Mike Melvill's Early Days with Burt Rutan

Mike Melvill in the cockpit of SpaceShipOne

On 21 June 2004, Mike Melvill piloted SpaceShipOne past the edge of space, becoming the first commercial astronaut in aviation history. Melville and his wife, Sally, were Burt Rutan's very first employees when they moved out to California in 1974 to join Rutan in his business. But Melvill is nothing like the 433 individuals that preceded him into space. I think Dave Hirschman's article for the June 2013 issue of AOPA Magazine "The Unlikeliest Astronaut" put it best in the following paragraph: 

Unlikeliest astronaut. Mike Melvill doesn't fit the typical military-trained, academically overachieving astronaut profile. The South African native failed a math course and never finished high school. He raced motorcycles and became a machinist at 17. He married his childhood sweetheart, Sally, and they emigrated to the United States in the late 1960s. He became a U.S. citizen in 1972, and his motivation to fly was a dislike of airline travel—not a dream of exploration.

To understand how Mike Melvill's unlikely career in aviation is inextricably linked with that of Burt Rutan, we have to step back a bit and take a look at Burt Rutan's first aircraft design, a homebuilt piston pusher he called the VariViggen. Rutan began the design work on the VariViggen in 1963 while he was still an undergraduate at California Polytechnic State University. He would graduate in 1965 third in his class with a degree in aeronautical engineering and soon landed work at Edwards AFB as a civilian flight engineer. Living in Lancaster at the time he was working at Edwards, Rutan began construction of the VariViggen in his garage in 1968 after five years of doing his own model experiments with subscale models and wind tunnel testing that basically was Rutan mounting design iterations of the VariViggen to a test rig he built that could be clamped to the luggage rack of his station wagon. Using his day job experience as a flight test engineer, he was able to use these tests to refine the VariViggen's configuration before starting assembly. Around the time he was ready to start taxi testing the VariViggen, he left California in 1972 and took a job with Jim Bede's aircraft company in Newton, Kansas, as the director of development for the BD-5 homebuilt aircraft. In his spare time, he prepared the VariViggen for its taxi and flight tests with the help of some of Bede's engineers and employees. He made the VariViggen's first flight in April that year and embarked on a nine-week flight test program before flying the aircraft to the 1972 Oshkosh Air Show, demonstrating the aircraft to the experimental homebuilt aircraft community and selling the blueprints for pilots to build their own VariViggen. He returned to California in 1974 and formed the Rutan Aircraft Company. 

The Rutan VariViggen

It was there at Oskhosh in 1972 that Mike Melvill met Burt Rutan and purchased a set of blue prints for the VariViggen. Melvill was a machinist with a gift for tinkering working for a tool and die company in Indiana that specialized in industrial box cutting machines. Traveling all over to customers, Melvill figured if he learned to fly, traveling for business would be much more enjoyable than just a series of tedious waits in airport terminals across the country. He began working on his own Nesmith Cougar aircraft (a high wing homebuilt design from the 1950s) which was 2/3 finished before he sold it off and picked up another Cougar which was 90% completed. That second Cougar was the one Melvill was flying for four years before he met Rutan at Oshkosh. 

Melville liked the VariViggen design as it accommodated two people and three suitcases easily. With his wife's support, they bought a new house in Indiana that had the room for Mike to build his own VariViggen. Melvill can tell you exactly how much time it took him to finish his VariViggen- "Three years, one month, twenty-two days". He had followed Rutan's blueprints exactly until he got to the landing gear retraction mechanisms. Melvill didn't like the design and with a tool and machinist background, redesigned the system to his liking, fabricating his own parts at work. Melvill's VariViggen was the first one built aside from Rutan's and that made Rutan a regular visitor to see the construction progress. One day, when Rutan was visiting, he found out Melvill's wife was a bookkeeper (and a pilot in her own right as well) and that she worked at the same company as her husband. Rutan offered both of them the opportunity to come to California and work for him. The story goes that Rutan was more in need of his wife's accounting skills than Melvill's piloting and machinist skills:

"I need her worse than I need you!"

Melvill and his wife are one of the ten original owners of Rutan's company, Scaled Composites and his first employees as well. Melvill still has his VariViggen with 4,200 hours on the airframe. He would go on to become Rutan's main test pilot and the general manager of his company with his wife as the head of human resources. Being Rutan's main test pilot, Melvill was the pragmatist counterpart to Rutan's dreams and often Rutan talked with Melvill several times a day about his ideas. Most of the time Melvill would be first person to know what new ideas Rutan was contemplating. From the same AOPA article: 

“He came into my office almost every morning,” Melvill said. “He would say something like, ‘I think we’ve developed the technical expertise to build a twin, or a jet.’ But I’ll never forget the day he said he thought we had the technical expertise to fly an aircraft into space. It was something I’d never considered. We were doing a credible job with airplanes that flew about 200 miles an hour—but to get to space, we’d have to fly at Mach 3. It seemed too ambitious to seriously contemplate, and I was intimidated.”

Source: The Complete Guide to Rutan Aircraft, Third Edition by Don & Julia Downie.TAB Books, 1987, pp35-48. "The Unlikeliest Astronaut" by Dave Hirschman, AOPA News and Video, 1 June 2013. Photos: Wikipedia, EAA.

A Short History of the Groundbreaking Williams FJ44 Engine

The Williams FJ44-3 engine. The fan is 23 inches in diameter

The Williams FJ44 engine of the CitationJet family has a fascinating history as it's based on the F107 turbofan used on American cruise missiles like the ALCM and the Tomahawk. Williams International started out with marine turboshafts and APUs before getting into small turbofan engines. Sam Williams and his namesake company would rise to prominence in the aviation industry with miniature turbofans but his real dream was a civilian turbofan for general aviation. In the 1980s Williams envisioned a new class of turbofans based on the F107 design that would allow for a new class of general aviation aircraft that were jets half the cost and size of current bizjets with the field performance and economy of turboprop twins. 

Sam Williams believed so much in his FJ44 engine design that development continued through the 1980s in the absence of any launch order or production application. Keep in mind that this class of engine had never been used in general aviation and Williams International had never made a civilian production jet engine. Through the 1980s, Williams lobbied numerous general aviation manufacturers about his concept for a light jet aircraft and how he had a superbly economical engine to make such an aircraft feasible. The first manufacturer to agree was Rutan's Scaled Composites who flew the Triumph in 1988. Rutan's design never entered production but it did mark the FJ44's first flight. The next manufacturer to agree to use twin FJ44s was Swearingen in its SJ30 design- even though the aircraft flew, Swearingen and the SJ30 have passed through many ownership changes serial production has yet to occur. Williams' big break came with the third manufacturer- Cessna was looking for an efficient and higher performing successor to its iconic Citation line and launched the Cessna 525 CitationJet family in 1992 with a very substantial order of Williams FJ44 engines, vindicating Sam Williams' dream.

Sam Williams

The FJ44 is a joint venture between Williams International and Rolls-Royce and was the company's first civilian engine and first manned aircraft engine. Simplicity and reliability were key to this new class of aircraft and as such, the FJ44 engine has only 700 parts total, 1/4 that of many other bizjet powerplants. The Cessna CitationJet series was the first production application for the FJ44 engine. It wasn't enough to have a simple engine, it also had to have performance and basing the FJ44 on the F107 cruise missile engine gave the FJ44 that foundation. In fact, the F107 that the FJ44 is derived from was such an impressive accomplishment that it won the Collier Trophy- it has 1/10th the weight of the Pratt & Whitney JT8D engine but has the same specific fuel consumption and thrust-to-weight ratio. That performance pedigree translated over well into the FJ44 and it made the engine successful. On the Cessna CitationJet series, the economy and performance of the new engine made the new jet a leap in performance over the Citation 500 series it replaced. While aerodynamic improvements are part of the equation, the FJ44 engine's performance and economics are a large contributor. Compared to a Citation 500 at an identical mid-cruise weight, the CitationJet goes 13% farther with 17% less fuel and it does this 40% faster than the original Citation with the FJ44s having a lower thrust output than the JT15Ds used on the first Citations.

There are four engines in the FJ44 family. The lowest powered one was the first one, the FJ44-1 and it powers the Cessna CJ1 and CJ1+ of the CitationJet family and is also used on the Cessna Citation M2 as well as the Swedish jet trainer Saab Sk60. It has a thrust rating of 1900 to 2100 lbs. The FJ44-1 series first flew in 1988 and went into production in 1992. 

The second engine in the family is the FJ44-2 and is based on the core and LP turbine of the FJ44 paired up with a larger fan and new compressor section for increased thrust. Its applications include the Cessna CJ2, the Beech/Raytheon Premier I,  and the latest incarnation of the SJ30 design, Syberjet SJ30. Two of Rutan's designs fly with the FJ44, the Scaled Composites Proteus and the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer that Steve Fossett flew around the world in solo nonstop in 2005. It's also used on two re-engining programs for the Citation 500 and the Learjet 25. The FJ44-2 has a thrust rating of 2300-2400 lbs thrust and went into production in 1997.

The next engine in the family is the FJ44-3 which has a new fan and compressor section for an increase in thrust rating to 3000 lbs. It powers the Cessna CJ2+ and CJ3+ and is used in Nextant's re-engining and remanufacture program of the Beech 400 as well as on a re-engining program for later Citation 500 variants. It went into production in 2004. 

The top end member of the FJ44 family is the FJ44-4 with an increase in thrust to 3600 lbs with a larger fan and enlarged compressor. It also features a dual-channel FADEC for more efficiency. It powers the Cessna CJ4 along with the Beech 400XPR remanufacture/upgrade program for the Beech 400. The engine will also power the upcoming Pilatus PC-24 jet. 

There is also a scale down of the FJ44 engine, the FJ33, which went into production in 2004 and has a thrust rating of 1000 to 1900 lbs. The fan is only 19 inches in diameter and it powers the Diamond D-Jet and the Cirrus Vision. 

Unlike other manufacturers of small jet engines, the FJ44 has no turboprop derivative and there are no turboprops in the Williams portfolio. This is a reflection of Sam Williams' philosophy that given time and technological progress, light turbofans like the FJ44 will displace turboprop engines for most civilian aircraft applications. The FJ44 is one of the landmark engines of aviation history and Sam Williams has earned honors for creating an engine that gave rise to a whole new class of general aviation aircraft.

Source: The History of North American Small Gas Turbine Engines by Richard A. Leyes and William A. Fleming. American Institute of  Aeronautics and Astronautics/Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999, pp383-429. Williams International http://www.williams-int.com/. Photos: Williams International

The Ground-Breaking Boeing Condor UAV

The Condor in flight

In the 1960s as the technology for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) progressed, the USAF initiated two programs that would provide unmanned analogues to the premier airborne reconnaissance aircraft of the day, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird and the U-2. Both aircraft had their strengths and weaknesses and the USAF hoped to expand upon their capabilities with adjunct UAV reconnaissance aircraft. The companion program to the SR-71 Blackbird originated from the Lockheed Skunk Works as the D-21/Tagboard reconnaissance drone for the CIA. Possessing the same Mach 3 performance as the Blackbird, the D-21 was originally launched from the back of a modified A-12 Cygnus. However, after a disastrous fourth airborne launch that cost the launching aircraft and one of its crew, the D-21/Tagboard was moved over to the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress as the launching aircraft. After four failed operational missions in which the D-21 was lost, the program was canceled in 1971, at which time the second program which would have been a companion to the Lockheed U-2 was getting under way. Being a large jet-powered glider-like aircraft not too dissimilar in performance to the U-2, in 1971 the USAF initiated the Compass Cope program with Boeing and Teledyne Ryan producing prototypes- Boeing's design being the YQM-94 Gull (Compass Cope B) and Ryan's competing design being the YQM-98 Tern (Compass Cope R). After a competitive evaluation, Boeing's Gull was chosen in August 1976, to which Ryan lodged a protest. It was pointless at that juncture as the USAF canceled Compass Cope in 1977 before any production Gulls were built. 

But it wasn't the end of the story for Boeing's work for a high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) UAV. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was still interested in the idea of a HALE UAV for strategic reconnaissance. DARPA wanted to go one step further than the Compass Cope program, though. A contract was issued to Boeing for a HALE UAV that could operate for days at high altitudes carrying reconnaissance payloads that ranged for optical camera systems to electronic intelligence collection arrays to even an airborne synthetic aperture radar for all-weather/day-night surveillance. Boeing contracted with Burt Rutan who was using an all-composite structure in his record-breaking long-distance aircraft, Voyager. Boeing's design, aptly named Condor, used a predominantly composite structure with a wingspan of 200 feet, the same as that of the Boeing 747. The fuselage was only 68 feet long but was slab sided to facilitate the mounting of either an ELINT or SAR antenna array. Designed to be disassembled into sections and transported by a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy, the Condor's fully loaded weight was 60% fuel. 

Comparing the Condor and the 747

The wing's airfoil section was extremely efficient and provided natural laminar flow at altitudes in excess of 50,000 feet. Since the Condor was to be autonomously controlled, the wing had to have benign stall characteristics to simplify the control of the UAV. The wing was so efficient that it had twice the lift-drag ratio of the U-2- 40:1 compared to 20:1 for the spyplane. Since the wing would be highly flexible, a fuel transfer system was used to move fuel between wing tanks to reduce flexing in flight. The use of composites resulted in a wing that weighed only 2 lbs/square foot- an impressive feat considering that a commercial jetliner's wing comes in at approximately 30 lbs/square foot. 

The Condor was powered by two Teledyne Continental 175-horsepower six-cylinder piston engines that were superturbocharged for operation at very high altitudes. Each wing-mounted engine drove a three-bladed propeller 16 feet in diameter. Since the propellers were optimized for high-altitude cruise, at lower altitudes they would cause a significant amount of fuel burn and drag- as a result, a two-speed gearbox was used- one gear ratio for low-altitude flight and a different gearing for high altitude cruise. 

The flight control computer of the Condor was groundbreaking in that the Condor was the first UAV designed and flown autonomously without external control input from a remote pilot. Two Delco Magic 3 series computers were used as the brains of the Condor- the Magic 3 series computers were also used in the guidance systems for the Titan II ballistic missiles and the Delta family of rocket launchers. One computer acts as the primary computer with the second one operating in standby and ready to takeover should the primary computer fail. The control software consisted of only 60,000 lines of Fortran code- minuscule when one considers that today's RQ-4 Global Hawk reconnaissance UAV uses several million lines of software code! The Condor's computers were responsible for vehicle functions, flight control, and navigation using inputs from an inertial navigation system (this was in the days before GPS). The computer system was even designed to not only handle inflight emergencies but also prevent an enemy from taking electronic control of the UAV. Should that happen, the system was designed to recognize it was being taken over and immediately direct the Condor back to friendly territory. 

A microwave landing system was adopted to provide control of the Condor during takeoff as well as landing. Using a dolly, once the Condor reached 65 knots, it lifted off the ground and left its takeoff dolly behind. It would take anywhere from two to three hours for the Condor to reach its cruising altitude of over 50,000 feet. At cruise altitude, the Condor cruised at 200 kts, but its all composite construction made it a very small radar target and its piston engines had a very low infra-red signature- so despite its size and apparent leisurely cruise speed, it was a difficult target to track on most radars of the day. Descent for landing took two to three hours as well, and an extendable nosewheel and landing skids were used for landing. To save weight, instead of doors covering the skids and wheel, a replaceable Mylar sheet was used that the skids and nosewheel broke through on landing.

The Boeing Condor today at the Hiller Aviation Museum 

The Condor was developed in secret and its rollout in March 1986 was its unveiling to the world. It made its first flight on 9 October 1988 from Boeing's test facility at Moses Lake, Washington (the former Larson AFB). Since the rules on UAV operations in controlled airspace had yet to be fully written, a manned chase plane had to accompany the Condor during its transit through any controlled airspace. Only eight test flights were made with the last one on 28 November 1989, but the Condor set two world records- one for record altitude for a piston-engined aircraft at 67,028 feet on the fourth test flight and one for unmanned aircraft endurance at an impressive 58 hours, 11 minutes on the final test flight. Given that the test flights occurred over eastern Washington state, it's unlikely any operational reconnaissance payloads were carried, but to this day the exact nature of the payloads to have been carried- or even if they were carried- on the Condor remain classified. With a cost of $300 million, the Condor program did prove the viability of autonomous UAV flight as well as advanced composite construction and ultra-lightweight structures, but it lacking in military flexibility as well as its slow speed resulted in its cancellation after the final test flight. Only one Condor was built and flown, and in 1998 it was acquired by the Hiller Aviation Museum in the Bay Area where it can be seen on display today. It's the largest aircraft to be suspended in an interior museum display in the world. Not bad, even just sitting in the museum it still sets a record!

Sources: Birds of Prey: Predators, Reapers and America's Newest UAVs in Combat by Bill Yenne. Specialty Press, 2010, p20-32. 
Condor photo in the Hiller Museum by Joe May @ Travel for Aircraft- "Photo Funday- Boeing's Condor"

Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites were hired by Beech Aircraft in 1982 to build a five-eighths scale prototype of the Beech Starship. Based on the layout of his successful VariEze/Long-EZ kitplanes, Rutan became a vice president at Beech and even married the daughter of one of the aircraft company's executives.

Given the FAA's relative inexperience in certifying carbon-fiber composite aircraft at the time, once the prototype had been scaled up to a production article its performance fell below expectations and only 24 were built. The Starship would be the only Rutan design to achieve series production.

And his marriage? It was his third and it only lasted 20 months. By 1988 Rutan and Scaled Composites ended their relationship as well with Beech Aircraft.

Source: Aviation History, November 2009. "Top Pencil: Maverick Airplane Designer Burt Rutan Doesn't Just Think Outside the Box; He Completely Destroys It and Starts Anew" by Peter Garrison, p28-29.