Flying Planes and Herding Sheeps

[flyingwithdickrutan]

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

[flyingwithdickrutan]

Prologue

Growing up in a small town in the Himalayas, I have fond memories of running outside my home every moment I heard rambling sound of jets that once in a while flew overhead or showing up at home every day at 6PM sharp to watch an hourly broadcast of Disney Hour that would some time run episodes of Talespin, a cartoon about flight and adventure. Without internet, along with encyclopedias in my school library, this would be the only way for me to see the scales and figures to build model airplanes in my father's man cave. My father one day brought a bolt and he in his excitement described how bolt was from an airplane. "Whoa". And there I stood gazing the bolt, fascinated about its divine purpose to fly free. Without internet and even computer, staring at the airplanes would be my only way to get perspective on the scale of overall geometry to build model airplanes. I would buy sheets of styrofoam from a local hardware shop and recycle motors and batteries from my old toys to build model airplanes which never flew for more than a minute. My family could not afford an airplane ticket for travel in the early days and it was until 2004 when I had my first chance to fly in an airplane. I remember sticking my head to the window and see as far as I could, the homes, rivers and green fields spanning out in the northern plains of India.

I had come long way in my life from those memories to until this day. Today, I am an aerospace engineer with affiliations from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and Stanford University. I have designed airplanes and built things that are currently orbiting the planet or about to be launched to space and nothing has given me more happiness than immersing myself to the enigmatic world of making things fly. 

[flyingwithdickrutan]

"Racing the Sun"

This painting vividly portrays elements of my love with aviation - airplane, joshua tree and mountains (Mojave) and cowboy (freedom).