Regarding the answer to the question in the July 2002 about the Spruce Goose seaplane. It was my understanding that for Howard Hughes to fulfill his contract and avoid more congressional scrutiny it had to fly.So he flew it. The contract did not specify how long or high,etc, it had to fly.One mile or so and Hughes had it moth balled .
I’ve not heard that. AIUI, the contract was to ‘construct’ three aircraft before the end of the war. (This was in 1942.) I haven’t read the contract, so I don’t know if there was any requirement to demonstrate them in flight. One might assume that aircraft constructed would be able to fly. Would a flight requirement have been included in the contract? One would think so, but I don’t know.
In any case, by the time the Hercules was completed the war was over. Hughes failed to deliver even one of the three aircraft to the government. In 1947 he was called before the Senate War Investigating Committee to explain how he could have spent $40 million for the Hercules and the XF-11 and not delivered an airplane to the military. The Committee accused Hughes of spending money on booze and hookers in order to get the contract. At the end, the Committee never returned a report.
During a break in the hearing he flew the aircraft. According to the linked page, ‘Hughes had answered his critics and the hearings ended.’ It sounds to me as if he was just making a point, rather than technically meeting the terms of a contract (or contracts) that he’d already failed to meet.
The story I’ve read was that Hughes wanted to prove to his critics the plane could fly; it hadn’t yet, so that was one of the things the inquiry was wondering about. Could the thing fly?
During what were supposed to be taxi tests, he got it about 70 feet up in the air, thereby proving it could fly. Pleny of spectators around to see this… Speculation was whether this was deliberate, or if he just could not tell (being 20 feet up or so already) that he was off the water.
That still didn’t work. one of the often-repeated stories after that was that “it only managed to get 70 feet up and only flew for half a mile”, suggesting it was not a fully capable aircraft.
…which is silly, of course. If it took off under its own power and made a controlled landing, it was a fully capable aircraft. (You can’t really argue that it wouldn’t have been stable; that would have been a good argument in 1900, but not by the 1940s, when the basic problems had all been worked out. And you can’t really argue about the agility of something built as a giant transport in the first place. Maybe it would have developed stress problems in actual use – remember the Comet? But that could only be determined by extensive testing under a full load.)
It’s not like the length of the very first test flight of an aircraft is a guide to anything. The Spitfire’s first test flight was only eight minutes long.
I agree. If the critics had been knowledgable and claimed it did not get out of ground effect, they might have made a point, true or not. I don’t doubt that at the time the engineers were quite capable of making the calculations to be sure it had no shortage of take-off power.
The real issue is that the true test flights were never made. IIRC, Hughes went back to Washington and made sure the plane never flew again. For better or wore, this left people free to make whatever claims they wanted.
Actually, it was kept in flyable condition until Hughes dies, at a cost of $1,000,000 a year for thirty years. Howard Hughes might have been as nutty as a bag of peanuts, but this was a project he believed in enough to spend a very large amount of his own money on.
Yes, but if he’d delivered it or sold it someone else would hav flow it and gotten all the publicity. It sounds like one of those “take my bat and ball and go home” episodes. Regardless, it was an excellent design (I took the tour of in just outside Portland, Or. about 8 years ago). Hughes was a good pilot and had an excellent design team. I could see why he would feel it was special. It’s huge by anything except modern standards.
Actually, it’s huge even by moderns standards. As this graphic shows, it’s as tall and almost as long as a modern A380, and its wingspan is even longer than the enormous Antonov An-225. It was and is one of the largest airplanes ever built and flown.
Note to aviation/waterslide fans: if you visit the Spruce Goose next summer, you can check out their newest attraction, the 747 Wings and Waves Water Park.
Actually that’s just the start. The Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum has a nearly empty space museum building. It’s nearly empty not because it doesn’t have lots of cool space stuff (it does!) but because the building was designed/built to house a retired Space Shuttle. I was at the museum last fall and was told they are in active negotiations with NASA to secure one of the Shuttles once that program officially ends.