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Howard Hughes: Hughes Aircraft
built 199 days ago
Howard Hughes was more than an aviator: he made movies, ran an airline, designed the half-cup bra, founded aerospace companies, made billions, and was the country's most famous hypochondriac. But those are incidentals as for a fellow pilot like George Marrett, who flew a rescue Skyraider in Vietnam and wrote about it in Cheating Death , and who afterward became a test pilot for Hughes Aircraft. By concentrating on the aviation side of his former boss, Marrett has written a short, readable, and fascinating biography. In his hands, Howard Hughes turns out to have been a lot more interesting than Charles Lindbergh, though he never came close to him as an aviator.
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Howard Hughes answers questions before a U.S. Senate Investigating Committee, looking into Hughes Aircraft's military contracts, late 1940s. The tycoon had been summoned to explain why he had failed to deliver aircraft on time and within budget. The honest answer was that he meddled with his aircraft company so much that it was dysfunctional. Only later, when he started a second aircraft company, and vowed hands-off management, did he become a successful defense contractor.
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Howard Hughes test-flew the "Spruce Goose," a two-hundred-ton plywood airplane with a wingspan longer than a football field on this date in 1947. The reclusive billionaire piloted the craft over Long Beach Harbor in California. Officially the Hughes H-4 Hercules, the seaplane was built by the Hughes Aircraft company and was the only one of its kind ever built. It was the largest flying boat ever to actually fly.
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Howard Hughes was very hands-on in every film and every aviation innovation. Hughes flew all the planes that he helped design including the XF-11, an experimental spy plane for the US Army. The aircraft almost caused Hughes his life when it crashed landed in a Beverly Hills neighborhood, ripping through three houses and then exploded into flames. Hughes ... piloted a plane in Hell's Angels. His compulsive and controlling behavior is part of what made him a strong and powerful businessman.
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During 1943 Howard Hughes and Preston Sturges began discussing the joint venture that would evolve into California Pictures. Continually finding himself sidetracked by his aircraft commitments, Hughes needed a capable filmmaker who could ... shoulder the production responsibilities of the film company. Hughes was drawn to Sturges who shared a similar background with the wealthy renegade. Like Hughes, Sturges was a successful entrepreneur — operating his own engineering company and restaurant-nightclub — all on the side of a brilliant film career. Hughes frequented Sturges' restaurant called The Players, and established a friendship with Sturges during Hughes' early years in Hollywood. Hughes became the unofficial model for the hero in Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels (1942), featuring the exploits of a Hollywood playboy who goes slumming to experience the life of the common man.
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Soon after, Hughes Aircraft built its first internally designed airplane--the H-1 racer. The H-1 was designed for speed, pure and simple; it was streamlining at its very best. On September 13, 1935, Hughes piloted the H-1 to a new speed record of 352 miles per hour (566 kilometers per hour) at Martin Field, near Santa Ana, California. The previous record was 314 miles per hour (515 kilometers per hour). Although Hughes had already achieved the record after a few passes over the airfield, he kept pushing, and the H-1 ran out of gas. Forced to make an emergency landing in a nearby beet field, Hughes walked away from the plane unharmed.
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