Deep in the Mojave Desert, Jeana Yeager, a schoolteacher's
daughter from Texas, is ready to make her dream come true - to fly
around the world in a paper plane without stopping.
It has taken £4 million and five years of effort to realise this dream,
and some time in the next nine months she and co-pilot Richard Rutan
will climb aboard a paper plane called The Voyager and in 13 days and
nights they will go around the world without touching Earth.
Can it really be done? "We believe so. All the results from the test
flights indicate it is possible," said 33-year-old Jeana, who holds four
world flying records and is a skilled engineer.
The Voyager will follow the most suitable winds of the upper
atmosphere and the flight will be mostly over water. If anything goes
wrong, they will be able to make an emergency landing on the sea.
Jeana and Rutan hope to do 25,000 miles in the remarkable Voyager
so they used a kind of paper much stronger than ordinary paper in the
construction of their plane. It is made with reinforced paper. The
Voyager is quite big - its wings are longer than a Boeing 727's.
Although it weighs less than the average car, it can carry a large amount
of fuel (approximately 1489 gallons).
In a test run, or test flight, over the Rocky Mountains, Jeana was air
sick for the first time in her life. "The Voyager is very light - it easily
moves with the wind. It was like being on board a small yacht in a
rough sea. We seemed to be going up and down like in waves," she
said. During the flight the turbulence, i.e. strong wild movement of air,
forced them to fly very high - almost on the edge of the atmosphere.
Flying that high was not included in their flight plan and Jeana and
Richard had some difficult moments until they managed to get out of the
turbulence.
Jeana and Richard are very excited about their project. It was nearly
a quarter of a century ago that a B-52H jet bomber flew from Japan to
Spain, a distance of 12,532 miles, without stopping. That was the
world record for an unrefuelled flight.
The project was born as a result of a conversation between Richard
and his aircraft designer brother Burt. Richard asked him if it was
possible to fly round the world without refuelling. After some careful
thinking, Burt said "I think so". But Jeana and Richard are the ones
who will find out.
