Richard Richard Glenn Rutan first touched down on planet Earth on July 1st, 1938 in Loma Linda, California.

His charmed life began the minute the clock started running.

You see, Dick, the eldest, followed by Nellianne and finally Bird in 1943, hit a much

more valuable jackpot than mere wealth or social prominence. All three began life with that greatest

gift of all. They had great parents. George and Irene Rutan ran one of the most successful

mom and pop operations in aviation history, and that's what they went by,

too, Mom and Pop Rutan, who gave the world a beautiful and elegant stewardess, one of the two

greatest aircraft designers to ever walk the earth, and in terms of sheer achievements, arguably

the greatest pilot that ever lived. Now, like every real American boy, Dick got his pilot's

license on his 16th birthday, and seemingly before the ink had dried, he found himself exactly where he belonged in the front seat of the best jets of the most powerful Air Force the world has ever seen.

He left his younger brother behind to build model airplanes in order to impress his lifelong hero who was no longer

there to see them. But he would see what those model airplanes would eventually become, and

one day he'd fly one of his kid brother Bert's toy airplanes all away around the by-god

planet.

Dick started his flying career in the backseat of an F-101 B voodoo. That's more of an interceptor than a fighter, really. He did the same in the F-89 Scorpion for a while,

and then served as the in-flight navigator aboard a Douglas C-124 Globmaster 2.

A big, tough, slow-propeller airplane.

And this experience would come in handy when he would fly a small

fragile and slow propeller airplane many years later but then Dick Ratan got to move to

the position that every pilot covet whether they care to admit it or not that would

be the front and only seat in a fighter jet in Rutan's case it happened to be the

F-100 Super Saber, and if you were a

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