In the final stage of our ranking list, we reach number three that corresponds to the most important designer of the last 30 years. This is none other than the American Burt Rutan (1943) who from his company Scaled Composites in Mojave’s dessert, with his revolutionary developments and with the use of composed materials, has been able to proof that the innovation in the aeronautic world is not only in the hands of companies like Boeing or Airbus, but in the hands of people with an extraordinary talent and his small groups of engineers.
Among his achievements we find the design of the GlobalFlyer that made a non stop flight around the world with a single pilot, the Ares, a revolutionary low-cost jetfighter, the StarShip, designed for Beechcraft as an executive jetliner in canard configuration, that employed for the first time a carbon fiber composite for the structure and, of course, the design of the SpaceShip One (and the carrier aircraft White Knight) which won the X-Prize in 2004 flying at an altitude of over 328000 ft.
Today we will talk about one of the most difficult duties that one has to face in his professional life: write a good specification. Although, as mentioned previously, this work is usually given to the newcomers, this task is one of the most complex ones that an engineer can face. It takes knowledge, experience and synthesis capacity and these are capabilities that not everybody has.