I am curios, in reading the history of the “Spruce Goose”-Howard Hugh’s doomed monster airplane, I was puzzled. The plane was very much underpowered, and had great difficulty in getting to 100 feet. It is obvious (looking at its one and only flight), that it would have been useless for its designed purpose (transporting hundreds of soldiers across the Atlantic to England).
Now, Howard Hughes came at a time when aircraft design was still in the hands of pioneers-many who had no formal engineering training. Still, in 1943, there were established university programs in Aeronautical Engineering, and experts in aircraft design should have known that the design was bad-so why did the USAAF fund Hugh’s design? Was it his tremendous aura of success?
Well, there was nothing intrinsically wrong with building a large troop transport out of wood – gliders were being used to carry troops and equipment, after all. And the Spruce Goose was hardly unique in not having the right engines in its first iteration (e.g., the DC-3, B-29,B-36and many others.
Also, there was a war, and war is always a laboratory for dumbass ideas. Didn’t matter if you’re American, British or German.
Things might have been different had the U-boat peril turned out to be an actual logistical issue. As it was, even during the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, the vast majority of Allied shipping was getting through and the U-boats were defeated long before the Spruce Goose project had gone anywhere.
The mindset of building big cargo planes at that time was imagining a much longer war with a drawn-out stalemate with the Germans neither able to invade Britain, nor the Allies able to assault the European mainland, and the U-boats threatening supply lines from North America. In retrospect it seems unlikely, but had the Germans managed to defeat the Soviets or hold them to a stalemate on the Eastern Front, it wasn’t an impossible scenario, especially before the stunning Soviet victories in 1943 and the reversal of the Battle of the Atlantic during the spring of 1943. Even though the Spruce Goose was probably never going to be mass-produced, if things had gone differently and there had been need for large cargo planes, the project still could have yielded valuable data.
Seaplanes and flying boats experience a lot of drag when they’re on the water. I was in one once when the pilot couldn’t quite get enough speed to take off. He cranked the wheel to one side and got one float out of the water. That reduced the drag and we skimmed along on the other until we were fast enough to lift off.
That the Spruce Goose got airborne at all tells me something, although I imagine it was very lightly loaded for that test. It at least had the power to take off; after that it should have been able to gain speed and climb. I don’t know if it would have met its performance goals. Maybe it couldn’t take off with a full load. But I don’t think it’s fair to call it a complete flop because of just one flight. That Hughes decided to land it doesn’t mean it couldn’t do a lot more than it did.
If you’ve never seen the Spruce Goose, and you are anywhere near the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, and you are interested at all in aviation, stop in and gawk at it. It is so gigantic, so vastly out of scale compared to all the other aircraft on display, that it is difficult to get your head wrapped around it. You can go inside it, too.
Thanks for the replies…as I say , Howard Hughes got away with a lot. His experimental twin-engined fighter (the H-1) was a technical flop (almost killed Hughes on its test flight). The plane’s development consumed millions , and eventually the AAF cancelled the project.
I’m amazed that Hughes got so far with largely unsound ideas in aircraft design-his “expertise” was mostly his own hunches, although he did pioneer the concept of flush rivets (which increased aircraft speed by lowering drag).
I also recall reading that the USAAF had Prof. THeodore von Karman on retainer as a consultant- von Karman would have immediately rejected most of Hughs’ ideas.
Years ago, I visited the Smithsonian’s amazing National Air & Space Museum. There was a Spruce Goose exhibit. Not the plane, of course, but a large model & a lot of explanatory information.
One of the placards had a picture of the plane & of a person–to scale. A little boy exclaimed at just how large it must be. But his dad assured him that it wasn’t true–there really weren’t any planes that big…
I’m still rather regretting I didn’t pipe up & tell the guy–“Listen to your kid! He’s right!”
Back in the late 1980s, I saw it, and was able to go inside it, when it was on display in Long Beach. I agree about the size–seeing it in photos just doesn’t compare to how big it really is.
An uncle of mine viewed the plane some years ago. An employee at the museum said they should rename the plane “Jesus Christ” because that’s usually the first thing people say when the get a look at the Goose.