In May 1978, a 37-year-old machinist and his wife flew their odd-looking homebuilt airplane from Indiana to Mojave, California, to show it to its designer, Burt Rutan.
Rutan, who had founded the Rutan Aircraft Factory (RAF) several years earlier and was now selling plans for VariEzes, looked over the plane, an all-wood canard pusher called a VariViggen, and admired the workmanship. He promptly invited the visitor and his wife to join his little company. They accepted.
Rarely are lives so entirely reshaped by a single decision.
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The new fellow’s name was Mike Melvill, and his wife’s name was Sally. Originally from South Africa, they had been together since their teens and had two sons. Sally became RAF’s office manager, Mike shop foreman and editor of the company newsletter, The Canard Pusher.
In 1978 I was a regular visitor at RAF, flying up from Los Angeles on Wednesdays for lunch at Reno’s Cafe. My arrival, usually with flying buddy and erstwhile FLYING contributor Jerry Slocum, was the signal that lunch was at hand. “Squeet! Squeet!” Rutan would exclaim, and we all trooped toward the door.
So I got to know Mike and Sally from the start. But my memories of those days, 50 years ago, have faded. Only a few episodes survive.
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One is Burt and Mike coming down to Whiteman Airport (KWHP) to show me how to lay up fiberglass in Melmoth 2, the new all-composite plane I began to build in 1981. They did the inner skin of the aft fuselage that day. Another indelible picture in my memory is of standing beside an anxious Sally on the ramp at Mojave in 2004 and watching a plume of white smoke grow upward toward the edge of the sky. Atop that slender pillar was Mike, heading for space.
Another is the time I made an unplanned landing at Porterville, California, with what turned out to be a broken crankshaft. I called Mike, who lived in the mountains nearby. He flew down in the VariViggen and delivered me to my car at Whiteman. A few minutes later I was watching the VariViggen’s lights climb away from Runway 12 and swing northward toward home, and reflecting that Mike was a good friend to have.
Mike was always generous, always helpful, always ready to make things—especially airplanes—better. When, 20 years after that first layup, it came time to move Melmoth 2 from Whiteman to Mojave for flight testing, Mike supplied a trailer and lent me one of his hangars.
It was late in May when he winched the plane off the trailer. It was not until the end of October that the FSDO inspector, who I think was annoyed that I had not hired a (hugely overpriced) private inspector, finally signed off Melmoth 2 for flight. By then Mike must have been dying to get his hangar back, but he never said a word.
Mike was flying chase when I cycled the landing gear for the first time and found that I couldn’t get it fully down and locked because of drag on the nosewheel. Burt’s brother Dick later informed me that I uttered an impermissible expletive on the frequency. Mike’s patient advice—basically, slow down and cut the power to idle—proved correct.
Maybe because he wanted the hangar back, but more likely because he loved flying any new airplane, he lost no time helping get the required 25 hours flown off. After I made the first few flights, I gave him a couple of pages entitled “What You Need to Know to Fly Melmoth 2,” thinking that he would study them that evening and we would discuss them before he made his first flight.
When I showed up the next day, he had already put a couple of hours on the plane. Over the next weeks he flew it 11 hours, collecting reams of performance data and, one weekend when I was out of town, replacing the rudder pedal linkage with a superior version of his own. He later replaced the brake cylinders with better ones, also without asking. Mike opened the flight envelope of Melmoth 2 to VNE. He did the first stalls and the first rolls. He would later be the first to fly the plane with four aboard.
The phrase “a pilot’s pilot” is so hackneyed as to be all but meaningless, but Mike really was someone pilots would look up to in the way that some non-pilots look up to pilots. He had flown an incredible variety of airplanes, flown them all over the world, and had made the first flights in nearly all the weird designs Rutan dreamed up. Just for the heck of it, he and Dick Rutan had flown around the world in two Long-EZs, 38,000 miles, mostly ocean. Mike’s Long-EZ had 4,500 hours.
Mike was brave. He had his share of near-death experiences. One that was caught on video took place during a test flight in SpaceShipOne. Something went wrong with an electric actuator, making it impossible to configure the spaceplane properly for reentry.
Mission control at Mojave was in a panic. Mike, aware that the flight might turn out to be his last, took a handful of M&M’s from a pocket of his flight suit and released them into the cabin. They floated weightless around him like so many little comets and asteroids. I never see M&M’s without thinking of Mike, distant and alone in that seemingly doomed capsule, but still self-possessed and even whimsical.
Mike did far more favors for me than I was ever able to do for him. But I did open a door that I think gave him a lot of joy late in his flying career. I introduced him to Javier Arango, who had a collection of extremely accurate reproductions of World War I fighters. Arango, a consummate pilot himself, detected in Mike that “ability in the abstract”—the knack of doing everything well—that set him apart from the common run of flyers.
Javier’s airplanes, fitted with rotary engines most of which were century-old survivors of the Great War, were tricky to master, but Javier trusted Mike with them. I think flying a Sopwith Camel put a nice bookend to a career anchored, at its other extreme, by SpaceShipOne.
Mike accumulated countless trophies and honors, including that of becoming the “first civilian astronaut” during SpaceShipOne’s successful campaign to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize. But the litany of his accomplishments omits what was most essential about him—that he was a modest, uncomplicated, sweet-natured guy, completely forthright and entirely loyal.
He was as capable of anger as of forgiveness—I was at times the object of both—but he was untainted, as far as I could tell, by ego and ambition.
Mike Melvill died in March. In my life, at least, he cannot be replaced.
This column first appeared in the July Issue 972 of the FLYING print edition.
