Richard Rutan was born under the fortuitous crossing of talent and ambition – and he took it straight to the skies. He earned his pilot’s stripes around the same time as his driver’s license, at the age of sixteen, and three years later joined the Air Force Cadet Academy, flying missions over Vietnam upon graduation. Rutan was a skilled entrepreneur as well, designing with his brother Burt an ultralight piloted aircraft that helped pilots like Jeana Yeager (no relation to Chuck Yeager) break air speed records – and then break one for longevity.

On this day December 23, in 1986  the Rutan brothers’ Voyager aircraft, piloted by Jeana Yeager, completed the first nonstop, non-refueled circumnavigation of the globe.

The previous world-distance record was set more than two decades before, by an Air Force B-52 bomber flying 12,532 miles. The Voyager, sketched out literally on the back of a napkin at a lunch meeting between the Rutan brothers and Yeager, would be much lighter, made of composite materials more likely to be founded on space shuttles than on private planes. But it was a sight to behold, with a 110-foot wingspan, when it launched from California to complete its historic voyage.