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.