Living History

Penner pointed me to this History Channel post commemorating December 23 as the sixteenth anniversary of Rutan/Yeager flight around the world. Since I am staking out the hotly contested niches of Fresno-related and history-related blogging, this is a natural to me. Burt and Dick Rutan were both Fresno boys before they moved up to C. Muncey territory. I remember either Burt or Dick telling me that their first exposure to flying was a demonstration out near Roeding park when they were boys.

I was fortunate to second-chair a jury trial in the District Court for the Eastern District of California for Scaled Composites, which was Burt's Mojave-based aircraft design company. The trial started sometime in mid-January of 1991, which coincided with the start of the airwar in what will soon be known as Gulf War I. I'll never forget Dick Rutan's comment that there is nothing more satisfying than flying into a "target rich environment."

Some years later, I was working on a contract case arising out of the failed salvage of a B-29 in Greenland, which was the subject of a Nova documentary. This post describes the end result of the salvage operation:

In the spring of 1995, after a series of setbacks, (including the death of his chief engineer for seven years, Rick Kriege), Darryl had the old bomber rolling on the ice in a fast taxi, minutes away from attempting a take-off when disaster struck. A fuel line to an APU in the tail section had broken loose and sprayed gasoline on the hot APU. A fire broke out which consumed the big plane where it stood on the ice. Now wrecked for good, the Kee Bird would sink to the bottom of the shallow lake in the coming thaw.

Anyhow, I was communicating with an attorney at the Smithsonian (which just has to be the coolest legal job known to man) who would walk past the Voyager every day on his way to his office.