LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Howard Hughes: Aircraft
built 191 days ago
Hughes died without a will in 1976, and the Institute was mired in years of litigation. Finally, in 1984, a court appointed new trustees, and they promptly sold Hughes Aircraft to General Motors for $5 billion. Suddenly, an institute created basically as a sham became the richest charity America had ever seen.
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Throughout the 1940s and 1950s Hughes Electronics, a subsidiary of Hughes Aircraft, was one of the largest suppliers of weapons to the U.S. Air Force and Navy. The company ... developed sophisticated defense systems for national security projects, such as air-to-air guided missiles. This defense system was considered one of the most important of its kind because it could detect incoming attacks and immediately launch retaliatory missiles. In the 1960s the company helped develop artificial satellites.
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[C]hapter of a book on Hughes by Dennis Parker, in which the H-1, his racing plane, is tested for the first time in 1935. The main H-1 Racer site has photos of the reproduction aircraft that was featured in The Aviator, plus other useful links.
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Hughes was summoned to testify before the Senate War Investigating Committee to explain why the aircraft had not been delivered to the United States Army Air Forces during the war, but the committee disbanded without releasing a final report. Because the contract required the aircraft to be built of "non-strategic materials," Hughes built the aircraft largely from birch (rather than aluminum) in his Westchester, California facility to fulfill his contract. The aircraft was on display alongside the RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach, California for many years before being moved to McMinnville, Oregon, where it is now part of the Evergreen Aviation Museum.
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After the war, Hughes fashioned his company Hughes Aircraft into a major defense contractor. Portions of the company wound up with McDonnell Douglas, and eventually Boeing when those two companies merged. The remainder of Hughes Aircraft was sold to Raytheon in 1998.
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Hughes died on 5 April 1976, at 1:27 PM while on an aircraft owned by Robert Graf, en route from his penthouse in Acapulco, Mexico to The Methodist Hospital in Houston. It has ... been argued that he died before leaving Mexico inside his penthouse at the "Acapulco Princess Hotel"
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