What are the Varieze and the Defiant?

In the Beginning

A long time ago, in a galaxy not too far away, Burt Rutan was a young flight test engineer for the Air Force out at Edwards AFB. For reasons that he has never disclosed to me (aside from the fact that he does not know me), Burt moved on. He had been working on a pretty neat canard aircraft called the VariViggen, which he intended as a personal fighter aircraft. It was a nice first design (he had built lots of subscale aircraft but this was his first full-size design). He left his job working for Jim Bede and founded his own company.

The Model 31/33 Varieze

One of the first things he investigated was the feasibility of using composite construction to build a high-aspect-ratio winged canard aircraft. The tiny creature that emerged was christened the Model 31 VariEze (because it was "very easy" to build). He intended it as a one-off research aircraft, but its popular reception at the Oshkosh Airshow encouraged him to sell the plans. This he did, after a redesign to accommodate a bigger engine, the Model 33. The name "Varieze" remained, however, and thousands of plans were sold.

Rutan Model 33 Varieze (from Wikipedia)

The Varieze's forte is speed with efficiency. A completely average example will fly 160 mph at 30 miles per gallon (mpg). A few top-notch examples have flown as fast as 250 mph in the Reno Air Races; others have set world records for distance and efficiency, notching nearly 70 mpg while flying 170 mph. One of the ways it achieves this is with a very small frontal section; the cockpit is pretty tiny!

The Model 40 Defiant

Over the next few years Rutan's inventions became bigger and bolder. In the late 1970's he designed a four/five seat twin-engine push-pull canard aircraft. He held a naming contest for it, and the winning entry was "Defiant," an apt name for an aircraft that defied convention. Supposedly the name "Defiant" actually came from the name for a heating stove. No matter- the aircraft performed magnificently. At one point it was nearly brought to production by Piper; however, Rutan and Piper never saw eye-to-eye and it never came to fruition. Rutan used his Defiant as his personal pickup truck for many years.

The Model 74 Defiant

Burt Rutan fended off requests to publish the plans for his Model 40 Defiant for several years. Eventually, in 1981 he agreed to let Fred Keller, who built an Oshkosh Champion Varieze, construct a Defiant and document the plans and process. The aircraft, the Model 74 Defiant, was built within a year, and the plans were available for sale by mid-1984. Several hundred plans were sold within a few months.

Rutan Model 74 Defiant (from 337skymaster.com)

The Defiant was designed with safety and utility in mind. The aircraft's systems are ingeniously simple, and the excellent performance adds a measure of safety. It is essentially an enlarged Varieze with an extra engine on the front. In contrast to the Varieze's almost complete lack of baggage space, the Defiant has tons of room in addition to the four seats.

Safety

The safety is built in two main ways. First, one of the major contributors to General Aviation accidents is loss of control due to stall and spin; these are most likely to happen at the worst time, when low and slow and approaching the airport on the turn to base or final. The Defiant's canard configuration makes it impossible to stall; specifically, the canard is set up with an incidence such that it stalls before the main wing. With nothing to hold the nose up anymore, the plane bobs down and quickly regains lift without the main wing ever having stalled.

The other big safety contributor is an obvious one: the presence of the second engine. Thanks to the Defiant's low-drag airframe, either engine is able to power the aircraft in a climb by itself. In addition, the inline configuration avoids the extremely dangerous critical engine loss-of-control scenario possible in other twins; briefly, the scenario involves a wing-mounted engine overpowering the tail authority at low speeds and forcing the plane into a wild and violent out-of-control maneuver. The engine-out scenario in the Defiant is ridiculously simple: advance the throttle levers and climb out of danger. No diagnosing which engine, no raising the gear, no accelerating in ground effect. Just climb out and go. I like that.

Epilogue

Burt Rutan's most famous homebuilt, the model 61 Long EZ, was designed after the original prototype Defiant, but before the modified 'production' version; the Long EZ is a modified and enlarged Varieze. Many lessons learned in the original Varieze were applied to the Long EZ and the second Defiant. In 1984, Burt and brother Dick Rutan (and Jeana Yeager) gained considerable fame for the Voyager round-the-world flight. In 1985, after the plans for the Defiant had only been available for a few months, Burt Rutan closed Rutan Aircraft Factory in pursuit of other projects; his company, Scaled Composites, has since built many exotic aircraft that embody his principle of simplicity and performance. The apogee of his career may have been the SpaceShipOne, the first civilian manned space flight in history. Rutan retired in 2011, but is rumored to be working on homebuilt designs in his retirement. 

Varieze serial 339 was completed in 1982, and bought by me in 2006.

Defiant serial 137 was bought in 1984, sold in 2009, and bought by me at the end of 2012.