Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

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IN THE EARLY 1930s flying was a hit-or-miss proposition. The world’s best pilots were the eccentric daredevil types who flew by the seat of their pants. Instrumentation was haphazard, standards were indifferent, and the Bendix Trophy winners, practically every one of them, built his own plane in his backyard. I was out to do quite a bit more than that – to set standards for the vision I had of air travel.

The first record I went for was the world land speed record held by the Frenchman, Raymond Delmotte. I wanted to break records, and that was why I started out to build the H-1. The H stood for Hughes.

But if you’re going to build a plane that’s the fastest plane in the world, naturally you have to make some innovations. And while breaking the record may have been my motive at the start, I quickly became so interested in the engineering problems that long before I was finished, and certainly long before I flew the ship, it was the engineering that had begun to fascinate me, to the point where I said to myself, ‘This is it. This is what I want to do with my life.’

I became totally absorbed in the concept and problems of design, and that stayed with me for decades. The rest of it – speed records and even the commercial airlines that I pioneered – took second place. As for the technical stuff, I don’t see how these details would interest anyone except me, and maybe a few airplane buffs. I don’t want people picking up this book and thinking it’s a manual on aircraft design. Let’s just say I designed the H-1, then built it, then flew it on Friday the 13th. I tried a day or so before, but you had to do four runs to qualify for the record and it got dark and I didn’t finish.

Glen Odekirk said, ‘For God’s sake, Howard, don’t try again on Friday the 13th.’

But I did. I was never a superstitious man. I broke the record that day at Martin Field in Santa Ana, California. Amelia Earhart and Paul Mantz were there as witnesses, and a guy named Therkelsen was up in a Lockheed Vega as official observer.

After I broke the record I decided to see what the ship could really do. It was about the sixth or seventh passage and I was all in a lather and could have flown all day. I pushed the ship too hard. We gave out a story that some steel wool had worked its way into the fuel line, which unfortunately led to rumors that there was sabotage, but that wasn’t true. I didn’t want any aspersions cast on the H-1 so that was the simple thing to say, and I said it. The truth is that when I pushed the ship too hard, the engine froze. She conked out. The landing gear wouldn’t come down either. It was still retracted and it stayed that way. I couldn’t make the airfield. I made a dead stick landing on some farm just short of it.

With a small airplane – anything piston-driven, except for something as large as a Constellation or a big passenger jet – you come close to stalling when you land. At a certain point on the glide path you throttle down and put the nose up. A full stall landing, with your nose up high, gives you the slowest possible landing speed and a short ground roll, which you want if you’ve got no engine. Getting the wheels on the ground is only half the battle, especially if you have a tail wheel and there’s no weight resting on it. You still have to bring her to a stop without going ass over tit, and without power that’s not easy. You have, or you had, just as many accidents after a ship touched down as you had on the glide paths.

Anyway, it wasn’t a bad crash and I wasn’t hurt, just knocked out for ten minutes or so and bruised.

The transcontinental records that I set were in 1936 and 1937. I flew a Northrop Gamma for the first trip. I’d put in a new supercharged engine designed by the Army and it was in a sense an uneventful trip. I just flew like a bat out of hell and didn’t have too much trouble. I didn’t let on that I was out to break the record. I told people that I wanted to fly to New York, and then I took off. I was really testing the airplane and myself. I just tried to see how fast I could get there – nothing more to it than that.

This wasn’t a breakthrough in aviation technology, although it led to many other things. I wasn’t out for publicity and I don’t think I would have got half as much as I did if I hadn’t been Howard Hughes, a young buck with an enormous amount of money and the producer of Hell’s Angels. If I had just been some barnstormer I’d have been treated as a thirty-year-old good pilot who broke a few records, which everyone knew would be broken time and time again, and that would have been that.

However, I was what they called ‘good copy,’ and from my point of view that was unfortunate. I would have accomplished a lot more in my early life if reporters hadn’t been hanging around waiting to pump me and ring wedding bells for every girl I took to a night club or for a flight. That drove me crazy.

Were there any particular incidents on those trips that weren’t reported at the time?

The incidents happened on the way back, the first time, when I flew from east to west. I usually prepare things pretty well, and in this case I’d certainly prepared the ship well, but I couldn’t do anything about all the gauges that were supposed to be working, and weren’t. I had realized en route that I didn’t have any aerial maps to continue with from Chicago to California, and you won’t believe this, but when I landed at Chicago they didn’t have any maps at the airport, either.

I did, of course, have a general idea of which way to go, and I headed west, following the great circle route at twenty thousand feet.

But then everything went wrong. My oxygen blew out. I had no oil pressure whatever – I had to pump the oil by hand – and I had ice on the wings. I was lucky to make it over the Rockies.

What did you do when you had no oxygen?

Took deep breaths. What the hell else can you do?

And you could survive at 20,000 feet without oxygen?

I’m here to tell the tale. I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody else, and I certainly didn’t want to try it again, at least not with that kind of faulty equipment.

But I was a young man. It was marvelous, it was a battle, and I loved every minute of it. Of course that doesn’t mean I wasn’t terrified half the time. The newspapers at the time made a great deal out of the fact that I’d made a $50 bet with a friend that I’d have my lunch in Chicago and my dinner in Los Angeles. They didn’t tell everything that happened, though. I won the bet, but I was in such a state of nerves when I ate the meal that I got the worst case of indigestion I’ve ever had in my life.

Those flights, in a sense, were false heroics. I look back on them now and I can see that I did such things out of ego. But I don’t want to apologize for them. I’ve done many things I’m ashamed of, but flying isn’t one of them. In fact that’s one of the cleaner, brighter images of my past. Because when you’re flying, people don’t clutter up the works. It’s just man and machine, and there’s a purity and nobility to that experience that I haven’t found in anything else. I’ve always been better with machines than I have with people. Machines are predictable; people are not. One thing about a machine – you can take it apart and put it back together and it’s the same machine. You can’t do that with a human being. I know. I’ve tried.

All my troubles – the reason I live as I do, the nearest thing to being a hermit – stemmed from personal relationships. I’ve always been able to deal with machinery with great pleasure. I invented a new kind of shock absorber when I was a fifteen-year old kid. I didn’t patent it, but it worked, and my father had it installed in one of his cars. I’ve worked for hours and hours figuring out a new concept for some minor airplane part, or how to improve an existing design. But when I was called away from my work to deal with people, for either pleasure or business, my heart sank, because I knew it would almost always end badly.

I’m a recluse – that’s obvious. I avoid meeting people. I didn’t start this way, I can assure you. I had friends and acquaintances as a child and I desperately wanted people to like me. Maybe I never admitted it, but I wanted it very much. And, frankly, I don’t think most people did like me. But I kept trying until finally I just stopped, because I had been hurt and disappointed in them and in myself, again and again, and I saw that I was incapable of dealing with people properly. I haven’t had a real friend since I was a child. The closest I’ve come to it has been Bob Gross, president of Lockheed, and that was at least 60% business. My last real friend in the sense of a pal was Dudley Sharp, I suppose, and that ended as most such youthful friendships end. We drifted apart, lost contact.

That’s one of the terrible sadnesses of life – this process of losing contact with people who mean a great deal to you. Sometimes it’s physical circumstances – you’re on the move, they’re on the move – but more often it’s because people don’t keep pace with each other, they drift into different pursuits and develop different ideas, and one day they realize they’ve got nothing in common anymore. It’s one of the most depressing things in the world to bump into an old friend you haven’t seen for twenty years, and you realize you have nothing to say to him except, ‘Hey, do you remember when…?’ It’s usually better to live with memories than to try to update them.

For other people I’m sure it’s easier. Their so-called friends probably aren’t always out to get something from them. That’s one of the problems about being very rich. Poor people don’t usually do it to you, but anyone who’s well off but not so rich as you are, invariably wants something from you – tries to use you. This happened to me time and time again.

There are times when I’ve thought I could only be friends with billionaires. And how many of those are around?

In 1936, after I broke the record with the Northrop Gamma, I set about remodeling my own plane, the H-1. I worked on that until early 1937. I redesigned the oxygen equipment and worked out a new type of experimental oxygen mask. I fiddled around with the retractable landing gear and the shape of the wings, and I put in a better engine, an 1100-horsepower twin-row Wasp, with fourteen cylinders. I rebuilt her to withstand stresses up to 550 miles an hour, although of course I couldn’t keep up that speed for very long and didn’t intend to. I gave her a name. I christened her the Winged Bullet.

Then in late January of ‘37 I was ready. I wanted to see what the ship could do at high altitudes – I wanted to make a long run at twenty thousand feet.

It turned out to be from Burbank to Newark. Coast-to-coast, about 2,500 miles. I took off in the H-1 at two o’clock in the morning, pitch-dark, and I said to myself, ‘What the hell, I’ll go all the way to Newark.’ I thought at first I’d only fly to Chicago, but once I took off I just kept going, changed the route a bit and decided to keep flying.

I had a little trouble again – the oxygen valve jammed when I passed over Albuquerque and I had to throw the damn thing away and get down to 14,000 feet where I could breathe. I always had bad luck with oxygen equipment.

When I got to Newark I’d broken my own record, and I knew it, and the hell of it was I couldn’t land. There was a United Airline Boeing 247 on the runway having engine trouble. I had to wait until they moved it out of the way. I had no radio, just buzzed the field a few times and waggled my wings so they’d know I wanted to land. That added about twenty minutes to my time, but I still broke the record by about forty minutes.

I put a guard on the Winged Bullet and took a taxi into New York and went to sleep for forty-eight hours. Of course the newspapers found out very quickly I’d broken another record and they were hammering at my door for days.

In many ways I’ve often regretted that I made that flight. The aftermath was disaster. It was one of those absurd events – or nonevent, as it turned out – which nobody could predict or whip up out of their wildest dreams. Even after it happened nobody could realize its importance, but in many ways it was to change the course of my life and bring me more aggravation than if I’d opened the door to a cage of rattlesnakes.

I’d broken all the speed records with the H-1, and naturally the U.S. Army Air Corps was interested. They didn’t have a plane that compared with mine. The speeds I had flown at were nearly double what any of their pursuit planes could fly, and that record stood for eight years, which I think is a record in itself. You can believe that the Army wanted to see that plane.

When I was in New York, a general named Oliver Echols called me and asked me to stop off at Wright Field in Ohio on my way back to California. The Air Corps wanted to look at the plane.

I said, ‘Sure.’ I was pleased.

But it was several days before I left, and I had a lot on my mind, and I was tired from all the preparations, the flight and the aftermath of publicity. I wanted to get back to California. I took off, and the first stop I made was Omaha, to refuel. Then I went right on to California.

What I didn’t know was that Echols had invited all the top brass in Washington to Wright Field in Ohio to inspect the plane. They were standing around waiting while the Winged Bullet and I were up there above the clouds and headed for California. I forgot. I’m human, and I forgot. And they never forgave me.

Naturally the newspapers made as much of it as they could. The generals landed on Echols and blamed him, told him he’d screwed it up and must have got the date wrong. But he hadn’t got it wrong and he could prove it.

The Hate Howard Hughes Club started that day, at Wright Field, and it had repercussions which were endless.

My ship, the H-1, was far better than anything the Air Corps had, but after that incident they wouldn’t buy it, because they figured I’d snubbed them at Wright Field. Until the end of the Second World War they never built a plane to equal it. I was anxious to have that plane produced, but I didn’t have the facilities. It might have made a tremendous difference to us in the Second World War, because that plane – the original, the one I flew, wound up in the Smithsonian – became the Japanese Zero.

Just before the war began, I told Noah to get together with Jesse Jones to find out how I could contribute to the war effort. Jesse took Noah to see General Knudsen, who decided he wanted me to make some accessories for the B-25, struts and cannon barrels. But then, as a part of the chain of command, the red tape rigmarole, Knudsen sent Noah along to General Echols.

‘If Howard Hughes gets any contracts from the Army,’ Echols said to Noah, ‘it’ll be over my dead body.’

Noah told me that, and I got on the phone to Jesse Jones.

‘Jesse, tell the Army to put old grudges aside. This General Echols is screwing up the war effort. I’m not going to make any money out of manufacturing struts and casting cannon barrels, but if it’s necessary, you know I’ll do it. You tell Echols to shove his grudges up his ass.’

Jesse bypassed Echols and we got the contracts. The Aircraft Division of Toolco made the struts and the cannon and six-inch shells during the war. But if Echols had his way, nothing would have happened. It’s a wonder we won the war with people like that in positions of responsibility.

There was another reason why the Army had a grudge against me. This never came out at the Senate hearings in 1947, either, because it would have been too ridiculous to bring up a thing like this, but I happen to know that the Army brass always held this incident against me and it gave them a very poor opinion of me.

It seems that sometime during the war there was a question of whether or not the contract for the HK-1 would be renewed, whether the government would still pump money into the project, because things were going slowly at that point and I couldn’t get the parts and the materials I needed. They wanted me to come to Washington, but eventually the top brass came to see me in California.

I was with Russell Birdwell the night before – he was my publicity man and we were working on The Outlaw – and I was exhausted, rundown, and Birdwell said, ‘Howard, get some sleep. And in the morning you’ve got to shave and put on a suit and tie. You’re going to be put on the spot by the United States Army and you have to make a good impression.’ He was very considerate, anxious for my welfare.

Birdwell left, and I got a few hours sleep, but I overslept. The appointment with Echols and Admiral Towers and the rest of the brass was for an early breakfast at the Ambassador. I was in a terrible hurry – I shaved, as I’d promised, but I dressed very quickly and put my suit and tie on over my pajamas. To this day I don’t know why I did that, but I did.

I gave my progress report at breakfast in the Ambassador to those generals and admirals, eight or nine of them, and it was warm in the room and at some point I loosened my tie and opened my suit jacket. I stood up, and there were my pajamas tops hanging out from under my shirt, and my pajama bottoms sticking out from under my pants cuffs.

I paid no attention. I was involved in trying to explain why there had been delays in the HK-1 and why the ship had to be completed, for the sake of both the Air Corps and the tremendous research we were doing in the field of large-plane design. But that’s another story. The point of this is that all the Army could see was that Howard Hughes hadn’t bothered to take off his pajamas before he put on his suit.

What an insult! What a thing to do! They thought I was making fun of them in their starched uniforms with scrambled eggs and chests full of fruit salad, their campaign ribbons. They also thought this was evidence that I was a little nuts.

That weighed heavily against me for the rest of the war. I was talking business and airplanes and I thought the military was doing the same thing. My sartorial splendor was totally beside the point in the long run, but not for them. For them it was worse than if I’d been Hitler’s secret second cousin. They never forgave me for that. It was constantly brought up whenever they had their conferences about me and what I was building for them. I was told this by Jesse Jones, and at the time he had no reason to lie to me. Their attitude hampered the war effort, and the military has tried to make my life miserable ever since.

Think about it. If they’d bought the H-1 from me, the Japanese wouldn’t have had the Zero. It was the fastest thing around, nearly twice as fast as anything the Air Corps had. After the Air Corps had bitten off its nose to spite its face, I got some little company in the midwest to agree to tool up for producing it. They went broke. But before they went broke, the Japanese sent a delegation of engineers to their plant, studied the modified H-1, went home, and within a year the H-1 had become the Zero, made by Mitsubishi.

Was the Zero an exact copy?

With modifications, naturally, but not so much that you couldn’t recognize the H-1 with the rising sun on her wingtips. The Mitsubishi people had that ship in the air by early 1939. They rounded off the wings a bit, shoved in the armament, put in a 780-horsepower engine where I had a 1050-horsepower Wasp, and they got more than 350 miles per hour maximum speed out of her. That was better than anything this country had at the time. Naturally if any Air Force General admitted this when the war began and those Jap Zeros were buzzing all over the Pacific and kicking the crap out of the Navy, they would have had him personally cleaning out Oliver Echols mink-lined toilet. That was all hushed up. If we had had it in 1941 instead of them, the Japanese might never have attacked Pearl Harbor. Even if they had, we would have whipped their ass a hell of a lot quicker and probably wouldn’t have had to use the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But none of that was to be, because I’d overflown Wright Field and worn my pajamas under my suit in a meeting with generals.