Burt Rutan’s list of airplanes designed and flown (45), of honorary Doctoral Degrees (6!), of national and international awards (112), of patents held (7), and of design projects related to aviation in some way (several hundred) takes up 11 pages! This all occurred in the years between 1965, when he graduated from California Polytechnic University, and his retirement from Scaled Composites in April, 2011. It includes a work schedule that would have crippled most people: escalating over the forty-six years he spent in the high desert to six or seven days a week, 8 to 16 hours a day. He does not know what a 40-hour week is. “I think the main reason is there wasn’t much else to do in Mojave. I kept my head down and my elbows up and I worked like hell.” When he retired, he found “with a clear calendar, I could sleep in and then decide on a given day what I would do after I woke up. That concept was so foreign to me that it was absolutely amazing. I still haven’t gotten used to it.”
In his lifetime he went from model airplanes to rocket science, from homebuilts to transports, from internationally recognized projects like the Voyager and Spaceship One and the White Knight to classified stuff we will probably never know about. He changed the culture of aviation.
