The Spruce Goose, with Hollywood producer-aviator-tycoon Howard Hughes at the controls, makes its only flight, skimming the waters of Long Beach Harbor in California for roughly one minute.
That short hop, made mostly for the press and newsreel cameras, climaxed a story that began at the height of World War II. Appalled at the heavy toll German U-boats were taking on Allied shipping, Liberty ship (see here) builder Henry J. Kaiser proposed a fleet of gigantic flying transports to move men and materiel across the Atlantic. After Kaiser enlisted Hughes’s support, the two men got an $18 million government contract (about $250 million in today’s money) to build three flying boats.
Aircraft designer Hughes and his engineers came up with the Hughes H-4 Hercules, an eight-engine behemoth with a wingspan of 320 feet, wider than a football field is long. It was supposed to carry 750 troops. Because of wartime restrictions on critical materials, Hughes built the prototype, HK-1, not out of steel or aluminum but out of wood. The seaplane gained worldwide attention as the Spruce Goose (a name Hughes despised), but it was actually constructed largely of birch.
The project bogged down in cost overruns and red tape. Kaiser withdrew in 1944, but Hughes continued. When the government cut off funding and investigated Hughes for misappropriation of funds, he plowed $7 million of his own into the H-4.
Hughes finally got his plane off the ground (or, more accurately, off the water) in 1947. Following its short flight, the Spruce Goose was stored in a custom-built hangar and maintained in a state of flight-readiness. After Hughes’s death, in 1976, the plane passed from owner to owner and is now the centerpiece of Oregon’s Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum.—TL