People have flown faster and higher and travel by air has become almost a dull routine. But 80 years ago, Howard Hughes electrified the country, setting a transcontinental record from California to Newark in a plane designed for speed.
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The small plane shot over Newark Airport, the roar of its powerful engine echoing over the vast airfield as it swept low before pulling around in a tight power turn.
The pilot had already lowered his flaps, killing off speed, when he spotted the United Air Lines flight on the runway below. He opened his throttle and circled until the Chicago-bound airliner began its takeoff roll. Finally, with a signal from the tower, the gleaming aircraft of polished aluminum and dark blue wings lined up with the runway, dropped its wheels, and touched down into history.
"I'm very tired," said Howard Hughes, grimy with oil but wearing a carefully knotted dress tie under his flying suit as he climbed out of the cramped cockpit before a crowd of reporters. "A bit shaky."
Eighty years ago today, the famed billionaire aviator and movie producer flew from Burbank to Newark in a transcontinental run for the record books, traveling coast-to-coast in 7 hours 28 minutes and 25 seconds--at what was then an astounding average speed of 332 miles an hour.
His sleek plane, now on display in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, was unlike anything ever been seen before. Designed and built to break a record, it incorporated a flush-riveted skin, an automatic pilot, hydraulically operated landing gear, and a fire suppression system. But it was also something else.
Meticulously built with impeccable workmanship, the plane even today seems made of pieces that melt into each other, as if sculpted from a single block of metal.
"It's by far the most beautiful aircraft ever made," declared Bob van der Linden, chairman of the aeronautics department of the Air and Space Museum and curator of the plane known as the Hughes H-1. "It's a work of art."
Since then, people have flown faster and higher and travel by air has become almost a dull routine.
Flying from Los Angeles to Newark today is like getting on a bus. United Airlines Flight 1961--a twin-engine Boeing 757-200 jet scheduled to leave LAX this morning--should touch down at Newark Liberty International Airport after an approximately five-hour flight that will be flown mostly by the flight computer. Upon landing, passengers, cocooned in a pressurized cabin at more than 37,000 feet while traveling at speeds of more than 600 miles per hour, will likely think only of where to pick up their luggage.
The story of the H-1, though, evokes a time when the world was enamored with aviation. Only 10 years earlier, Charles Lindbergh had flown non-stop from New York to Paris and new marks for speed and distance were being set every day.
Back then, Newark Airport was often the center of it all. As the de facto airport for New York City before the opening of LaGuardia, Newark by 1937 was the busiest airfield in the world, handling a large percentage of the country's airmail and more than 27 percent of all its passenger traffic.
Movie stars, celebrities and famous aviators passed through the municipal airport's main Art Deco terminal. Amelia Earhart based a plane there. In September 1931, Jimmy Doolittle set a new transcontinental record, traveling from Los Angeles to Newark in just over 11 hours at speeds averaging 217 miles per hour.
In the decade before the flight, Hughes, who inherited his father's oil tool business and used his money to go into the movie business, had produced several major films, including the World War I flying epic "Hell's Angels." Already a licensed pilot, he began focusing on ways to go faster. And in the spring of 1934, he began work on the Racer.
"If you had all the money in the world to build the fastest plane in the world, it would look like the H-1," said van der Linden.
Terry Brennan, chief curator and director of restoration at San Diego Air & Space Museum, knows just what it took to build it. He's overseeing the construction of a full-scale replica by volunteers that he estimates will take another eight to to 10 years to complete.
Designed by Hughes and aeronautical engineer Richard Palmer, and built by Glenn Odekirk, the plane began as a scale model that was tested in the CalTech wind tunnel. Made from a lightweight aluminum alloy, its stressed-skin monocoque fuselage was fastened together with thousands of countersunk rivets and then polished to a mirror finish. Every screw used on the plane's surface was tightened so that even the slotted head was aligned with the airstream.
The metal sheets for the plane's body were precisely cut to and "butt-joined" to eliminate even the slightest gap--tolerances that still give technicians at the Smithsonian headaches. If they have to remove a panel and don't line it up properly, it won't go together again. The wings were made of wood, which at the time was easier to build the most accurate airfoil shape need. Covered in cotton fabric, they were then sanded and doped to a glass-like finish. Even the registration numbers were inlaid into the paint to create a perfectly smooth surface.
Well-known for his obsessions and his increasingly bizarre and withdrawn behavior in his later years, Hughes became just as fixated on building what he simply called "The Racer." To streamline the exposed cylinders and blunt nose of the 14-cylinder Twin Wasp Junior engine, Hughes had it wrapped in a distinctive, bell-shaped cowling designed to cut drag and improve cooling.
"He was a fanatic about getting rid of parasitic drag," said Brennan. "It had to be the cleanest airframe that was ever produced."
Hughes himself called it the most efficient airplane of its day. "This airplane was fast because it was clean," he said in an interview transcript from the files of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas Special Collections.
George J. Marrett, a retired test pilot for Hughes Aircraft and the author of "Howard Hughes: Aviator," said the H-1 was built in secret. Those involved in the construction called it "Silver Bullet," or the "Mystery Ship."
In an interview, Marrett--who never met Hughes--remembered first getting a look at the historic plane hidden away in a corner of a Quonset hut at the Culver City complex where Hughes Aircraft was once based. "Then you walked in there, it was lit with something like a 50-watt bulb," he recalled.
There were wire fences partitioning off the inside. One could walk either left or right and in the dim light, he could see the Racer partially covered with a tarp. He ducked underneath the canvas to get a closer look."It was just so neat," he said. "A lot of people didn't even know what the Racer was."
Marrett, who interviewed many former Hughes old-timers for his book, said the plane was rolled out in August 1935. Hughes insisted on flying it for the first time himself. "Howard had in mind taking the Racer to Cleveland for the National Air Races," Marrett noted. "But when he flew it, he developed an oil leak and was worried about flying it long distance. He wasn't confident."
Instead, he decided to take it to Orange County in an effort to capture the three-kilometer land-plane speed record. In a scene recreated in the Martin Scorsese film "The Aviator," Hughes flew the Racer over the Pacific and began a series of diving passes before a series of official timers. The streaking plane was clocked at an average speed of 352.38 mph--breaking the existing record by 38 mph. Then, as depicted in the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio playing Hughes, disaster struck. On a final pass, the engine unexpectedly died from fuel starvation.
Marrett said the plane was too low to attempt an engine restart using the auxiliary tank. In a harrowing, gear-up landing, the Racer slammed into a Santa Ana beet field and plowed a long furrow before finally coming to rest in a cloud of dust. Hughes was already out of the cockpit, taking notes by the bent blades of the propeller, when would-be rescuers reached him.
"She'll do better, Ode," the aviator reportedly told Odekirk. "She'll do 365. I just know it."
According to Marrett, Hughes decided to rebuild the Racer in an attempt to break the transcontinental speed record. While Odekirk and Palmer were put to work rebuilding the Racer with longer wings and additional fuel capacity, Marrett said Hughes began testing a theory of flying higher to take advantage of the strong westerly winds during the winter months.
"In the winter, the jet stream drops down south and it can be strong even at 15,000 feet," Marrett explained.
While the modifications were being made to the Racer, Hughes purchased a Northrop Gamma to make the flight from California to Newark. On Jan. 13, 1936, he took off in the Gamma and found the strong tailwinds that were predicted, reaching New Jersey in 9 hours, 27 minutes, 10 seconds--eclipsing the previous record by 36 minutes. But he knew the far-more-aerodynamic Racer would be even faster.
A year later, the H-1 was ready. After less than two hours of testing, Hughes decided over the objections of Palmer and Odekirk to make a new attempt at the record. It was still dark when mechanics rolled the plane out of its hanger at Union Air Terminal in Burbank, then the main airport for Los Angeles.
"He liked to fly at night," said Marrett. "There's less traffic and it's less turbulent."
At 2:14 in the morning, he took off. Witnesses said the plane "staggered, accelerated and then literally vaulted into the air," and Hughes pointed the ship east.
Newspaper accounts of the time played the story like the moon landing. In a front page story, The New York Times headline reported: "Hughes, Riding Gale, Sets Record Of 7 1/2 Hours in Flight From Coast..."
According to the Times story, Hughes flew mostly at an altitude of 14,000 feet, wearing an oxygen mask that gave him trouble most of the way. He told reporters that he was at 20,000 feet near Winslow, Ariz., when found he was not getting enough oxygen.
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"I was going to sleep. It was a helpless, hopeless feeling," he later said. "I nosed the ship slowly downward to an altitude of 15,000 feet and full consciousness came back to me. It was the closest I ever got to being in a real jam."
Without a radio transmitter on board, he could give no reports of his progress along the way.
The newspaper report called his arrival at Newark "unheralded and a surprise," as a United Air Lines flight prepared for takeoff. Witnesses said "the propeller whir of the hurling Racer made the buildings tremble from sound vibration" as Hughes swept low across the field.
The billionaire, who would become a recluse, shunning all public contact in his later years, smiled broadly as he got out of the plane in Newark. He shook hands with Palmer, the engineer who designed the Racer. "I knew she was fast," Hughes told him. "But I didn't know she was that fast."
His record would stand until 1945.
After the record-setting flight, the plane was brought back to California and sat undisturbed in a dark corner of the airport storage building in Culver City for nearly 40 years, before it was finally donated to the Smithsonian in 1975. Hughes never flew it again.
"He was done with it," explained van der Linden. "He moved on to something else."
Ted Sherman may be reached at tsherman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TedShermanSL. Facebook: @TedSherman.reporter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Frederic Masucci (Photo: Dept. of Public Safety) 
