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Burt Rutan Retires From Scaled Composites
hondo77 writes "Lost in all of the April Fool's Day fun was the news that Burt Rutan retired on April 1. 'Five of his planes now hang in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, including the Voyager, which in 1986 became the first airplane to fly around the world without refueling, and SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 became the first private rocket plane ever to put a man into space.' Enjoy your retirement, Burt. You've earned it." Watching SpaceShipOne fly in 2004 is one of the happiest memories of my life. Thanks, Mr. Rutan.
This has to fly.
Well deserved with all he's done but I don't think the place will be the same without him. I hope he's just resting and not done but if he is the rest is well earned.
Regardless good luck Burt!
"Bah!" - Dogbert
I demand a flying car! I was promised a flying car!
Few people working today have actually designed a high performance airplane. Ben Rich, who ran the Lockheed Skunk Works and designed the propulsion system for the SR-71, wrote on his retirement that he worked on 26 airplanes during his career, but today's aircraft designer would be lucky to work on one.
For the first time since WWII, the USAF no longer has a new fighter plane in development. If and when it becomes necessary to design one, who will know how? Nobody will have the practical experience to get it right.
Rutan was one of the few people who consistently got exotic designs right. He will be tough to replace.
Slashdot has never been a news site. It's an aggregator.
He just doesn't come across as somebody who can sit around.
I still have a copy of a magazine from 1976 (Air Progress, I think) with the Varieze on the cover, and announcing a new approach to home built aircraft. That aircraft changed the way a lot of us looked at building. I even got a copy of the plans, which I still have. The joke at the time was that you not only could build the plane in the quoted number of hours, you had to, because the building time was based on epoxy curing times.
Aircraft won't be the same: he was one of the few people I knew of who seemed to understand both aerodynamics and structure.
On April Fool's day any major story is automatically assumed to be a hoax. Nobody would believe the truth on that day.
Actually, now that I think about it, people aren't that good at distinguishing truth from fiction on any day. Parent is right - try posting something true some April Fool's Day. It would be the most successful slashdot trick ever.
I can't help feeling disappointed to lose the service of Burt Rutan.
I'll try to take the advice of Dr. Seuss - don't cry because it's over, just smile that it happened. Thanks for the coolest aerospace innovation ever.
I guess you could say he's scaling back? Anyway Burt Rutan did a great job at combining imagination, technology, and the wisdom at meshing the two. If one looks at his flock of planes throughout the years you'll find some of the most unusual planes ever developed. Asymmetrical? No problem. Dual wing? No problem. Supersonic? No problem? Cheap bizjet and fighter jets? No problem.
The man is a genius and will go down in history with Leonardo Da Vinci, Otto Lilienthal, The Wright Brothers, Charles Lindburgh and Amelia Earhart. He is truly a pioneer in aerospace and science in general. It is his innovations in composite materials and airframe design that have pushed far beyond what anybody saw coming from civilian aviation. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the "ufo" sightings people see are his creations also.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Yes, a joke is funny.
But shutting down business for a day to have fill-in-the-blank articles all day... well I'm sure the advertisers thought the drop in visits was funny.
In 1982, I met Burt Rutan, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager at the airshow in Oshkosh. Burt was presenting his Solotaire self-launching sailplane which had just won a competition sponsored by the EAA. I was interested in self-launching sailplanes and good designs were rare. After the award ceremony, I accosted Burt, Dick and Jeana as they were walking away and they were kind enough to sit with me at a picnic table for awhile discussing airplane designs, flight characteristics and flight safety.
Burt Rutan is to my mind one of the towering giants of aviation history, all the more so because he continued to think outside the box and roll back the frontiers of the designer's art. In an era when design and engineering principles were already considered to be well-established, and advances were merely refinements of what had gone before, Burt managed to surprise and delight with his every offering. He is a wellspring of innovative genius, a colossus of the industry, a prodigy, a maverick, and one of my personal idols.
Good luck, and Godspeed Mr. Rutan.
The Rutan family will continue to innovate and inspire ...will always be an inspiration to me and so many others.
Chuck Yeager _ Burt Rutan EAA
Around the world in one flight with voyager is something I will never forget.
Well, they still let you post, so I can't see the foolishness ending any time soon...
The need to end their April Fools crap altogether. It's just not fun anymore.
From Burt's Wikipedia page
On July 29, 2009, Burt Rutan drew a full house for his presentation at the Experimental Aircraft Association's EAA Airventure 2009 Oshkosh Conference entitled "Non-Aerospace Research Quests of a Designer/Flight Test Engineer" where he discussed his thoughts on his hobby of climate change.[40] Although he admitted in his presentation that he was not a climate scientist, he stated he spent most of his career on data analysis and interpretation and how it is used or misused.[41]
"I put myself in the (Those who fear expansion of Government control) group, and do not hide the fact that I have a clear bias on [ Anthropogenic global warming (AGW)]. My bias is based on fear of Government expansion and the observation of AGW data presentation fraud - not based on financial or any other personal benefit. I merely have found that the closer you look at the data and alarmists’ presentations, the more fraud you find and the less you think there is an AGW problem... For decades, as a professional experimental test engineer, I have analyzed experimental data and watched others massage and present data. I became a cynic; My conclusion – “if someone is aggressively selling a technical product whose merits are dependent on complex experimental data, he is likely lying”. That is true whether the product is an airplane or a Carbon Credit."
He describes his interest on the climate change topic as deriving from his "interest in technology, not tree hugging". Burt Rutan's house was featured in a November 1, 1989 article in Popular Science entitled: "21st Century Pyramid: The Ultimate Energy-efficient House".[42]
Rutan will also not interview with Scientific American, as he claimed that the magazine has "...improperly covered man-made global warming. They drink Kool-Aid instead of doing research. They parrot stuff from the IPCC and Al Gore."
Mod parent +
towering giant of aviation history
What does that mean anyway? Ceasing being productive? Quitting a "job" sure, but does any one believe Rutan will just stop doing anything?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Airplane Design NASA Sci Files featuring the planes of Burt Rutan
Thanks for all the great designs over the years. You made the prettiest commercial plane ever the Beechcraft Starship and got us closer to commercial spaceships than anyone else. Enjoy your well deserved retirement, I wish they made more like you =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Can a man like Rutan really properly retire?
I can't imagine that his brain will just suddenly stop getting ideas and solving problems in new ways. Retire as CEO, sure. But he will either come in a couple of days a week or start doing some interesting home projects.
That's my hope, anyway.
Burt Rutan has made a real contribution to human knowledge and understanding. He has also been an inspiration to quite a few of us in many different fields.
Burt Rutan 7 of 8 RAF Rutan Aircraft Factory
I had the privilege of working on Rutan's Vantage jet doing design and S&C verification. At the time, I worked for the only man considered a peer to Rutan, Jan Roskam, though only those in the aerospace industry would know him. The Vantage was a great plane, and Rutan and his company earned my respect and admiration. The respect was mutual, and an engineer who studied under the president of the company I worked for went on to become a VP at Scaled.
Another poster mentioned how there is an obvious lack of good aircraft designers today. Being someone in the aerospace industry, I agree with that 100%. This isn't just a "darn, the kids these days" rant. There is a demonstrable lack of creativity and ability in the younger generation of aerospace engineers. Some of this may be due to a lack of progress in the field (NASA has gone to hell, the USAF doesn't need any more aircraft), some of it could be due to a lack of desire to put in the effort (which is tremendous) to become a great aerospace engineer. I wish I knew. Hopefully soon we will have some truly bright engineers come to the forefront of aircraft design.
So, let me say that it was a privilege to be in the industry both competing with and cooperating with you, Mr. Rutan. I don't know if I'll ever have such a chance again. Thank you for that, and for your contributions to aviation. Best of luck to you.
He made great airplanes, no doubt about that. Innovative, outside the box, advanced the field, nobody can dispute that and I admire his contributions to aviation. But at the same time Rutan is a rabid anthropogenic global warming denialist and for that my respect for him is reset to zero. http://dlcinci.blogspot.com/2009/10/burt-rutan-is-full-of-hot-air.html
Mark my words, he will be back. Folks like him get to where they are because they have this fire in their belly, and the only way to extinguish it is by working on what they love. Guess what, this doesn't go away just because you arbitrarily declare that you're "retired".
Watching SpaceShipOne fly in 2004 is one of the happiest memories of my life.
That's a very sad commentary on the state of your life, I'd say.
I mean, don't get me wrong, watching it fly was neat. Cool. Inspiring, even. But "one of the happiest memories of your life"? If that's really true, then you really need to reflect on the state of your life and make some changes, I think. If your happiest moments are those where you passively sit back and watch what others have done, with no involvement on your part at all, then - well, as I said before, that's very sad.
You have genuinely earned your retirement good man. While the saying "thinking outside the box" has become quite cliché today, you have never been boxed in by convention. I love how you truly made an Art out of "If it looks right, it'll fly right". Enjoy your retirement, you've earned it! TJ Lambert
change it.