"Not on your life."

CCLXI

Howard Hughes (1905-1976)

A full year after Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific, another world-famous aviator stepped up to try his hand at a Worldflight. 

Howard Hughes, who had been born in Texas in 1905, was a 33-year-old wunderkind whose father, Howard Hughes Sr., had perfected a double bit for petroleum drilling in 1903, and then had had the brilliant idea of trademarking it and then leasing it, not selling it, to prospectors. Far superior to the single bit used until that time, the double bit became (and with variations remains) the industry standard for oil drilling. 

Every oil company that wanted to drill effectively and efficiently and most of all competitively used the Hughes bit. The Hughes Tool Corporation set its own leasing terms for drill bits, and since the elder Hughes was providing bits to some of the largest and richest companies on Earth, he became one of the industry’s giants and one of the richest men on Earth. Howard Hughes’ father died prematurely when Howard was only eighteen, and the son became a millionaire many times over.

 

 

Hughes in 1930 with his Boeing 100A. Aside from its smooth fuselage, the plane also boasted a supercharger

It was only 1923 when Howard Hughes Jr. came into his fortune, the dawn of the Soaring Twenties, and Hughes diversified his holdings. He became heavily invested in avant-garde areas like aviation, in the motion picture industry, in real estate, in oil, in general technology, and in early telecommunications networks.

Among Hughes’ aeronautical inventions was the fully-streamlined fuselage without projecting rivet heads. First appearing on a modified Boeing 100A in the early 1930s, fairings and wheel covers were added to the aircraft, a civilian model, which allowed it to outfly the P-12 fighter plane then used by the U.S. Army Air Corps.  He would later invent the pressurized aircraft cabin, among other innovations.

 

The New York Daily News, always known for its tabloid excesses, didn’t fail to disappoint this time either

Hughes was famously obsessive-compulsive, and his obsession in the 1930s was breaking aviation speed records.  On September 13, 1935, flying his custom designed Hughes H-1 Racer, he set an airspeed record for a civilian landplane of 352 miles per hour. On January 13, 1936, he set a new transcontinental (Burbank-to-Newark) record of 9 hours, 27 minutes, 10 seconds. On January 9, 1937, he broke his own record by making the same trip in 7 hours, 28 minutes, 25 seconds.

The Hughes H-1 Racer

No sooner had he climbed out of the cockpit of the H-1 Racer than he announced that he would circle the world at record speed, breaking Wiley Post’s solo flight time of 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes set in the summer of 1933.  

 

Hughes (hatted) standing next to his Lockheed Electra Model 14 with Thomas L. Thurlow, Harry Connor, Richard Stoddart, and Edward Lund.  The well-known impresario Grover Whalen (far left) christened the airplane

Hughes’ choice for the aircraft was a Lockheed 14 Super Electra. He chose the enlarged version of Amelia Earhart’s famous plane due to its larger fuel capacity, its extra space for additional fuel tanks (which Hughes made self-sealing by coating them with neoprene, a flight engineering first), and its room for a full crew. The plane was outfitted with two 1200 horsepower Wright Cyclone engines. Not wishing to share Earhart’s fate, Hughes had the most advanced radio transceiver available installed in the cockpit, and everyone aboard drilled with it. Four (not just two) compasses were installed, and the best Sperry automatic pilot was added to the mix --- allowing the pilots to rest and recuperate (though they did not much more than catnap en route). As a fallback safety measure, Hughes had the open space inside the cantilevered wings filled up with ping pong balls for positive flotation in the event of a ditching.

Unlike Post who flew solo, and Earhart who was accompanied by only Fred Noonan, Hughes took along four other men, Harry Connor as copilot and navigator, Tom Thurlow as navigator, Richard Stoddart who was the radio operator, and Ed Lund, as flight engineer.

The Hughes Lockheed Model 14 Super Electra. Larger by a third than Amelia Earhart’s Model 10, Hughes equipped it with the most advanced communications and avionics equipment available, and it carried a crew of five. Note the RDF loop beneath the fuselage rather than atop

Hughes and his crew departed New York on July 10, 1938, after a full year of preparation in flight training, jungle survival, mountaineering, ditching, and sea survival techniques. 

The Hughes Worldflight was not primarily an endurance test, but a speed test. He wanted to break Post’s record, not replicate Earhart’s seemingly endless Equatorial trek.  Instead, Hughes chose to circle the world at a much higher northern latitude, very significantly shortening the flight.

The path of the Hughes Worldflight carried the crew from Floyd Bennet Field in Brooklyn, New York to Paris, on to Moscow, Omsk, and Yakutsk, all in the U.S.S.R., then on to Fairbanks, Minneapolis, and home. The elapsed flying time of the voyage was only 91 hours (3 days, 19 hours, 17 minutes). Leaving July 10, 1938 they landed back in Brooklyn on July 15th

Despite the relative brevity of the flight it was not without its problems. Exceeding more than 25,000 pounds at liftoff, the overloaded and fully crewed plane nearly ran out of runway taking off. The tail wheel was severely damaged during the rough departure, making the landing in Paris a complicated matter. Hitting fierce headwinds over the Atlantic, the Super Electra ran out of fuel (despite the auxiliary tanks), making it to LeBourget outside Paris literally on fumes. 

Fogbound, they flew across Europe and into Russia largely without incident though on instruments, but Hughes played it cautiously when lifting off for Fairbanks, Alaska. He had planned a night flight, but his gut told him to wait until daybreak to leave isolated Yakutsk. Although Russia was largely flat steppe, mysterious mountain ranges rose up unexpectedly over the landscape, few ever properly surveyed; and though Dr. Hugo Eckener had flown the Graf Zeppelin through the fog-shrouded Stanovoys by the seat of his pants in 1929, Hughes decided to play it safe and cross the Terkhoisankoi Mountains (reported altitude 6,500 feet) in daylight. It was a wise decision as it turned out, for the mountain range was capped with snow and reached nearly 10,000 feet. Had he tried to fly it in the dark everyone aboard would most likely have been killed.

 

“Would I like to make the flight again?” he mused to reporters afterward. “Not on your life. Once is enough.”