The shark's nose. Photo: Sarah Scoles
"Everybody wants to be the hero test pilot with the jacket standing next to the plane looking real cool"
Flight suit on, Gillen enters the cockpit on the day of the test. Photo: Sarah Scoles
Author's forward view from Snort's backseat. Photo: Sarah Scoles
After initial tests, Seguin and Gillen take their planes above the first cloud layer. Photo: Sarah Scoles
One of Seguin's big, bad moments came during a prep flight for a world-record attempt. He switched from the "cold" (regular) fuel to the hot gas, which racers use to go fast. He pushed the engine to 100 percent of its power, warped the plane into overdrive, checked that all systems were nominal, and then began pulling back. Once he throttled down to 500 horsepower, he switched to the cold gas."The engine quit," he remembers. "Like, dead."But he didn't panic. "We're pushing the engine so hard that it's not uncommon for it to stumble," he says. "You don't freak out enough when it's doing something weird." Seguin didn't freak out enough, until the engine remained stubbornly off. He was able to glide in "on energy" (or momentum, no power), but another plane barely cleared the runway in time.Flying in this plane, with a view everywhere I look, including up, is not like flying in a plane. It's like being part of the sky.
Circling around Mojave, the shark plane seems to fly into the Sun. Photo: Sarah Scoles
Toward the end of his engineering degree, he took a job building World War II-era airplanes and began thinking about a post-college career that would combine his interests in airplanes and engineering. "I made a list of companies that did that," he says, "and more were on the Mojave airport than anywhere else in the country."So he hopped in the 150 and flew to Mojave to see who wanted to give him a job for the summer. He ended up landing internships at XCOR Aerospace and Nemesis Air Racing. But, most importantly, he got contacts at Scaled Composites, his dream company. When Seguin got back to school, he called the company's office every Monday afternoon."Maydays used to be sexy"
During breakfast at the Voyager restaurant, a representative of the Mojave Transportation Museum stops by the booth to show off archival airplane schematics that were donated to the museum. Photo: Sarah Scoles