Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1228683
APRIL 2020 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 67 thing that's sort of in view when you're in this continuous turn. The Voyager was a canard for dynamic sup- port of a lot of span-loaded fuel. If you put all the fuel in the middle, your wing spar is going to be heavy, but if I put it partially out here, the wing is a lot lighter. If you put it out there on that slender wing, it will twist in turbulence and come apart. The canard on the Voyager is to support the torsion of what is most of the fuel in the airplane. That's why the Voy- ager was a canard. After that, I got away from them. I found that I was wrong about a pusher engine being quieter. It's not because a prop sees the vibrations that are going in and out of the wing in flight. It's noisier to have the prop on the back. That's why my Catbird and Boo- merang have engines on the front. Feinberg: Of all the designs over the years that you were involved in and developed, what do you consider to not necessarily be the most advanced but the most significant? Rutan: Boomerang, clearly. The only people that fully appreciate Boomerang are people who fly light twins. Like a Baron, it's an air- plane with engines on the wings. With those airplanes, if you lose an engine and have to feather that engine and then go to full power on the other one, it will roll upside down, and everybody dies. You have to fly at a speed so that with full rudder, you can barely control that. It's called the blue line speed. Statistically, on general aviation airplanes— everything from Piper Cubs to King Airs—your chance of having a fatal accident after the fail- ure of a single-engine is much higher on a twin than it is on a single, even though on a sin- gle, you become a glider. The reason is con- trollability. It shouldn't be. If pilots keep it fast enough, they should be able to fly back on a single-engine and land. But people buy twins because they think, "I have twin engines. It will be safer, with a much smaller chance of killing my family and me." But statistically, they're twice as dangerous. Rutan's safe twin-engine airplane design, the Boomerang.