1938

Howard Hughes, Jr. was born on December 24, 1905 in Houston, Texas, the son of Howard Hughes, Sr. and Alene Ganos Hughes. The senior Hughes invented a machine that greatly facilitated drilling for oil, an invention that made him, and later his only child, extremely wealthy. The young Hughes attended several prestigious prep schools and briefly Rice University. He was an average student but had already demonstrated a strong mechanical bent. When he was fourteen, his father paid five dollars for the boy’s brief ride in a Curtis seaplane, an experience that marked the beginning of a lifelong love affair with flying.
The death of his mother (in 1922) and father (in 1924) made him a young millionaire. By the age of nineteen he had dropped out of Rice, persuaded a Texas judge to free him from a minor’s disabilities, and married his first wife, Ella Rice. Later that year he moved to southern California where part of his father’s business empire was located and where he spent much of his time furthering his flying ability. At the same time his uncle, Rupert Hughes, a successful film writer and director, convinced him to enter the movie business as a producer.
Hughes enjoyed modest success in films when he was only in his early twenties. A real breakthrough was Hell’s Angels (1929), which dramatized the experiences of First World War pilots. At a cost of $3.8 million, it was the most extravagant film made in Hollywood up to that point. Hughes closely oversaw the scenes of aerial combat and successfully transformed what had begun as a silent film into one of the earliest “talkies.” Among other things, this involved replacing members of the original cast, most of whom lacked English language fluency, with native-born and sometimes glamorous newcomers such as Jean Harlow. Amidst much publicity Hell’s Angels opened on June 30, 1930. Dazzling critics and audiences alike, it launched the legend of Hughes as daring, independent, and willing to gamble.1
After Hell’s Angels Hughes left the directing of his productions to talented men, including Lewis Milestone (The Front Page) and Howard Hawks (Scarface). By 1932, moreover, he had become more interested in flying than moviemaking. He came to own what early biographers characterized as a “small airforce.”2 He was especially interested in his racer, which had been built by Boeing for the U. S. Army Air Corps – he had arranged to buy this plane through the Department of Commerce. Leasing a corner of a Lockheed Aircraft Corporation hangar in Burbank, he hired designers and mechanics whose efforts increased the racer’s speed. As expenses rose, he created the Hughes Aircraft Company as a division of the Hughes Tool company.3
In 1934 Hughes suspended his Hollywood career (aside from romantic interludes with screen actresses such as Ida Lupino, Katharine Hepburn, and others). He took his redesigned racer to the Miami area where he easily won a major regional race. His team subsequently built a land plane, called the H-1, that would fly higher and faster than earlier models. Retractable landing gear was one of its unique features.
On September 13, 1935, with Hughes at the controls, the H-1 set a new speed record of 352 miles per hour over a course in California. He broke additional records in 1936 by flying from Miami to New York City in four hours and twenty-one minutes and cross-country from Burbank to Newark, New Jersey in seven hours and twenty-eight minutes. At the White House on March 3, 1937 President Roosevelt presented him with the Harman International Trophy for Best Aviator of the Year. Hughes was only the third individual to win this award – previous recipients were Charles Lindbergh and Wiley Post.4
Wiley Post held the record for flying around the world: in 1933 he had accomplished this in seven days and nineteen hours. Hughes was determined to break this record and to do so in a far more scientifically sophisticated manner than his predecessor. He first considered the DC-1 and the Sikorsky S-43 but later abandoned them in favor of the faster Lockheed Model 14 (L-14). The L-14 was a twelve-passenger transport plane that could be readily modified. Hughes’s improvements included two more powerful engines and expansion of the plane’s fuel capacity. For its time the L-14 was very advanced. Part of its equipment, for example, was an automatic pilot that could fly on a predetermined course for hours at a time. The plane also had an elaborate radio system, and Hughes would arrange for spare parts to be stored in cities and towns where landings might be necessary.5
A number of problems held up progress well into 1938. The Department of Commerce twice denied Hughes permission to undertake his flight, first because the project supposedly lacked scientific merit and, second because a similar plane had recently crashed. As late as July 3, 1938 Hughes was apparently so uncertain about his ultimate destination that he told the New York Times that his plans after reaching Paris were “indefinite.”6
Government approval finally arrived on July 8, as the crew of five kept busy at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn by fixing a number of mechanical problems. The L-14 got a new name, which was “New York World’s Fair 1939.” This had resulted from a request by Grover Whalen, the Fair’s chief, to publicize the coming event. Finally, on July 10, after a very brief speech by Hughes, the crowd of roughly 5,000 assembled at Floyd Bennett watched the plane take off at 7:19 pm. Loaded with 1,500 gallons of fuel and other necessities, none of the airport’s runways were long enough to effect lift-off. Hughes consequently chose the south runway where the paved surface gave way to a flat, smooth stretch of earth.