Rutan VariEze

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.

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.

I'll, I'll put it in the show notes.

What's the plane? Is it one of the, the VariEze kits? What is it?

Yeah, I, I don't know.

I haven't, I haven't watched...

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.