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.

Comments

There are few aircraft designers left

[Animats]

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.

Re:There are few aircraft designers left

[Have Brain Will Rent]

"To bring it back home, would you expect Dennis Ritchie to be able to fabricate a modern GPU in his garage?"

Yes. Yes I would.

Re:There are few aircraft designers left

[Waffle Iron]

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?

The reason that they designed and then discarded so many aircraft in those days is that back then, *they* didn't know how.

If I had a choice between an experienced aircraft designer from the 1960s, or just all the written design documentation from the latest planes, I'd take the latter.

Re:There are few aircraft designers left

[peragrin]

um that isn't true.

The F-22 and F-35 are just coming out. the scram jet engines for the next set of planes are still in testing.

Of course the next set of planes aren't being designed they are still be theorized. As all development cycles mature they slow down.

Saying there aren't new planes being designed is like saying there aren't tanks being designed. just because it isn't being shown to you doesn't make it so.

Re:There are few aircraft designers left

[MaroonMotor]

All the current generation aeronautical engineers are cutting their systems design teeth on UAVs. The UAV situation is like what aircraft was in the 50's and 60's - They are relatively cheap and no one knows what the ideal/best configuration is. So you see dozens and dozens of quickly evolving designs all over the world. Aeronautical engineers are still getting trained, Just not so much on manned high performance aircraft.

Re:There are few aircraft designers left

[sycodon]

"Dogfighting is a thing of the past, and you don't need a pilot to
guide a plane which carries missiles."

Write in indelible ink on you forehead, "I r ignorant of history"

Re:fuck april fools day

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot has never been a news site. It's an aggregator.

Glad that it happened

[flaming error]

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.

Truly an inspiration

[toygeek]

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.

Re:Truly an inspiration

[DNS-and-BIND]

Amelia Earhart? What the hell? You lost me there. Earhart was just a face, men did most of the things she got the credit for. If you want to insert gratuitous females with achievements in aviation, talk about Hanna Reitsch. She was a real pilot. The kind who flew her own planes. But oops! She served Germany during WWII - inconvenient truth. No wonder she's unknown by the world at large.

A Titan takes a well-deserved break

[jamrock]

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.

Hopefully he'll do a Brett Favre

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

Thanks

[afidel]

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 =)

It was a priviliege...

[CompMD]

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.