"Keep the damn thing."

CCLXII

Unlike many of his contemporaries Howard Hughes wasn’t drawn to flight by Charles Lindbergh’s great accomplishment. He was 22 when The Lone Eagle landed in Paris, a prime age for the adventurous, but he had been flying since he was 14. The story is told that he learned to fly by going down to an airfield one day in 1919, watching planes in the air, copying down the tail number of the best-handled aircraft, and then offering the pilot $100 dollars a day (equivalent to $1500 in 2018) to teach him to fly. Hughes was no natural. It took him over a year to solo, and the teenager insisted on going up every day, weather permitting. He made his first instructor wealthy.

Hughes in 1912, aged seven

A lot of young men were approaching pilots in 1919. Their would-be instructors were mostly glad to have them. Most flyers of the era had come home from the Great War loving flying, but it was a skill few people wanted or were willing to pay for, and almost nobody who wanted to fly could afford more than a few lessons. The difference between Hughes and most of his peers was that he had the money to make his merest whims come true. He even paid to have his pilot’s license have a low number close to Lindbergh’s.

Hughes at age eleven, the year he built his ham radio and motorcycle

It should come as no surprise at all that Hughes’ first fascination with airplanes had to do with their engineering and construction, not an unlikely path for a man who would attempt an engineering degree from Caltech (he dropped out because he was bored). Hughes had built his first ham radio in Houston, Texas when he was just eleven, and acquired the license CY-5; the first four hams, all adults, had bought their rigs from catalogues.  He also built his own steam engine motorcycle. Even as a boy, he had a flair for design and redesign --- he’d even improved his father’s patented drill bit while he was still virtually in short pants.  Looking at the primitive and small spruce / canvas / wire planes of the day, he could imagine sleek metal multiengine monsters carrying scores of passengers to romantic, far-off destinations. Like Juan Terry Trippe, who’d just come home from the war to found a small sightseeing airline, Howard Hughes saw flight as the province of the common man. Had he been one scintilla less brilliant, he might have ended up designing planes for Trippe. But Hughes was too much of a polymath to limit his interest to one thing.

Hughes, age 20, in 1926 as he arrived in Burbank, California

Like all pilots of the barnstorming days, Hughes eschewed flight plans, was forced to follow railroad tracks, used road maps to navigate, and had his share of crashes. Early on, he had a lot of crashes, and developed a reputation as an accident-prone, probably reckless, but incredibly lucky pilot who walked away without as much as a bump from crackups that killed other men. Pilots didn’t like to fly with him or around him either, because he’d simply fly into another pilot’s airspace without a care; sometimes the other guy died. Hughes seemed to think he was doing everything right, and developed a penchant for ritual --- he always entered the airfield with the same foot forward, he always wore his hat cocked at a certain angle --- and he became convinced, in an early manifestation of his eventually life-devouring Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, that the rituals were what was keeping him alive.  

Hughes’ immense wealth (he was a billionaire at a time when being a millionaire seemed nearly impossible to most people) allowed him to do things on impulse that even rich men would have to consider for months or years. When offered ownership of Trans-World Airlines (TWA) in 1939 for $15 million dollars he muttered, “That’s a small fortune,” and wrote a check on the spot for the full amount

If he fixated on small details, large details completely eluded him. Even years later he had a tendency to buy a plane for cash on the spot, fly off to some impulsive destination, land, park her on the hardstand, and call for a cab to take him someplace. Then he’d take a train or a ship home. It usually took days or weeks for the airport to track him down as the owner of the abandoned aircraft, and sometimes he didn’t even remember owning it. Usually, he just told them to “keep the damn thing,” he’d buy another.

Hughes, testifying before Congress, 1947