But none of that was to be, because I’d overflown Wright Field and worn my pajamas under my suit in a meeting with generals.
7
IN 1938, WHEN I was thirty-two years old, I decided to fly around the world and break the round-the-world speed record while I was doing it.
That flight was far and away the most important I’d ever made, not in the sense that I cut Wiley Post’s previous record time, but that I showed that with proper organization and care it was possible to make this kind of flight a routine, which it is today.
I don’t mean to say that in 1938 it was a routine flight – no icebreaking flight ever is. The preparations were extensive. I don’t remember how many thousands of man-hours we put in to get the plane ready. She was called the New York World’s Fair 1939 and she was a Lockheed Lodestar, the model Fourteen.
At the outset I’d bought a D-1, made by Douglas; then I started fitting out a new model Sikorsky. But when Lockheed came out with their ship, which was the sturdiest and fastest transport around, I bought one of the first models, and I made the ship over from head to tail to fit my needs.
Actually I made Lockheed, too, with that flight. I’m not blowing my own horn, I’m just stating facts. Bob Gross admitted to me that it was always spoken about among the executives at Lockheed in later years: ‘When Howard Hughes flew our plane around the world, everyone suddenly knew who Lockheed was.’ And the stock went up five points that week.
The Model Fourteen later was modified and became the Hudson bomber that the British flew during the war. Lockheed sold them 3,000 planes before the war ended. The British also bought the New York World’s Fair 1939. That’s just an aside for the history books and the airplane buffs.
The planning and preparation for the flight were extensive. For one thing we had to put in oversized gas tanks, which caused problems. Going over the equipment lists took days. Every inch of space was used. We had a rifle, shotgun and revolver – protection against anything that might come along if we had a forced landing in Siberia, because I was told that the polar bears weren’t too friendly. We had a solar still to convert sea water to drinking water in case we were forced down at sea.
Loading the plane was an incredibly difficult job. We were overweight, of course, but we used something called a Librascope, a relatively new invention which computed the weight of everything in the various cargo compartments and the hull and then told you the location of the center of gravity, the center of balance. If it wasn’t at the optimum flight point you could shift cargo, which is what we did ten or twelve times before we got it right. The wingloading was enormous, the most I’d ever heard of, about fifty pounds per square foot. That scared me, and rightly so.
We also used an entirely new system of radio communications, and tested it effectively for the first time in aeronautical history. We could send and receive on twenty-five wavelengths and the aerial, which was adjustable, gave us a tremendously powerful beam. I arranged to beam from Siberia all the way to Hermosa Beach, California. I had Dave Evans and Charlie Perrine, radio director for the flight, set up in a house on the beach operating a short-wave radio station, and I hit them all the way from Yakutsk in Siberia, nearly 5,000 miles away. Nobody made much of a fuss about that at the time, because they preferred to concentrate on the circus aspects which were considered more newsworthy, but that radio transmission was a fantastic step forward in the communications world.
We ate nothing but sandwiches, mostly ham, during the flight itself. I wanted the men to get the most nourishment possible out of those sandwiches, so in New York I tested twenty different kinds of bread until I found the one I wanted. That was Pechter’s Jewish rye bread.
But we had trouble the moment we took off. All that extra load we were carrying – mostly the gasoline in the wing tanks – made the takeoffs the most hazardous parts of the flight. We took off on Sunday evening, July 10, 1938, from Floyd Bennett Field, and I couldn’t get the ship off the ground. I used up all the runway and still I couldn’t get her off. I kept going, into the dirt, and one of the struts snapped – one of the wheel braces. I could feel it go, but there was nothing to do about it then, because the next second we were airborne.
Everything went well after that. We got to Paris in one piece, and on schedule. I had to go through the usual crap at the airport, shaking hands with the ambassador and a bunch of goddamn dignitaries. For a while it looked as though we weren’t going to leave Paris because of the damaged wheel braces, but the Embassy turned up with an Army man named Cook, one of those handy types like myself that only seem to flourish in America, and he fixed the damn thing and we took off again with a minimum of delay. Then we went over Germany, flying at 16,000 feet for a while, which was the regulation altitude prescribed by the Nazi government. What happened then has never been told, because I was honor-bound not to discuss it, but I feel certain enough time has passed.
Shortly before leaving New York City I had a visit from General Hap Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps. He asked me to take aerial photographs of parts of Germany that were on my course, or could be on my course with a little adjustment. Specifically, he was looking for aircraft and arms plants in the western Ruhr and in Silesia, and large troop concentrations on the borders of Poland and Czechoslovakia. We didn’t have anything like a U-2 then, and any aerial photo reconnaissance had to be done at very low altitudes and of course on a relatively clear day.
The Germans, when we went over, instantly got us on the radio and told us to get the hell out of their airspace. They were building up, and they thought we might be taking pictures. We denied it vigorously, and in the newspapers it was denied vigorously, by me and several other people connected with the project, that anything like that had been in mind. Of course that was exactly what we were trying to do. We came down as low as we could over the critical areas, but we couldn’t break through the cloud cover. It was socked in right from the Black Forest to the Polish border. We were flying pretty low, hoping for a hole, and any minute I expected to see some of those Messerschmitt fighters coming right up at us.
Did any of the men with you on the plane know what you were doing?
If they’d used their heads they might have figured it out, because the camera was covered but mounted. One of them asked me about it, and I said it was to photograph polar bears in Siberia for the National Geographic. He believed me. Not all of those guys were terribly bright when it came to thinking about other things than their job.
We went on to Moscow. A lot of bigwigs were there at the airport, including the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Alexander Troyanovsky, on leave from Washington. I gave him the baseball scores and the American League standings – he was a Yankee fan, which was a safe bet in those days. The Model Fourteen had the red Lockheed star on the fuselage, and some of the Russian soldiers standing around the field thought this was a Communist plane making the trip. They got all excited – whoops, the Americans are Communists too!