Innovative Aircraft

While setting these aviation records, Hughes was building a powerful aircraft company, Hughes Aircraft, founded in 1932. When World War II broke out, Hughes hoped to produce aircraft for the U. S. war effort. Other manufacturers won the contracts for this work, howev­er, and Hughes only received a contract for two experimental planes.

The experimental aircraft Hughes produced were both innovative, but they were unsuccessful. The first crashed while Hughes was flying it. The second

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ACCIDENT AND INJURIES

Hughes’s first experimental plane, the XF-11, nearly killed him. It was meant to be a high-altitude spy plane that could be used to take photographs without being seen by enemy radar. Before it was finished, World War II ended. Hughes contin­ued working on the plane, however.

On July 7, 1946, he took it on a test flight that developed problems. The plane crashed, destroying three homes in Beverly Hills, California, in the process. The crash and resulting fire left Hughes with many injuries and severe burns. He began taking powerful painkillers while recovering from these injuries—drugs that led to an addiction that plagued him for the rest of his life.

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experimental aircraft was a flying boat so large that it could carry more than 700 passengers. The U. S. military hoped to use the giant aircraft to carry troops across the Atlantic Ocean without wor­rying about attacks by German sub­marines. Unable to get aluminum need­ed to build the plane, Hughes built it of wood. That produced the plane’s nick­name, the Spruce Goose (although it was actually made of birch, not spruce). Its official name was the Hughes H-4 Hercules. The Spruce Goose had a wingspan of 320 feet (98 meters), longer than a football field. The plane was flown only once, on November 2, 1947. That day, Hughes piloted it a distance of 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) in the harbor of Long Beach, California. The plane did not rise above 80 feet (25 meters). It remained in the harbor at the cost of a million dollars a year until Hughes’s death. The Spruce Goose is now dis­played in the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.