http://www.boston.com/dailynews/158/nation/Billionaire_Howard_Hughes_Spru:.shtml

Billionaire Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose wooden airplane lands at Oregon aviation museum

By Gillian Flaccus, Associated Press, 6/7/2001 07:44

McMINNVILLE, Ore. (AP) It was airborne for only one minute, skimming just 70 feet above the water on a fall day in 1947 before billionaire Howard Hughes landed the world's largest plane for the last time.

The Spruce Goose dubbed the ''flying boat'' returned to the limelight Wednesday as more than 3,000 visitors came to see the restored wooden airplane during the Evergreen Aviation Museum's grand opening.

''It's unbelievable. It's like flying a cruise ship,'' said 70-year-old airplane aficionado Cliff Halvorson.

Once the brunt of aviation jokes, the Spruce Goose was built in the mid-1940s to fly troops across the Atlantic Ocean.

The federal government had given Hughes and ship builder Henry Kaiser $18 million to build three ''flying boats.'' The planes had to be built without using critical war materials, including aluminum and steel.

Hughes' plane was called the HK-1 the first Hughes-Kaiser plane but critics and reporters nicknamed it the Wooden Wonder, the Flying Lumberyard and the Spruce Goose. The plane's hull and wing floats were filled with hundreds of beach balls to give it extra buoyancy on its only flight.

Kaiser abandoned the project in 1944. By 1946, a prototype still wasn't done, and a Senate subcommittee was trying to kill the project.

Hughes continued working on the craft, pouring $7 million of his own money into the project. On Nov. 2, 1947, at Long Beach, Calif., he took it on its only flight.

''We don't know if it could have flown farther,'' said Tracy Buckley, museum curator. ''Hughes never flew it again, and it's a mystery as to why.''

More than 100 volunteers spent eight years restoring the Spruce Goose after it brought by barge to McMinnville in 1992 from Long Beach where it had been stored for 45 years.

The 3½-acre Evergreen Aviation Museum was built to house the plane, which has a wingspan wider than a football field and weighs 400,000 pounds when fully loaded. The facility also displays 36 other historical airplanes dating from 1921 and including a B-17 Flying Fortress and a P-38 Lightning.

Many museum volunteers are World War II veterans who flew missions in the types of planes on display.

''We just love airplanes,'' said Ken Mills, who served as a ball turret gunner on B-17s that flew weather missions over Europe. ''We wouldn't work this hard for pay.''

-- Anonymous, June 07, 2001