Even as a young child growing up in the small Central Valley town of Dinuba, Dick Rutan knew that he wanted to be a pilot. Whenever he heard an airplane, he would gaze up and it seemed the sky was beckoning him. “I wanted to get up there in it,” Rutan recalled. “Those contrails of the big jets overwhelmed me. It was my destiny to fly.” He started lessons at 15, soloed on his 16th birthday and had a flight instructor’s rating by the time he graduated high school. He would go on to fly more than... Read this story
