Fabulous Team

While the can’t-do-it experts dug up more reasons why Henry J. Kaiser can’t possibly build cargo planes, the big West Coast engineer found a sure-we’ll-do-it partner. To his aid, on a 50-50 basis, came enormously wealthy, enormously successful Howard Hughes, speed flyer, technician, designer, builder, young man of vision, and a hardheaded businessman.

Howard Hughes, at 36, is no amateur in the business, is an airman’s airman: holder of the transcontinental speed record (7 hr., 28 min.), holder of the round-the-world record (3 days, 19 hr., 8 min.), big shareholder in great Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc. He is a first-rate designer himself, has a personal staff of technicians at work in his own experimental laboratories. He and his staff drew up plans for the giant new Constellation transport (range 4,000 miles; capacity 57 passengers, cruising speed 283 m.p.h.) and Howard committed himself for $20,000,000 to get Lockheed to build them.

Kaiser and Howard will make a fabulous team. Kaiser and his men, who helped put up Grand Coulee Dam (largest in the world), Boulder and Bonneville dams, the San Francisco-Oakland Bridge (longest in the world), are natural-born nose thumbers at nature.

Tall (6 ft. 3), slim, shy Howard Robard Hughes is a rich man’s son: his father invented a high-speed oil drill, left a multimillion-dollar fortune. But Howard Hughes has never coasted on his inheritance. He showed a technician’s touch even in boyhood, built his own motorcycle and radio set, invented a pretty good shock absorber, got admitted to California Institute of Technology for special courses before he was old enough to enroll as a regular student.

He was 19 when his father died. He ran the oil-tool business for a while, got bored, began branching out. He and Cinemactor Ralph Graves produced a motion picture, agreed that it was too bad even to release. But he tried again, turned out two minor successes, then gambled $4,000,000 on the war-aviator epic, Hell’s Angels. The picture made the late Jean Harlow the biggest box-office attraction in Hollywood —and made Hughes $3,000,000.

When Hughes took up flying seriously, he first became a crack pilot, then worked as an American Airlines copilot, under an assumed name, to perfect his technique.

His speed and round-the-world flights were triumphs of careful planning: each added to his store of aircraft knowledge.

Cargo planes have long been a Hughes dream; in one of his rare public speeches, after his round-the-world flight, he predicted that airplanes would some day supplant ocean liners, said that the aircraft industry’s future was “beyond the scope of the most fantastic imagination.” Now that Imaginer Hughes and Imaginer Kaiser are teamed up, Americans may possibly see some fantastic results.