Why was the Voyager aircraft not symmetrical? A 20-year mystery
solved. - By Joe Pappalardo - AirSpaceMag.com, November 01, 2006
Some people are really bothered by things that are unequal. This
time it was a portion of Voyager, which in 1986 completed the
first nonstop, non-refueled flight around the world. Reader
Peter Lakatos has been torturing himself for 20 years over the
puzzle of why the canard-like structure near Voyager's nose (a
canard is a horizontal stabilizer mounted in front of the main
wing) joins the twin booms at different points. He noticed this
both in photos and in museum scale models, where one of the
booms juts out slightly ahead of the other one. Thus begins the
case of the uneven booms. "On the left side the leading edge of
the canard is exactly flush with the forward-most point on the
boom," Lakatos wrote us. "That is not the case on the right
side, where the canard's junction with the boom is noticeably
set farther back from the tip of the boom." There's a good
reason for that, says P