November 2, 1947: Hughes H-4 Hercules makes its one and only flight

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Hughes H-4 Hercules

[onager]

1. Thank you. A little additonal info...

Some years ago, I wrote a bunch of articles for the book The People's Almanac of the Twentieth Century. I'm sitting in Egypt right now on a long-term assignment as a Field Engineer, so I don't have my library at hand.

Several of my articles were about famous aircraft, including the HK-1.

The book staff provided me with tons of research material, and some of the most interesting dealt with the initial talks between Henry J. Kaiser and Hughes.

I'm glad the Wikipedia entry got that right. Too often, the idea of the HK-1 is presented as a brainchild of Hughes' megalomania.

As Wikipedia notes, it was Kaiser who came up with the idea, and at the time it made sense. From 1939-43, U-boats wreaked absolute havoc on Allied shipping. The losses were horrendous. Even Winston Churchill once said that while he never doubted the Allies would win the war, the U-boat menace sometimes kept him awake at night.

The U-boat threat reached a peak in 1942, about the time Kaiser came up with the idea of flying stuff OVER the oceans, instead of trying to ship stuff thru them.

Before approaching Hughes, Kaiser had already taken his Giant Flying Boat idea to every major American aircraft company and been turned down flat.

Hughes himself said he had a very simple answer when Kaiser approached him: "You're crazy."

But as he tended to do, the more Hughes thought about the idea as an engineering project, the more he got interested. Then he got obsessed.

By late 1943-early 1944 U-boats were less of a threat, thanks to Allied code-breaking and better defenses.

And by the end of the war, the whole idea of the flying boat was headed for a hard landing in history's junkyard. During World War II the Allies built airfields in all sorts of weird places around the world, and they were easily converted to civilian use after the war.

In the same book I also wrote an article about the gorgeous Pan Am Clipper aircraft, the giant flying boats that flew the Pacific routes before WWII. Juan Trippe could be just as obsessive as Howard Hughes. When he needed a landing dock closer to the shore in Guam (IIRC), he simply had his construction crews dynamite the island's coral reefs. Nobody worried much about the environment in those days.

After WWII, on the same day that Pan Am Clipper service resumed from San Francisco to Hawaii, a TWA Constellation (ironically owned by Howard Hughes) took off from Hawaii and landed in San Francisco. More than anything else, the era of fast, comfortable high-altitude flight doomed the Clippers. And the idea of the giant flying boat as a passenger aircraft.

End of rant. Sorry, I get carried away...:-)