The US National Aeronautic Association (NAA) has named aircraft designer and composites pioneer Burt Rutan as its 2015 recipient of the NAA Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy.
Established by NAA in 1948 to honour the memory of Orville and Wilbur Wright, the trophy is awarded annually to a living American for “significant public service of enduring value to aviation in the United States”.
Rutan (actually Elbert Leander Rutan) is a world renowned aerospace engineer noted for designing 46 aircraft types, five of which are now housed in the American Smithsonian Museum.
They have included light aircraft including the Vari-Eze homebuilt and later the record breaking Voyager, which was the first aircraft to fly non-stop around the world without refuelling and the sub-orbital Spaceship One, which won the US$109 million Ansari X prize in 2004 as the first privately funded spacecraft to enter space and return twice within a two week period.
From 1965 to 1972 Rutan was a civilian flight test project engineer for the United States Air
Force at Edwards Air Force Base, where his projects included spin tests on the McDonnel F-4 Phantom.
His involvement with light aircraft began when he left Edwards to become director of development for the Bede BD5, still the world’s smallest piloted jet aircraft, before starting his California based Rutan Aircraft Factory in 1974, and the now familiar Scaled Composites in 1982.
Rutan has designed various light aircraft including the canard winged, pusher engine Vari-Eze aircraft, first presented at the Oshkosh airshow in 1975, then its larger Long-Eze cousin.
Later work included the Quickie single seat sport aircraft, Solitaire self-launching glider and the distinctive Boomerang twin, which had one engine mounted in the nose and one on a second smaller fuselage on the port side.
One of Rutan’s lesser known designs is the NASA AD-1 aircraft built to test NASA engineer Robert Jones’ theory on oblique wings. In 1979 the AD-1, with a wing designed to rotate 68 degrees off centre, began a program to prove Jones’ wind tunnel studies that suggested a transport-sized oblique-wing aircraft might achieve twice the fuel economy of more conventional wings at high speed.
When asked to consider designing the aircraft, Rutan is said to have completed the initial feasibility study in 40 work hours.
Now aged 72 he is still designing, this year presenting his SkiGull two-seat amphibious sport aircraft design at the US Experimental Aircraft Association’s (EAA) annual AirVenture fly-in convention in Oshkosh.