Sure Thing

Before a gaping gathering last week in Manhattan's City Hall, a tall young man who looks like Gary Cooper and flies like Lindbergh, fumbled with some sheets of paper, nervous not because he had just circled the world in 3 days, 19 hr. 8 min. 10 sec., but because he had made but one previous speech in his life. "There is one thing about this flight that I would like everyone to know," he blurted at last. "It was in no way a stunt. It was the carrying out of a careful plan, and it functioned because it was carefully planned. We who did it are entitled to no particular credit. . . . Any one of the airline pilots of this nation . . . could have done the same thing."

What rich, reticent, scientifically-bent Howard Hughes was thus modestly dismissing had been a flight so precisely steered that it extended only 20 miles more than the direct course planned around the top of the world, although almost every mile of it was flown by instruments, often against fiercely adverse weather conditions. Halved had been Lindbergh's 33 1/2-hour time to Paris, halved the late great Wiley Post's solo dash around the world five years earlier.

The swift, silver Lockheed monoplane that Hughes had whipped off Floyd Bennett Field for Paris a little over four days earlier, was the most foolproof private plane that ever flew. It had two radio compasses, three radio transmitters (see p. 50), three receivers. It had a Sperry gyro-pilot, a new type drift indicator, robot navigational control. It had a crew of four men trained in the use of all these instruments.

But if, as happened to many a plane in Hell's Angels when Howard Hughes was putting an inherited fortune made from oil-well drills into movies instead of aviation, this foolproof ocean-spanning plane had been forced down, that contingency was provided for, too. Aboard were two inflatable rubber rafts, with stocks of water, "nose cups" to condense breath into emergency water supply, concentrated rations, a can opener. To inflate the rafts there were cylinders of carbon dioxide covered with woolen jackets, and a supply of canvas gloves with which to handle them, since compressed carbon dioxide freezes its container when expanding. Linked with a long towline, the rafts would float together until help could come. To call for help there was a waterproof, 10-inch square, 15-watt radio transmitter run by dry cells. If these gave out, a waterproof hand generator could be used. The antenna would go aloft tied to a hydrogen-inflated balloon. For the guidance of rescue ships, smaller orange balloons would be blown up, cast on the ocean waves every 15 minutes.

Had it been necessary to abandon the ship in the air over land, the crew would have slipped into parachutes suspended in the cabin like oldtime fire-horse harness, pulled a lever that unpinned the door hinges, kicked their way to freedom. Floating down with them, attached to each 'chute, would have been a compact parcel containing 30 days' rations, water, a hunting knife, fishing tackle, a first-aid kit and snakebite remedy.

This augmenting of superior flying equipment with practical Boy Scoutism goes back to Howard Hughes's tinkering boyhood. At twelve, he made his first radio transmitter out of the family doorbell, later powered his bicycle with a discarded electric self-starter motor. At 14, he had his first airplane flight, at 30, with careers in the oil-digging-tool business and the movies behind him, he was head of his own experimental aviation company.

Wary as a surgeon about any move he makes, Howard Hughes somehow managed to think of everything for last week's flight. In New York he had tested 15 brands of bread for nutritive value. In the plane, along with heaps of sandwiches, were containers of milk, coffee, food concentrates, boned turkey and enough water to last all the way around.

Also in the plane's rescue equipment were a revolver and a shotgun. Handy in case of a forced landing on unfriendly terrain, these would also have been useful in enforcing crew discipline, a job Richard Evelyn Byrd had to do with a heavy flashlight on his transatlantic flight (1927).

But of all these precautions none had to be used. The New York World's Fair 1939 whisked around its 14,716-mile course with machine-like monotony. Most interesting sidelights came from airports the plane touched at: throngs in Red Moscow pleased with a U. S. millionaire who had a patch on the seat of his pants; the "Godspeed--and success" from Mrs. Wiley Post at Fairbanks, Alaska; the surprise of the sleepy radio announcer at Minneapolis at seeing a news scoop landing virtually in his lap, since the plane had headed from Fairbanks for Winnipeg, the well-regimented welcome-home at jammed Floyd Bennett Field, "loused up" (in the phrase of Manhattan's elegant World's Fair President Grover A. Whalen) when Hughes came in on the wrong runway.

But if the reception at Floyd Bennett Field became somewhat tangled, Manhattan's jamboree next day for the aeronauts of the hour was in the good old Lindbergh tradition. In the front car of the motorcade rode Veteran Greeter Whalen, the man who had thus greeted Lindbergh eleven years before. Bowing, smiling, acknowledging the plaudits of the millions' Greeter Whalen led the way to City Hall. There, shepherding the five fliers into the presence of smiling little Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, Greeter Whalen trumpeted a magnificent blunder. He presented the reticent, slender, six-foot-three young man at his side as "Edward Hughes."

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