The Final Days of Howard Hughes: His Murder and the Takeover Conspiracy Exposed

By Christopher Jenner

This stunning expose attempts to blow the lid off the decades old case of the death of Howard Hughes, playboy movie-maker, aviator and businessman, alleging a murder and takeover conspiracy orchestrated by the very company designated to care for an aging Hughes The Final Days of Howard Hughes exposes Summa Corp. Syndicate's efforts to siphon off the wealth of The Man, and cover up their neglect, malfeasance and murder with a very detailed Plan of action, all exposed within.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christopher Jenner
• Release date: Mar 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311934581

Christopher Jenner

Christopher Jenner is an unknown author. Presumably a pen name for whoever penned this manuscript. It was found in a house during an estate cleanup of a deceased Hollywood connected man who was in the niche business of providing studios with classic 60's and 70's cars (especially ambulances and hearses) for various scenes in films. Found along with it were plenty of rejection notices from all of the major publishers written to the original writer which suggested the content may have been too hot for any of them want to handle.

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Prologue

Howard Hughes was born on Christmas eve, 1905, in Houston, Texas. His father, Hughes, Sr., was an inventive man with great mechanical curiosity, as well as Harvard-educated and a lawyer.

He was experienced in mining engineering, and had devised the rotary bit and several other advances and innovations in the equipment used to drill for oil. He was a one-time wildcatter in the Texas oil fields, and was often away from home early in his career. They called him Big Howard, and although he didn't strike it rich in the ground, his inventive mind built the family fortune by another route. He was a pioneer in the development of the Southwest's oil fields. Hughes Sr.'s inventions had led him to the formation of Hughes Tool Company, which today exists as a major supplier of oil field technology worldwide, and by the time of his son's birth he was well established financially. In 1909, Hughes, Sr. patented a new kind of drill bit, which had 166 cutting edges that revolutionized the digging of oil wells. Its teeth chewed through hard rock just like candy. He designed and manufactured this revolutionary drilling bit, nicknamed the rock eater, which became the tool of choice for oilmen the world over, and soon made him a millionaire.

Howard Hughes Senior doted on his son, and would later leave his share of his company, Hughes Tool Co. to Hughes, Jr.. Hughes Senior and Junior were fast friends, and young Howard, then known as Sonny, was encouraged to exercise his inherited mechanical ability and keen sense of scientific curiosity. Before he was 15, Howard, Jr. had already made a radio transmitter, a motor for his bicycle, was a member of the then popular Radio Relay League and had even gone on his first airplane flight.

At home, young Howard's mother, Allene, doted on their only child. By all accounts, she was a beautiful and sensitive woman, who was devoted to Howard Jr.. He was just as strongly attached to his beloved mother.

Howard Hughes, Jr. was a mechanical wizard. He once said, What I am interested in is science, nature and its various manifestations. When his parents refused to buy him a motorcycle, he made his own, by cleverly using his bike and the self-starter from an old car. Hughes made his first flight at 14, a hop in a battered seaplane which took passengers aloft at $5 a flight. Then he used his allowance to pay for flying lessons with barnstorming pilots in Texas, and within a year, the youth had a flying license. Hughes was a tall, gangly kid, a bit hard of hearing and shy, and he was a so so student, except when it came to mathematics and science. He was sent away to prep school in California, and became interested in movie making from an uncle who was a screenwriter.

While he was at school, at age sixteen, his beloved mother died unexpectedly from an overdose of anesthesia preceding minor surgery. Then two and a half years later, in 1924, he lost his father to a heart attack. Sonny's father, Big Howard, passed away at the age of fifty-four in the middle of a business meeting at his office in Houston, leaving behind a very large estate, his position as President of the Hughes Tool Company, and an orphaned son. In his Will, he'd leave his share of the Company to his son.

At the time of his father's death, Sonny, barely eighteen, was living with his maternal aunt, and attending the Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston. A rather quiet young man, he seemed to be mainly interested in airplanes and flight, his saxophone, and Hollywood.

When Howard, Sr. died in January 1924, the Hughes estate was valued at $871,518 as per the Inventory filed among his probate proceedings in Harris County, Texas. However, more important than the dollar value of his estate, though sizable, was his sole interest in the Hughes Tool Company, which he'd founded and would pass on through his untimely passing. With the beginning of the oil age, Hughes Tool Company, which manufactured the revolutionary cone drilling bit, was only starting to realize the huge profits that were to be its due. As set forth in a will that Howard Hughes Sr. executed on April 23, 1913 (and amended by a codicil dated November 25, 1919), the beneficiaries of this windfall, were to be his late wife, Allene Gano Hughes, his parents, a younger brother, and Sonny.

Both by Hughes Sr.'s design and by virtue of Texas community property law, Allene Hughes was to receive half of her husband's estate. The remaining half was to be divided among Sonny, Hughes Sr.'s parents Felix and Jean Hughes, and his youngest brother, Felix Hughes. Sonny was to receive half of this half, or a fourth of his father's estate, with the other fourth being split equally among the other three. And since Mrs. Hughes had passed away, the bequests to the others doubled, leaving Sonny fifty percent and his grandpa rents and Uncle Felix one-sixth of the Hughes Tool Company.

The rest has become part of the Hughes folklore – events that represented the end of Sonny or Little Howard as the grownups also called him, and the beginning of the Howard Hughes legend. Felix and Jean Hughes, encouraged possibly by Howard Sr.'s other brother, Rupert Hughes, who was conspicuously omitted from Howard, Sr.'s will, pushed to obtain a guardianship for their orphaned grandson. But Howard, Jr., now only nineteen, took steps to determine his own fate, as he moved swiftly to establish sole ownership of the lucrative Hughes tool business. To wit, Howard, Jr. filed a petition to be declared an adult for legal purposes, though he was only eighteen at the time of this filing. He then was able to persuade Judge Walter Monteith in Houston, who was an old family friend, to grant his petition. Young Hughes soon exhibited a well-founded desire for control, having learned from his father's negative experiences with a onetime partner, and immediately bought out his uncle Felix and his grandparents' interests in the Hughes Tool Company. Assuming total control, Howard, Jr., like his father before him, now became sole owner of lucrative Hughes Tool Company – the proverbial goose that laid the golden eggs. Hughes Tool Company prospered along with the rest of the petroleum industry, and just shy of his 21st birthday, Hughes, Jr. turned down an offer of $75 million for the company.

Hughes Jr.'s backbone and his independence came as a surprise to relatives and to company executives alike. And he approached his next goal - his acquisition of a bride, Ella Rice, who was two years his senior and a daughter of the socially prominent Houston family which founded Rice University - with the same single-mindedness of purpose. As an aunt of Hughes Jr. related, Came to me and asked me to go and convince Aunt Mattie, who was a Rice, to let Ella marry him, and I was against it, but I went and asked her. I said, 'I can't send him with all that money to California with all those vampire movie picture people,' and Aunt Mattie said she agreed with me. And Ella and Howard were married in her sister's garden.

And so it came to pass that, in 1925, Howard Hughes, Jr., took control of the Hughes Tool Company, hired a canny public accountant named Noah Dietrich to help him run the business, married his Sunday School sweetheart, and set out to make a name for himself. Restless, Hughes began searching for new fields to conquer, and by 1925, the impact of motion pictures was being felt across America. The most glamorous place in the country was Hollywood. Howard and his new bride moved to Los Angeles, where he established himself in the Hollywood motion picture industry by the age of nineteen, despite concerted machinations to appoint a guardian for him, and amidst rumors of counter plots masterminded by his uncle Rupert Hughes to muscle in on the Hughes Tool Company.

The grownups called him Little Howard and Sonny at first -then Long Sam, in tribute to his long, lean looks and extraordinary success. As an impressed Hughes executive once warned a doubter, Make no mistake about it, Howard is a genius - a dammed odd one - but a genius.

Funded by earnings from Hughes Tool Company, Hughes began producing movies, learning on the job, and learning fast. A silent film called Everybody's Acting was his first release. Then, he made a comedy that actually won an Oscar - Two Arabian Nights. As Hughes planned his 1927 hit movie about World War I airmen, Hell's Angels, no detail was too small to escape his notice. And when he cast unknown Harlene Carpenter, he introduced his protege, Jean Harlow, to America and a waiting public.

The pattern of control emerged in the making of Hell's Angels that stayed with Hughes. He controlled every aspect - from the story, to the filming, to the editing. He was so concerned with the details on Hell's Angels, that he actually purchased many, many airplanes. In fact, someone estimated that Hughes personally ended up having the fourth largest air force in the world just to develop and produce this very innovative, hit movie, every aspect of of which he was involved in. Always ahead of his time and a daring innovator, Hughes saw the additional value that sound, which was brand new to the movie industry, would contribute to his film, so he almost totally redid the picture to add sound, shocking the movie industry with the film's final production budget, which went to $4 million.

Hughes's marriage could not survive his busy, round-the-clock schedule, and went up in smoke in 1929 when Ella Rice and he got divorced, after four and a half years of marriage. Even their divorce occurred while, among other things, he was very busy in the midst of bringing his first Broadway play to the screen.

In 1931, Hughes cast a young Spenser Tracy in another movie about aviation. He gave the female lead to Billie Dove, a former Ziefield Follies girl and a new discovery.

Howard Hughes had a genius for publicity. Always innovative and daring, he specialized in taking unknown performers and, through publicity coupled with good or daring roles, turning them into celebrities and stars. When he made a movie about gangster Al Capone in 1932, which was criticized for being too violent, he took the censors to court, and won the case for free expression. And the movie was the real winner at the box office. It introduced stage actor Paul Muni as Scarface, and secured the reputation of Howard Hughes as a force to be reckoned with in the motion picture industry.

Hughes was more concerned with what scientific contributions he could make and what he could accomplish, than in coveting money, wealth and a lavish lifestyle. And so he lived simply during this period, living mostly in rented apartments and houses. And although he didn't take any real part in the Hollywood movie society, he was linked romantically with a number of women.

After a few years, the attraction of films and the new motion picture technology began to pale on this by now very wealthy young man, and Hughes began looking for new horizons to conquer. Noah Dietrich, who was his friend, adviser and employee, once said, Howard wanted to achieve three things. He wanted to be the world's greatest golfer, the world's best aviator and the world's richest man. We've got a start on the third one.

Hughes's interest in golf, although brief, was, as would be expected, intense. But his real interest and avocation was aviation, aeronautics, and eventually advanced aerospace technology.

Hughes perfected his own spectacular flying abilities during the filming of his hit movie, Hell's Angels, and later made several other pictures with airplanes and jets. He also had the first of many aircraft accidents, when the World War I fighter plane in which he was training went out of control and crashed. But exhibiting his soon-to-be legendary nerves of steel and courage, he persevered and went on to become a highly skilled and somewhat daring pilot.

Meanwhile, Charles Lindberg had flown across the Atlantic in 1927, and Hughes was soon caught up in the excitement and the danger of the budding aviation era. Aviation was in a bit of a low period between the two World Wars, not yet a proven commercial industry but clearly far more than a novelty circus act. Using a pseudonym, Hughes was hired on as a junior pilot with American Airlines, but he was discovered after only one flight, and shown the door.

Hughes handed over day t o day operations of the tool company to executive Noah Dietrich. This left him more time to pursue aspiring actresses like Ginger Rogers. Ms. Rogers once recalled the complexity of the man she had dated, "I could tell how resentful he was of anyone coming close to us in conversation. He resented it very much, and he just wouldn't hold still for somebody walking up to the table and saying, 'Hello, Ginger, how are you?' He'd say, 'Who is that?'

Hughes devised an innovative way of meeting Katherine Hepburn by landing his plane on the golf course where she was playing. During the three years they were together, Hughes taught Kate how to fly as both fended off the inevitable rumors and gossip about them. At the time, studios labeled Hepburn box office poison, and then Hughes bought the film rights to the Philadelphia Story, a classic comedy that then established her as a star once and for all. Kate Hepburn once recalled why she and Hughes could never hit it off as man and wife. Both had the same character flaw, she decided, - a wild desire to be famous. As a character in one of her films told her character, You have everything that it takes to be a lovely woman except the one essential - an understanding heart.

In 1932, as an innovator on the cutting edge of aeronautics, Howard established an aviation firm, Hughes Aircraft Company, which was devoted to experimental, advanced technology, and high performance concepts, and where early on he built a world record breaking racer aircraft and other experimental planes. In fact, from 1935 to 1939, he won considerable notice and fame as a world class master pilot. He won a sportsman pilot race in Miami in January, 1934, his first of many air victories. In 1935, he set the land flying speed record of 352 miles per hour. Then, in 1936, Hughes, ever the technological wizard and aeronautics innovator, designed the H-1 racer plane, which could fly at a then astounding 332 miles an hour. After it was built, he turned around and set a trans-continental speed record in the plane in 1936, flying from Los Angeles to Newark in 9 hours, 27 minutes. This achievement won him the coveted Harmon Trophy. (This plane was so advanced in design and performance, that it drew the eye of the Japanese aeronautical engineers, who copied many of its features for the famous Zero fighter plane in World War II.)

Howard Hughes drew national attention when he set a new world flying record. And it demonstrated his considerable courage in planes - later to be shown again and again in other experimental aeronautical high tech endeavors - when the flight ended in his first brush with death. Some rare archival audio footage captures the moment after, in Hughes's own words, as he answers a reporter's questions about the near crash: This beet field is not a very appropriate setting for this little airplane which is the new holder of the world land plane speed record. It's a forced landing here. It was caused by motor failure. I looked about and decided this field was the best spot. Put the plane down here with the retractable landing gear retracted, as landings in rough country are safer with the wheels up.

Some other rare archival footage, again in Hughes's own words in an interview with a reporter, also captures on tape that indomitable courage in experimental aircraft and high tech aeronautics Hughes would continue to exhibit, in spite of some pretty scary brushes with death and accidental injuries to himself.

RPTR: Out in the field you go hurdling through space at 290 miles an hour.

HH: Well, at eighteen thousand feet there's not much sensation, you're so far above the earth.

RPTR: Are you going to fly this plane back to its perch?

HH: Not right away, anyway.

RPTR: Now, do you in tend to break anymore records?

HH: I'm not sure.

RPTR: Why did you make the flight? What kick do you get out of this?

HH: Oh, hell, now that's a question of me ... [chuckle]

In 1936, the prolific Hughes set two more records – cutting the flying time between major U.S. cities, and pioneering the concept of commercial aviation. The following year, in his H-1, he broke his own transcontinental record, flying from Los Angeles to Newark in the then amazing time of 7 hours and 28 minutes -shattering his old world record, set only a year earlier, by a full two hours.

Then a year later, in the summer of 1938, Hughes left Burbank, California for what would be his grandest flying adventure so far - the attempt to fly around the world in his Lockheed 14 (interesting to note how far back Hughes's relationship with Lockheed goes) and probably also to break flier Wiley Post's 'round-the-world record of seven days, 18 hours, 49 minutes. Some rare, audio footage, in Hughes's own voice, captures the moment.

RPTR: Howard, what are your plans for the flight?

HH: We hope to get away in a week or two and fly to Paris.

RPTR: Are you ah going to fly alone?

HH: No, there'll be five of us.

Hughes and his crew started on the first leg of the round-the-world trip, with the New York World's Fair logo for good lopping off nearly four days. His speed for the elapsed time was approximately 161 miles per hour, twice as fast as the 83 mph for Post. Between 1935 and 1938, Hughes set three major speed records and won the coveted Harmon Trophy two times as well as the Collier Trophy for his around-the-world performances.

For a time after this, he returned to Houston, where he devoted his full attention to Hughes Tool Company. But Hollywood again exerted a strong pull on Hughes, and he returned to tinseltown to produce one of the most controversial motion pictures of its time. This was Hughes's 1946 movie, The Outlaw, starring his sexy new discovery Jane Russell on billboards across the country. For the film, the ever inventive and innovative Hughes is said to have designed a special uplift brassiere, designed to improve Jane Russell's already ample cleavage on film. Howard's first new film in a decade provoked so many disputes with censors that its release was delayed for four years. But rumors of steamy love scenes, albeit rumor with no foundation in fact, guaranteed its success at the box office anyway, just as the ever savvy Hughes had foreseen and anticipated.

And in the final cut of the movie, the public still got more than the censors bargained for. One of its stars, Jane Russell, once explained how this happened in t he scene in which Billy the Kid is laid up in bed recovering from a gun shot wound and her character Rio is nursing him back to health.

There was cleavage in it. And of course in those days, you didn't show any cleavage at all. And it was... I remember the shot they got, as a matter of fact... and it was not even supposed to be in there... because it was an accident. It was a.... there was a... the bed... and Billy the Kid was lying on the bed. And I ...was... the camera was right across from me. And I leaned over this way... I had a blouse on that went... like so. And I leaned over to pull the covers up... and they got too much cleavage.

Then in 1948, Hughes spent $9 million dollars to buy RKO Studios in order to build a stronger base in the movie business. And the multi-talented Hughes showed more of his seemingly endless abilities when he proved his additional prowess as a film editor. Hughes was an excellent editor, disclosed Gordon Youngman, an old executive at RKO Studios. Hughes also showed his genuine patriotism and love of country, when he suddenly fired one hundred workers on grounds that they were Communists. He refused to list screenwriter Paul Jericho in a movie's credits for the same reason. And he even appeared in court - the last time he would do so - to denounce the writer.

A couple of years later, in Korea, American troops would be fighting more direct forms of Communist aggression. And the true patriot Hughes and his Hughes Aircraft would supply the choppers. As captured in some rare audio footage at the time, a reporter announced the unveiling of one of Hughes's then latest technological contributions - one of the few not classified top-secret - to advanced helicopter design, the largest such aircraft in the world.

Reporter: Howard Hughes, the Hughes Aircraft producer, unveils his monster helicopter to the public and Air Force officers at Culver City, California. Powering by turbojet motors, the huge copter is designed primarily to lift great weights. It is the largest aircraft of its kind known. And when perfected, it is expected to take off and carry the load of a small freight car. And in passenger models, upwards of a hundred persons. The copter itself weighs 40,000 pounds, and its rotating blades measure 125 feet from tip to tip.

Obviously, Howard Hughes had far more substance than the typical Hollywood playboy. And in the mid to late 1940's that only seemed to be his role as he dated stars like Ava Gardner and Lana Turner. Most of his relationships with women around his age were for a brief period of time. It was for about five or six years that he was involved with women his own age, among them some very famous actresses. Then in 1957, Hughes would reportedly marry actress Jean Peters, an on and off friend of some years, which some saw as his tactic to try to prevent others, who had designs on stealing his industrial empire, from having him declared mentally incompetent. Hughes would keep his hand in Hollywood in the 1950's with a few more movies, including some films with such Hollywood notables as Ingrid Bergman, Susan Hayward, John Wayne, and director Roberto Rosselini. But above all else was Hughes's enduring love of the sky and the stars beyond, embraced in the fields of aviation and electronics at first, and then in the related fields of advanced aeronautics technology, aerospace technology and astronautics.

So much is made over Lindberg flying the Atlantic, as well it should be, but not near as much is made over Howard Hughes who soared faster and farther than Lindberg himself. Hughes flew around the world, and with unparalleled world-record shattering speed, and was obviously at the forefront of advanced aeronautical technology in comparison to other world aeronautical pioneers and innovators. As aforesaid, Hughes once stated, What I am interested in is science, nature and its various manifestations. And his keen scientific mind and wide-reaching interests in nature with all its wondrous manifestations were certainly bearing prolific fruit.

Back in New York, the mayor o f La Guardia led millions of Americans in lionizing the plot. Congratulations and welcome home, were the mayor's first words to the triumphant Hughes, and many words of tribute to Hughes were heard around the world for this and other incredible aeronautical feats. He was the hero out of one of his own movies - larger than life, and yet modest. But there was nothing modest about his next step - buying two regional airlines and molding them into TWA.

Hughes was one of those rare breeds - a combination of a keen and inquisitive scientific mind, a visionary who was technologically far ahead of his time, and a man of decisive action. Behind his outward demonstration of scientific and technological skills, he was a plunger, a visionary who would try anything once or twice. The idea of building an airline like TWA into a nationwide, and then international carrier, was one of Hughes's goals from the 1930's on, and he would be instrumental in TWA's growth. In 1936, a stunt pilot named Jack Frye called him up to appeal to him to invest in an ailing rail and air service called Transcontinental and Western Air. How much money? Hughes inquired. Fifteen million - cash, shot back Frye. Good God, don't you know that's a small fortune, gasped Hughes. But he coughed up more than $1 million to buy out the existing stock holders. Then, in the ensuing months, he and Frye spent their nights in old airplane hangars in West Los Angeles, knocking down a little Puerto Rican rum, while putting together plans for planes that would cross the country faster than the speed of sound, show motion pictures, serve banquet food, have piano bars, and possibly even a swimming pool. Other men laughed, but Hughes wound up with Trans World Airlines.

Hughes and another brilliant associate, Lockheed's Kelly Johnson, designed the highly innovative Constellation airliner, one of the great propeller-driven passenger planes of all time, which remains to this day. The Constellation was one of the most gorgeous airplanes ever built, with its three tails, and it revolutionized air travel at the time, with its pressurized, all-weather design, allowing for trans continental civilian travel after the war.

As a reporter in Los Angeles described it at the time, At Los Angeles, passengers go aboard for a sky voyage, that begins a new airline schedule of daily nonstop coast-to-coast flights by Constellation planes. The pilot is Howard Hughes, of round-the-world fame. And among the passengers are motion picture stars like Celeste Holm, and Hollywood actors Cary Grant and Frank Morgan. Thirty-five representatives of motion pictures, news and business. Linda Darnell is one, and so is Nancy Guild, newest of stars.

During the war, Hughes was also most prolific with his technological contributions to the Allied effort. With war underway in Europe in 1939, Hughes began work on the D-2, a medium range bomber. After three years of development, the military unwisely rejected the plane. And ironically, many people believe that the Japanese, again impressed with Hughes's advanced aeronautics designs and performance capabilities, adapted the design to build their famous Zero Fighter Plane. Hughes also designed improved machine guns for B-17 bombers, the flush-rivet fuselage, power-driven landing gear and the bell-shaped engine cowling. Among his many other advanced aeronautics technology contributions was the testing of the Speery Gyro-Pilot and a line-of-position computer, both of which were successfully demonstrated to be quite effective, worthwhile aids to aviation.

Although a daring man, with nerves of steel, Hughes was also a most careful and exact planner. To his mind, his many record-setting flights were not done as stunts but as scientific endeavors, and he planned and checked every facet personally, from the most crucial to the most routine. In fact, one of the stories indicating his concern for even the most minute detail was the series of nutritional experiments that he ran to determine which bread would stay fresh the longest, so his sandwiches would have better taste on the long flights.

World War II presented new opportunities for Hughes contributions. Now a major U.S. industrialist, he would advance the aeronautics industry while at the same time develop his crack aeronautics firm, Hughes Aircraft Company, into one of the nation's biggest Defense Department suppliers. Although stopped for a brief time because of another crash, in May 1943, the indefatigable, prolific Hughes was back to his nearly ceaseless work schedule.

The amphibious Sikorsky S-43 was one of Hughes's innovative projects at this time. And in addition to developing several unique advanced technology reconnaissance aircraft, it was at about this period of time when Hughes started serious design work on the HK-1, the Hercules Flying Boat, or as it would later by dubbed by an irreverent press, the Spruce Goose. While German U-Boats took their toll on Allied shipping lines, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser proposed the idea of a giant flying boat to President Roosevelt, to ferry men and material across the ocean. Henry Kaiser was a ship builder, not an airplane maker, and so he turned to Howard Hughes for assistance with the project. Hughes was concerned with the terrifying loss of U.S. and other allied troop ships and supply ships from torpedoes from the dreaded German U-boats. He conceived the idea of a massive transport aircraft which would be capable of carrying vast numbers of men and literally tons of all kinds of equipment. Hughes's plan was to at least partially replace surface shipping by a massive airlift.

A savvy Hughes, already sensing the bureaucratic and greedy political leeches and cut throats entrenched in the nation's capitol, wisely hired PR men to help eliminate interference in the nation's capitol. He realized that When in Rome, he had to do as the Romans do... as the maxim goes. In short, he realized you had to make campaign contributions, you had to hire people who knew politicians, who knew the Washington power structure. So throughout his life, he basically had lawyers, had public relations people who had connections to that structure... or in whatever state he was operating, had connections to that power structure... in order to make sure there was no undue interference or self-serving red tape to interfere with what he was trying to accomplish and contribute. If he wanted to buy an airline, if he wanted to expand the route system of his airline, if he wanted to make an acquisition that might be controversial, he knew the benefit of having those kinds of people.

During the war, always striving for new technological frontiers, Hughes designed and built the experimental FX-11 – his innovative design for a photo-reconnaissance aircraft. In a test flight, in 1946, one of the propellers lost oil and reversed its pitch. Hughes was nearly killed when the plane crashed into a house in Beverly Hills. While recovering from his serious injuries, Hughes found his hospital bed painful and inadequate. When something was needed that didn't exist, Hughes, ever the technological genius even while bedridden, simply invented it. He summoned some engineers and mapped out a new bed design which featured separate rubber squares, each movable by a separate motor. It was quickly built and worked admirably, helping speed his recovery.

Still in 1946, only months after his near fatal crash, the indomitable Howard Hughes took his innovative FX-11 photo-reconnaissance aircraft back up in a successful test flight, while again proving his status as one of the world's foremost aviators. And even while he was perfecting his FX-11 photo-reconnaissance aircraft, and recovering from his near fatal air crash, Hughes had been simultaneously meeting headlong one of the biggest challenges of his stellar aeronautical career – the Flying Boat project.

People who worked on it called it Hercules, but to the American public it would later become irreverently known as the Spruce Goose, built entirely of wood because of the wartime shortage of metal. With a wing span longer than a football field, this was an airship well suited to the visionary and technologist in Howard Hughes. And for this maverick tycoon and his seat-of-the-pants Hughes Aircraft Company to guide the Flying Boat from drawing board to launch in less than three years has to rank as one of the great dare-to-do-it stories in the history of American enterprise. It was a wood-hulled seaplane powered by eight engines, 320 feet long (60 percent longer than a modern Boeing 747). Along with his visionary side, Hughes always kept a skilled eye to the practical, and designed it so it could take off and land from the water, so it would be able to operate from facilities anywhere in the world and to utilize the already developed seaport materials handling systems for rapid loading and unloading.

Despite the breakneck speed with which the gigantic aircraft was finished - in less than three years - World War II came to a sudden halt in the latter half of 1945, after the Enola Gay signaled an end to the war in a devastating atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. But that didn't stop corrupt politicians like Senator Ralph Brewster,