The Phone Call
In June 2013, I received a phone call around 8 PM and by 10PM I was on the road from Stanford to Mojave with Google maps gently proclaiming it to be a 4 hours 48 min journey. All these memories were flashing back and forth while driving on a highway to Mojave Desert that seemed to kiss the starry sky far ahead at the horizon. Memories have power in their own way and that day I realized they also had life. They seemed to dance and rejoice for my journey to the desert. I had only seen in various Discovery Channel shows and documentaries about Mojave where some of the greatest airplanes in the history of general aviation were built and tested. With Edwards Air Force base adjacent to Mojave, this is the place where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier and all the early jet development happened in this place.
I had been to Mojave about a month before this day and while having lunch in Voyager cafe at Mojave spaceport, an old man had just landed his Cessna 150 and parked outside the this restaurant. He then walked in and took a seat next to my table and murmured to himself "It's windy today". My jaws dropped the moment a colleague whispered me that this person was Dick Rutan, one of the greatest pilots in the world who flew Voyager around the world non-stop making one of the last aviation's first and prominent world record. Feeling that this could be the opportunity I never would have in my life, to walk to him and share my story and hopefully if everything goes well, request him to take me to fly in his airplane.
The person who called that night was indeed Dick Rutan. I was about to experience a dream that me and my colleagues had envisioned back in the college, watching videos about the adventures of Dick and his brother Burt Rutan, who designed Virgin Galactic's Spaceship. At sharp, 08:00, we met and discussed about the flight and were soon airborne and the rest was stupefying awe. Everything seemed to suddenly have paused in my life and in that limbo was a beautiful reality of me and him suspended in the air and his voice orchestrating
"Manu, let me tell you something. Flying is like herding sheeps. You got to take care of all these dials and have an intuition if anyone of them is defying your expectation."
First flight with Dick in Cessna 152












