pounds of remaining fuel touched down at Edwards Air Force Base in California on December 23, 1986, completing the first nonstop, unrefueled flight around the world. Pilots Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager had circled the globe in Voyager, a fragile aircraft designed by Dick brother Burt Rutan that looked more like a flying canoe with enormous winglets than a conventional airplane. Voyager weighed just 939 pounds empty but carried 7,011 pounds of fuel at takeoff, more than seven times its own structural weight. The design sacrificed everything for range: the cockpit measured 3.3 feet by 7.5 feet, barely large enough for one person to lie down while the other flew. The aircraft had no autopilot capable of handling its extreme sensitivity, meaning one pilot had to maintain active control at all times during the 26,366-mile journey. The flight nearly ended before it began. During the December 14 takeoff, the fuel-heavy wings drooped so low that both wingtip extensions scraped the runway and broke off. Burt Rutan, following in a chase plane, determined the damage was survivable. Over the next nine days, the pilots battled Typhoon Marge in the Pacific, were denied overflight rights by Libya forcing a costly detour, and nearly lost the aircraft when a fuel pump failed over the final stretch of ocean. Rutan and Yeager landed to 55,000 spectators and live television coverage across two continents. They received the Presidential Citizens Medal from Ronald Reagan and the 1986 Collier Trophy. The flight demonstrated the extreme limits of aeronautical endurance and lightweight composite construction. Only one other aircraft has since matched the achievement: Steve Fossett GlobalFlyer in 2005, which used a jet engine and benefited from two decades of materials advancement that Voyager pioneering composite airframe helped inspire.