Behind the Voyager Flight: 40 Years of Quieter Cockpits

Everyone knows the headline: in December 1986, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager flew the Burt Rutan–designed Voyager around the world nonstop and unrefueled, staying aloft 9 days, 3 minutes, and 44 seconds in a cabin the size of a phone booth. What fewer people know is that their hearing survived the ordeal because of a technology that had never flown before.

With the airframe stripped of every ounce of insulation to save weight, the two engines—one fore, one aft—put noise levels as high as 110 decibels straight into the crew’s ears. Bose engineers, then still developing active noise cancellation, approached the Voyager team in 1986 with two headset prototypes and a simple request: wear them, and tell us what happens. The gamble worked. The prototypes are credited with protecting the pilots’ hearing across the nine-day flight and helped launch Bose’s aviation business.

This year at AirVenture, the people behind that story sit down together. Dan Gauger, a now-retired Bose engineer who helped develop those first prototypes and was on-site with the Voyager team, will share his account on a panel reflecting on how flight technology has evolved over the past 40 years—and how it has made flying safer and more comfortable.

He is joined by an accomplished group:

• Mike Hance — Voyager Mission Control assistant director
• Chris Henry — EAA Aviation Museum director
• Patty Wagstaff — Championship aerobatic pilot

40 Years of Flight Tech Panel

• When: Thursday, July 23, 1:30–2:30 p.m.
• Where: Pilot Proficiency Center, adjacent to the EAA Aviation Museum

The Voyager itself now hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, but the conversation about what made—and keeps—general aviation flyable continues at Oshkosh. Full AirVenture programming is posted at eaa.org.