Famous aviation inventors from the Wilbur and Orville Wright to space entrepreneur Burt Rutan are driven by the joy of invention.
In September 1900 Wilbur wrote to his father, “It is my belief that flight is possible and, while I am taking up the investigation for pleasure rather than profit. I think there is a slight possibility of achieving fame and fortune from it.”
They treated their first visit to Kitty Hawk as a vacation trip, Orville wrote to his sister in October 1900, “This is a great country for fishing and hunting. The fish are so thick you see dozens of them whenever you look down into the water. The woods are filled with wild game.”
On another occasion, Orville wrote to his sister, “It has been with considerable effort that I have succeeded in keeping him (Wilbur) in the flying business. He likes to chase buzzards, thinking they are eagles and chicken hawks, much better.”
The brothers brought home with them a lot of pictures that year. But they where mostly scenic tourist type pictures, only a few were of their 1900 glider.
Even two years later prior to their third trip to Kitty Hawk, Katharine wrote to their father, “Will and Orv ….. Really ought to get away for a while. Will is thin and nervous and so is Orv. They well be all right when they get down in the sand where the salt breezes blow, etc. They think that life and Kitty Hawk cures all ills you know.”
Burt Rutan talks about how private space policy should emphasize innovation, safety and having a helluva good time.
Rutan has averaged more than one new aircraft design per year for over 30 years totaling some 36 different manned airplanes. Last year Rutan and his team, Scaled Composites, became the first private company to send a man into suborbital space twice with two weeks, using the same vehicle.
When SpaceShipOne landed after its second successful flight and won the “X Prize,” he proclaimed, “we are going to the stars.”
Until the latter part of 1906 there were only two men in the world who could fly. Between 1903 and 1906, Wilbur and Orville made 160 flights totaling almost 160 miles.
From the period 1908 to early 1912 only 10 people had flown. After that for the next 3-1/2 half-year period, there was an explosion of flight. Thousands of pilots flew hundreds of airplanes in 39 countries.
They were flying because it was fun. Commercial applications were still in the future. People wanted to fly with barnstormers and attend air shows. It would not be until the late 1920s before commercial transport carried passengers, mail and merchandise.
Rutan is at the point with regard to development of space airplanes where the airplane was before the common man could fly. His SpaceShipOne demonstrated that “the little guy can fly above a hundred kilometers, without government assistance, and government technology, and government funds.”
“We strongly feel that the biggest problem is the safety problem, not the affordability problem,” claims Rutan.
“The real thing that we did here is to develop three new breakthroughs, and each one of them is going to have enormous effects on safety. The “care-free reentry” in which the craft realigns itself automatically is just one of those, so we think this is the right way to go and we think that we can get that level of early airplane safety if we adequately do our flight tests ahead of time.”
Rutan has an outstanding safety record over his 30 years of airplane development. His airplanes have never injured a pilot or had a major accident.
He maintains that his success is based on a philosophy of never having to defend their safety. Rutan requires all his people whether building, designing, flying or testing, always to be in the mode of questioning safety.
“But to never, ever put themselves in a position where they defend the safety. Once they do, you’re screwed.”
He explains what he means by saying, “If you’re always questioning it (safety) you can turn around and find something better and immediately incorporate it. For example, if you had turned in last week a report to government agency in which you’ve told the product, as it is, is safe, if you discover something better next week, you have two choices.”
“One, you can go and write an addendum to that report and essentially tell the government, that, gee, I was wrong last week, it wasn’t the safest that it can be, and now it is because I’ve discovered this new thing. And then you’ll find yourself debating that with them and losing your credibility with them.”
“We make changes almost every day when we’re in a research mode. So you can see you get into this big back and forth in which they see you making changes after you defend the safety to them.”
“Now the solution there is to never tell anybody it’s safe, but also question it, which then allows you to immediately incorporate safety features and go on. And, instead of firing somebody who designed something unsafe, you reward whoever found a better way and congratulate them. The other choice that people have is they’ll see something safer and they’ll realize they just told the government that it was safe last week. And then they made the decision that, well, you know, last week’s configuration — it’s safe enough”
Rutan also points out that he runs a small company. He doesn’t have a big safety department that works with government regulators. It would be counterproductive to divert his workforce from designing, manufacturing and testing to make the product as safe as possible in order to write reports and provide data to government regulators who are often naïve and sometimes inexperienced and won’t make a quick decision.
He maintains that he is not against government regulations but rather how they are applied. He believes that the solution is to allow the developer to define the testing that is needed for his system to show that it is safe. The developer would negotiate his test plan with the FAA, who would approve the fact that he did it. You can’t regulate too early in the development process because you don’t know what new ideas are going appear in the future.
He provides the example of NASA. He claims that “what Alan Shepard flew in was an expendable booster with a parachute recovery, and for 44 years of NASA manned space flight, they have not made significant improvements in concepts that will allow safe access to space.”
An article in the New York Times of April 4, 2005 cites that the loss of the Columbia and its crew two years ago was the outcome of a broken safety culture. James D. Wetherbee, a former shuttle commander and recently a safety official at The Johnson Space Center in Houston, is still concerned about safety at NASA. He states that “NASA’s management did not see safety clearly, and noted that the previous administrator, Sean O’keefe, had spoken about how much risk was acceptable.” Wetherbee says that is the wrong question to ask. The right question is what risk is necessary, and how do we eliminate the unnecessary risk.
What Rutan wants to do is follow the process the Wrights used. That was one of continuous improvement through experimentation and flight testing until both brothers believed their Flyer was safe enough to fly.
Rutan claims he will develop a space vehicle that is 100 times safer than anything developed so far.
But, the Wrights didn’t have to contend with the FAA or NASA.
Reference: Reason, March 31, 2005.