A millionaire’s hangar

Hughes Aircraft began as a rich young man’s workshop. Howard Hughes, heir to the Hughes Tool Company fortune, set it up as a division of Toolco in the early 1930s to build one aeroplane: the H-1 Racer. On 13 September 1935, near Santa Ana, he flew it at 352.39 mph to take the world landplane speed record, and in January 1937 he flew a modified H-1 from Los Angeles to New York in 7 hours 28 minutes. The company moved to Culver City in 1940. At the start of the Second World War it had four full-time employees; by the end, 80,000 people worked for it, mostly building parts and struts for other firms’ aircraft.

The flying boat that flew once

Hughes wanted to be a great military aircraft builder, and the war gave him his chance. His answer to U-boats sinking Atlantic convoys was a giant flying transport. Because aluminium was rationed, the H-4 Hercules was built almost entirely of birch using the Duramold process, which did not stop critics calling it the Spruce Goose. It was not ready until long after the war. On 2 November 1947, during what was billed as a taxi test at Long Beach, Hughes lifted it off the water for about a mile, 26 seconds at 70 feet. It never flew again. It remains the largest seaplane ever built, and held the record for the greatest wingspan of any aircraft flown until 2019.

Crash in Beverly Hills

The other wartime project nearly killed him. The XF-11, a twin-boom photo-reconnaissance aircraft ordered in quantity in 1943, was cut to two prototypes after the war. On 7 July 1946 Hughes took the first one up from Culver City himself. A propeller reversed pitch, and he crashed into three houses in Beverly Hills, suffering critical injuries. The failures led to a Senate investigation in 1947, one of the first to be televised. Hughes was cleared, but the military was wary of him ever after. His managers turned instead to radars and missiles, and Hughes Aircraft grew into an electronics giant that built the first working laser and the first geosynchronous satellite.

The Loach

Hughes kept a small band of aircraft engineers for himself. In 1948 he bought a heavy-lift helicopter design from Kellett, which became the XH-17 Flying Crane, still the holder of the record for the largest rotor ever flown. In 1955 the helicopter team moved under Hughes Tool. Its little Model 269, first flown in October 1956, became the TH-55 Osage, on which a generation of US Army helicopter pilots learned to fly. Then in 1965 Hughes won the Army’s Light Observation Helicopter contest with the egg-shaped Model 369, the OH-6 Cayuse. Pilots called it the Loach. In 1966 it set 23 world helicopter records, and 1,420 OH-6As were built, many lost in Vietnam.

Apache

The last great Hughes design was the one that endures. In 1972 the Army asked for an Advanced Attack Helicopter, and Hughes’s Model 77, the YAH-64, first flew on 30 September 1975 and beat Bell’s YAH-63 for the contract. Howard Hughes died in 1976, his holdings by then grouped as the Summa Corporation. In 1981 the helicopter arm became Hughes Helicopters, Inc., and in 1983 the first production AH-64 Apache rolled out of a new plant at Mesa, Arizona. Summa sold the company to McDonnell Douglas in January 1984. The Apache, now built by Boeing, passed 2,700 deliveries, and the Hughes 500 lives on with MD Helicopters.

Заводы

• Hughes Airport, Culver City · Culver City / Playa Vista, Los Angeles — Main plant from 1940; built the H-4 and XF-11; later home of the helicopter division
• Mesa plant · Mesa, Arizona — Apache production line opened 1983
• Tucson missile plant · Tucson, Arizona — Built in 1951; became Air Force Plant 44

Люди

• Howard Hughes · founder, owner and record pilot — 1905–1976; flew the H-1 records and the only H-4 flight
• Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge · engineers — Built Hughes’s fire-control systems; left in 1953 to found what became TRW
• Lawrence A. Hyland · general manager, later president of Hughes Aircraft — Joined 1954
• Robert Ferry · test pilot — Set the helicopter distance record in a YOH-6A, 1966

Рекорды и первые достижения

• World landplane speed record, 352.39 mph, H-1 Racer, 13 September 1935
• US transcontinental record, 7 h 28 min, H-1 Racer, 19 January 1937
• Largest seaplane ever built; largest wingspan flown until 2019, H-4 Hercules
• Largest rotor system ever flown, 134 ft, XH-17
• 23 world helicopter records for speed, endurance and climb, OH-6, 1966
• Helicopter endurance record of 101 hours, Hughes 269, 1958
• Collier Trophy awarded to Hughes Helicopters, 1983