In fall 1942, a saga began that was to outlast the war the giant airplane was intended to help win.

READ MORE: When the ‘Spruce Goose’ Took Flight.Hughes initially thought the idea was “crazy” but soon realized that it could be his shot. He approached Hughes with a proposal for a partnership: You design the giant planes, and I will build them. Kaiser knew nothing about designing planes, but he heard that Hughes did. Still, to avoid U-boats altogether, Kaiser speculated that a large cargo airplane or “flying boat” could be developed to carry supplies across the ocean, entirely beyond their reach. Initially ridiculed because of his lack of any experience in shipbuilding, he proved skeptics wrong, building more than 2,700 at an average pace of 39 days per vessel. Kaiser proposed to mass-produce “Liberty Ships” faster than the Germans could sink them. was losing huge numbers of irreplaceable cargo ships to German U-boats, threatening the ability to keep Britain fighting and eventually turning the tide in Europe. The brainstorm for a gigantic cargo airplane didn’t originally come from Hughes but from construction tycoon Henry Kaiser. But Hughes Aircraft itself seemed to be losing out. Starting in 1939, Hughes owned a controlling stake in Transcontinental and Western Airlines (TWA) and played an important role in encouraging development of the Lockheed Constellation. His proposed D-2 fighter, which looked much like a P-38, was an expensive flop. aviation industry was booming with wartime orders, Hughes Aircraft failed to secure any military contracts.

Even after World War II began, and the U.S. As I also mentioned, he tried but failed to sell the H-1 to the U.S. In an earlier post, I described Hughes’ early career, and the H-1 Racer he built in 1935 to set world speed records. Constructed almost entirely out of wood, it was for a long time the largest airplane ever built, and flew only once. For this session in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, I’ll be attempting to fly Howard Hughes’ giant H-4 Hercules.

Airplane flight simulator 2019