Rutan Long-EZ

You know his work.

He designed the VariEze and the Long-EZ homebuilts that showed up at Oshkosh in the late '70s and made every other designer in the field stop and rethink their assumptions.

He later designed SpaceShipOne, the private spacecraft that won the Ansari X Prize in 2004.

But in the early '80s, he was focused on a different kind of boundary.

Hmm.

Denver had recently bought an experimental Long-EZ airplane.

He was an experienced pilot with more than 2,700 hours in the air, but he had only about two hours in this particular type of plane, and this particular plane had been modified.

The builder had moved the fuel selector from between the pilot's legs to behind his left shoulder.

and the Colorado General Assembly later honored him by making Rocky Mountain High as an official co-state song.

His life was unfortunately cut short on this date in 1997 when his experimental Rutan Long EZ aircraft crashed into Monterey Bay, California.

John Denver was 53 years old at the time.

In 2001, guitarist Wes Borland officially left the group Limp Bizkit right at the height of the band's commercial success.

It started in the experimental home-built world.

Burt Rutan's designs from the nineteen seventies and eighties, the VariEze, the Long-EZ, demonstrated what composite construction could do for efficiency and aerodynamic refinement.

The knowledge base built up through thousands of home builds.

Then it moved into the certified market.

Canard configurations, pusher propellers, hand-laid composite construction at a time when anyone serious about aviation still riveted aluminum.

His VariEze and Long-EZ designs had taken over the home-built world and given thousands of pilots an airplane that handled like a sports car on the fuel burn of a rental car.

Burt Rutan cared nothing about how things had always been done.

He cared only about how they should be done.

Burt Rutan was not the kind of person whose ideas you dismissed.

He had already designed the VariEze and the Long-EZ Canard Pusher composite homebuilts that had turned heads at Oshkosh through the late 1970s and proved that thinking differently about airframe geometry was not just theoretically appealing, it was practically superior.

He had just started a company called Scaled Composites in Mojave.

He thought about aircraft structures the way most people simply are not equipped to.

That question has followed her for 40 years, and I imagine it stopped being amusing about 40 years ago.

She was a record-setting pilot with more than 2,000 hours logged and a precise technical mind.

She had already set long-distance records in a Rutan Long-EZ.

She looked at the drawing on that napkin and thought, I can build that airplane, and for the next five years they did.