On November 2, 1947, in front of a Senate committee that had spent months calling his airplane a "flying lumberyard," Howard Hughes climbed into the cockpit of the largest aircraft ever built, told everyone he was just running taxi tests, and flew it for twenty-six seconds. It never flew again. Today it sits in a hangar across the highway from a small Oregon airport called McMinnville.
A Pirep featured story · KMMV McMinnville Municipal, McMinnville, OR
Henry Kaiser and Howard Hughes signed a wartime contract in 1942 to build a massive flying boat — designated HK-1 — that could carry 750 troops or two M4 Sherman tanks across the Atlantic above the U-boat threat. The War Production Board imposed a critical constraint: no aluminum. The aircraft had to be built of laminated wood. (Spruce was actually a minor component; the airframe was mostly birch. The press named it the Spruce Goose anyway. Hughes hated the name.)
Kaiser walked away from the project in 1944 in frustration over the delays. Hughes kept going. He renamed the airplane the H-4 Hercules and bankrolled the construction himself out of his Hughes Aircraft Company funds. The war ended in 1945. The Hercules wasn't finished. The Senate War Investigating Committee, chaired by Senator Owen Brewster of Maine, opened hearings in 1947 accusing Hughes of squandering $22 million in public money on a project that was now pointless and probably would never fly. The hearings were televised. Brewster called the airplane a "flying lumberyard." Hughes testified for days, defended the project with characteristic obsession, and reportedly told the committee: "I have stated that if it's a failure, I'll probably leave this country and never come back. And I mean it."
He went back to Long Beach Harbor. On Sunday, November 2, 1947, before a crowd assembled to watch a series of high-speed taxi tests, with engineers, journalists, and his hand-picked co-pilot David Grant aboard, Hughes opened the throttle on the H-4's eight Pratt & Whitney R-4360 Wasp Major radials. He lifted the aircraft off the water without warning and held it 70 feet above the harbor for about a mile at 135 mph, for twenty-six seconds. Then he landed. The Hercules never flew again.
The H-4 had a wingspan of 320 feet 11 inches — longer than the length of a football field — and remained the largest wingspan of any aircraft ever built until the Stratolaunch flew in 2019. Hughes kept the Hercules in a climate-controlled hangar in Long Beach, fully maintained and ready to fly, for the rest of his life. After his death in 1976 the aircraft was eventually moved by truck, in pieces, across Oregon. The last 7.5 miles into McMinnville happened in February 1993.
The Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum opened around the H-4 Hercules in 2001 — built directly across Oregon Route 18 from McMinnville Municipal Airport. The Spruce Goose sits inside, fully reassembled. Pilots fly into KMMV, walk across the highway, and stand under a wingspan longer than a football field.