In January 1996, Mike Melvill and his wife, Sally, arrived at work at eight A.M., unlocked the door, and let themselves in. They headed through the carpeted reception area to Mike’s office, which looked out onto the Mojave flight line. Their boss, Burt Rutan, was standing over his drafting table. Burt looked up, startled, squinted at them as if they were blurry, peered outside the window, and checked his watch. He muttered that his wife was going to be mad. He’d worked straight through another night, standing at his drafting table, nursing his umpteenth cup of black coffee, wearing his clothes of the day before.
Mike and Sally exchanged knowing looks. They had worked for Burt for nearly eighteen years, saying goodbye to him at five P.M. and returning many mornings before eight to find him where they had left him. They knew his brilliance and his quirks. He was the boss who took them on exotic vacations, only to announce a day after arriving that they were leaving because he couldn’t think on a white sand beach in paradise. He was the boss who did wind tunnel testing on top of his 1966 Dodge Dart station wagon; who always said his best plane was his next plane; and who knew airplanes better than just about anyone alive.
These days, Burt was working on his thirty-first plane, the Proteus, a high-altitude research aircraft named for the Greek god who changed his shape to take on any form. The Proteus was being built for Angel Technologies to deliver broadband services from just above the stratosphere. Mike had recently attended a meeting with Burt to discuss the project, and had met Angel founders Peter Diamandis, Marc Arnold, and David Wine, and Angel chief technology officer Nick Colella.
Several times a day, Burt would wave Mike over, or appear at his drafting table with an idea or a sketch for a plane or a part that more often than not had the whimsy of a Dr. Seuss drawing. Burt was deliberately contrarian, moving engines back and wings far forward and co-opting materials once reserved for boats and surfboards.
As Burt’s go-to test pilot, Mike had plenty of experience with Burt’s convention-defying aircraft. He would fly anything Burt dreamed up.
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Mike didn’t learn to fly until he was thirty years old in 1969, but the South Africa native was drawn to danger long before his love affair with the skies began. His strong, compact frame made him a star on the local gymnastics squad, and his agile acts on the parallel bars were only the beginning.
Mike inherited a competitive spirit from his father, a world-class target shooter who routinely defeated younger rivals. A motorcycle enthusiast, Mike also got his father’s auto mechanic skills. But his ability to build and fix things did not translate into confidence in the classroom. Mike found much of the teaching mind-numbing and was frustrated that the curriculum gave him no opportunity to work with his hands. He failed his senior year math final and didn’t graduate from high school.
Mike met his match early when he encountered Sally, a high-energy, petite blonde with a strong will and a thirst for adventure. Sally’s parents wanted her to go to finishing school and marry a wealthy sugar farmer. Sally wanted only Mike. She defied her family and left Durban on the back of Mike’s motorcycle, with her angry father in hot pursuit. Mike and Sally went to England, where Mike became a carpenter. They were married in Scotland and immigrated to the United States in 1967 to join Sally’s brothers and her now friendly father. They settled in Indiana, where Sally’s family had a rotary die-cutting factory called Dovey Manufacturing. Mike ran the machinery while Sally took orders from customers. His aptitude for building was apparent from his first day on the engineering-based job. He started making some of the company’s tool products, and when those expensive tools failed, broke, or were incorrectly used, he was dispatched to troubleshoot.
To do that part of his job, he jumped on a plane once a week, spending long days just getting to the companies. Finally, Mike concluded that someone in the company needed to learn to fly. Most of the repair jobs he went to were near small airports. Sally’s brothers had no interest in flying, so it was decided that Mike would get his pilot’s license on the company dime. But Mike didn’t take to flying in small planes the way he took to machining parts. He vomited every time he and his instructor were airborne. Thankfully, his instructor, Dick Darlington, told him that plenty of people were nauseated when they first learned to fly. He assured Mike that the sickness would diminish and then disappear. He was right. Mike earned his private and commercial pilot’s licenses, and was soon arriving at work wishing that someone’s equipment, somewhere, would break so he would have to fly off to fix it.
Flying became freedom. It was a different way of looking at the world—as Amelia Earhart described it, “You haven’t seen a tree until you’ve seen its shadow from the sky.” Instructor Darlington, aware of Mike’s intense interest in flying, suggested he consider making his own plane, given that he had the skills and tools of a machinist.
Mike had no idea that people made their own planes. Darlington told him about a place in Wisconsin called Oshkosh, where the Experimental Aircraft Association held an annual gathering of pilots and their homebuilt or modified aircraft. In the summer of 1974, Mike and Sally attended. One of the first things they saw at Oshkosh was a crazy-looking plane with a tail on the front and engine in the back. “What is that?” Mike asked, intrigued. Its name was the VariViggen, and it was flown by a man named Burt Rutan. The name VariViggen came from the Viggen, a highly innovative Swedish fighter aircraft built by Saab. The Viggen had “canards,” essentially wings moved from the back to the front. As Mike watched Burt give people rides in the plane, doing short takeoffs, short landings, and turning on a dime, Mike said, “Now that’s a plane.” Burt sold kits for the VariViggen out of the back of his plane parked on the Oshkosh flight line. Mike handed over fifty-one dollars in cash—Burt didn’t trust banks—returned to Indiana, and began studying the plans. He knew how to build things from blueprints, but these were not engineering plans. They were sketches and photographs and had a comic book–style narrative.
Undeterred, Mike started building. He made progress on one part, only to find himself confounded by the next part. He called the Rutan Aircraft Factory (RAF) in Mojave, and Burt walked him through the problem. At the end of three years, Mike, ever competitive, became Burt’s first customer to finish building a VariViggen. Not long after finishing the plane, Mike and Sally flew the VariViggen from Indiana to a business meeting in California.
To confirm that Mike had built the plane right, they flew into Mojave. Burt was so impressed that he invited them to dinner. He told Mike and Sally that he’d left his job as director of development for Bede Aircraft in Newton, Kansas, and opened RAF in 1974. He asked Mike what he did for a living and ended up offering Mike and Sally jobs. Burt said he needed help so he could focus on designing new planes. Sally could do bookkeeping, and Mike would help him with the homebuilt airplane business. He offered the Melvills a starting salary of $22,000 a year—to be split however they wanted. They were each earning double that in Indiana.
In September 1978, Mike and Sally gave up their secure jobs in the family business and moved from central Indiana, with its bone-chilling winters, hot summers, and flat landscape, to the Mojave Desert, with its crisp winters, baking arid summers, and sandy, tumbleweed-strewn landscape. The Melvills’ sons, Graham and Keith, were fifteen and twelve. Sally cried for a year, lonely for her extended family, but Mike settled in. He had found his niche. The renegade spirit suited him, and his newfound love affair with planes was the oldest story in this dusty town. Where others saw wind, sand, and Joshua trees, aviators saw a dreamland of unlimited heights and speeds. They saw a sky that was almost never obscured, a place where nearly every day brought a call from the flight tower of “severe clear.” A cast of characters flew in and out of Mojave, stopping in at Burt’s shop to share stories. Over time, Mike befriended legendary pilots, notably Scotty Crossfield, the first to fly twice the speed of sound, and Fitz Fulton, who set early altitude records for the military and was the first to fly the modified Boeing 747 when it carried the space shuttle out of Edwards Air Force Base.
Mike started at RAF doing whatever was needed, from sweeping shop floors to helping Burt design and flight-test new planes, including the kit-built VariEze and Long-EZ. Mike improved the instructions in the kits. Thousands of the VariEze kits sold quickly, at $54 apiece. The Long-EZ kits were snapped up for $250 apiece. Burt told Mike that the idea for the first kit for the VariViggen came in part from the Simplicity sewing patterns used by Burt’s wife, Carolyn. Burt had seen Carolyn make her own dresses by pinning patterns to fabric and cutting along the dotted line, and wondered why he couldn’t do the same for aircraft. Burt loved the idea that someone could build a plane in his or her garage and go and fly it.
By the early 1980s, Burt told Mike that they needed to phase out the homebuilt plane business. The money was good, but the builders needed a lot of support, and the liabilities were great. When the U.S. Air Force needed a trainer for a new fighter plane, Burt built a scaled-down replica that would give them the same flight test data. Scaled Composites opened for business in 1982. Burt set a standard for working hard, but he also evangelized the need for fun. He would stop meetings to say, “Are we having fun yet?” Employees would yell, “Yeahhhhh!” Instead of spending money on employee Christmas parties, Burt took 1 percent of the company’s net profit for the year and divided it equally among employees. Burt gave himself the same bonus as the shop floor sweep. On Fridays, when the company was small, Burt announced that everyone had been working too hard. “It’s time for clam chowder,” he’d say. Employees would jump into planes and off they’d fly to their favorite greasy spoon in nearby California City.
In the same way a surfer studies the sea, waiting for that perfect wave—looking for a glassy surface, an offshore breeze, and the right amount of spray coming off the top of the lip—Burt was captive to the sky. One afternoon, Burt found Mike and said excitedly, “Have you looked outside?”
“Yeah,” Mike answered tentatively.
“The clouds!” Burt said.
“Yeah, there are clouds.”
“We need to go flying!”
Mike, Burt, and Burt’s brother Dick grabbed cameras, piled into a plane, and hit the sky to fly through the rare clouds of Mojave.
Mike took advantage of any opportunity he had to become a better pilot, practicing landings and takeoffs again and again until he got it right. Burt, who had been a flight test engineer—not a test pilot—knew the maneuvers needed to get the desired telemetry, whether on directional stability or stall characteristics. Burt demonstrated a maneuver in his own twin-engine Duchess and then had Mike do the same thing. Mike learned that flight tests proceeded in incremental steps—slowly, steadily. Mike learned to take a plane that had never been flown before and start by taxiing it around the runway to make sure the brakes and steering worked and the plane cooled well. The plane was then returned to the hangar, and the team would debrief with the data and Mike’s analysis. This would continue for days or weeks, until they felt the plane was flight ready. The first “flight” would be in the thin cushion of air inches above the runway.
Mike got his long-distance flying and formation training from none other than the velvet-armed Dick Rutan. The Rutan brothers agreed that Mike was one of the most instinctive stick-and-rudder pilots they had ever met. With time, Burt grew confident that Mike could do dangerous flying in a plane that had never been pushed—performing stalls and spins—and bring his baby back safely.
There were times, though, when Mike sat on the runway before a first flight test, looked at whatever unconventional contraption he was belted into, and wondered, Am I going to be alive for long after I push the throttle? Mike narrowly averted disaster many times, including the day a mechanic left a wrench inside a wing of the prototype Starship, flown in 1983. The controls jammed midflight. Mike tried everything he could think of before grabbing the stick and putting all of his weight on it. He was lucky; the wrench popped loose.
Sally served as Scaled’s director of human resources. It wasn’t easy being the wife of a test pilot of experimental planes. When someone asked what it was like, she pointed to her wrinkles. But being a pilot herself, Sally said, “It’s for Mike to question whether the plane is safe.” Both she and Mike had to believe that Burt would never put Mike in a plane that wasn’t safe.
But Burt pushed the limits. In 1992, Mike and another Scaled pilot, Doug Shane, endured a plane that Doug called “a new and unwelcome experience,” and that Mike labeled “harrowing.” Burt had designed a new radio-controlled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), intended for forty-eight-hour flights at 65,000 feet. The drone was called the Raptor and had a wingspan of sixty-six feet. It was designed to carry a 150-pound payload, including underwing antimissiles. The fuselage was too narrow to accommodate a cockpit. The Raptor was part of a ballistic missile defense concept, engineered by Nick Colella while he was at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.*
Mike arrived at work one morning to find the shop guys having fun with a saddle they’d thrown over the newly built Raptor. The maintenance manager was a horse owner, and the crew had apparently been taking turns in the saddle. When the guys somewhat nervously asked Mike whether they could take his picture up in the saddle, he was game and climbed aboard, just in time for Burt’s arrival. For a moment, no one said a word, fearing the boss would not be amused. But Burt studied the situation and exclaimed, “That’s it! That’s what we needed and I never thought of.” Burt had been worried about losing the unmanned prototype on its first flight tests. That morning, again to the surprise of the crew, Burt had the shop build a fiberglass saddle with a back and shoulder support. He would give the pilots the ability to override the remote controls. They could just ride on top of the plane! He’d give them parachutes, too, just in case.
When it came time for the Raptor’s test flights, Mike climbed warily into the fiberglass saddle on top of the plane, put his helmet on, and got his feet into the stirrups. Sally was deep inside Scaled—not about to come out to witness the love of her life riding on top of a plane. Project engineer Dave Ganzer controlled takeoff and landing remotely, making Mike—straddling the fuselage—feel like a pawn in someone else’s nutty video game. The landings proved particularly terrifying, as the Raptor came in at nearly 100 miles per hour. There was Mike, riding on top of a plane in the open air without even a windshield. It took every bit of his strength not to reach for the controls.
A few days into the testing, Mike got airborne and very quickly realized he had no rudder control. Ganzer and his crew were in a chase van on the runway, and Ganzer reported the same problem. Mike couldn’t land if he couldn’t line up with the runway. Mike radioed Ganzer to say he was going to fly over to the dry lake bed in Rosamond and try to land there. He didn’t have the option of parachuting out, as he couldn’t gain even a foot of altitude. Ganzer sped out of Mojave, following the imperiled Raptor’s path. Ganzer was in Burt’s old white van with the roof cut out to make way for a plastic bubble. Ganzer would stand up in the bubble holding the controls to fly the Raptor.
With the dry lake bed below, Mike considered putting one wing down to drag himself to a stop. The plane would surely break apart. Ganzer had said something to him about the Raptor’s “adverse yaw.” This suggested the plane would react in an opposite way to the normal push of the stick. If he pushed the stick to the left, the plane would initially yaw or turn to the right. Mike said his pilot’s prayer and plunged the stick all the way to the right. The plane turned to the left initially and then had one beautiful moment of leveling out. Mike immediately put the plane on the ground and taxied to a stop in a cloud of dust. By the time Ganzer and crew came tearing in, Mike had dismounted from the death trap. He was almost breathing normally again when Ganzer and the crew came to a stop. Ganzer discovered there on the lake bed that a relay that controlled the rudders had locked up. The relay was replaced, and Mike was asked to fly the drone back to Mojave. His first reaction was “No way! I thought I was dead!” As the hours passed, though, it was clear that the only way to return the Raptor to Mojave was for Mike to fly it. He reluctantly got back in the saddle.
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Now, in early January 1996, Mike was getting ready for the first test flight of another new plane, the Boomerang, a five-passenger twin-engine that took defiance of convention to a new level. It was intentionally asymmetrical, and looked all wrong. The wings didn’t match, with the right wing coming in fifty-seven inches shorter than the left. One of the engines was mounted on the fuselage, the other on the left boom, and the right engine was more powerful than the left. The horizontal stabilizer, joining the fin on the twin tails, extended past the right fin but not past the left. The “door” for the copilot and pilot was through the windshield. Burt’s goal with the forward swept-wing plane—thus the name Boomerang—was to solve the problems and dangers of engine failure and asymmetric thrust—the “P effect”*—in conventionally designed twin-engine planes. Burt assured Mike that the asymmetrical design was actually “more symmetric than a symmetric airplane” when flown. He said that the P effect slowed a symmetric plane down, requiring rudder, but that the P effect on an asymmetric plane made it symmetric at low speeds and asymmetric at high speeds, when the pilot wouldn’t notice it.
Before leaving the office, Mike checked out the drawings for the Proteus, the Angel Technologies’ high-altitude plane still in the drafting phase. The plane shared similarities to a Klingon warship from Star Trek, a praying mantis, and a dragonfly. The Proteus needed to be capable of doing small circles in the sky for up to fourteen hours at a time and carrying payloads of different size and weight. “You’ll have to wear a Moon suit for this,” Burt said. Mike had no doubt Burt was serious and noted happily that at least the plane had a cockpit—and no stirrups. Mike studied the drawings and realized that the temperature cycling would be extreme: the Proteus would have to be capable of taking off in the Mojave summer of 110 degrees, and at 50,000 or 60,000 feet would encounter temperatures of minus 110 degrees, a delta of 220 degrees.
As he was pondering this, another Proteus drawing on Burt’s drafting table caught Mike’s attention. In this sketch, the Proteus carried a rocket underneath. Mike looked closer; there was a cockpit in the rocket. This couldn’t be serious, he thought.
Burt smiled at him expectantly. Mike had seen that dreamy expression before. He had to wonder: What on Earth was Burt going to build next?