On the evening of January 1, 1936, Hughes stood beside his racer plane, the Northrop Gamma. After setting a short-distance speed record in his H-1 Racer craft in Santa Ana, California, in September 1935, Hughes was bent on establishing a record for long-distance flight across the United States. He sought out the single-engine Gamma, owned by well-known racing aviatrix Jackie Cochran, who relented after Hughes offered her a large sum for it. Hughes replaced the plane’s engine and took off from Burbank, California, on January 16, 1936, headed east. He flew across the continental United States, landing in Newark, New Jersey, only nine hours and twenty-seven minutes later, earning a new record for cross-country flying. He would set two other airplane speed records in the United States that year.

From the cockpit, Hughes tests the counter-rotating propeller engines of the XF-11 reconnaissance plane he designed for the U.S. Army Air Force in April 1946. On July 7, 1946, one of the counter propellers failed during Hughes’s test flight of the craft, sending the plane into a dive. Hughes was badly injured when the plane crashed into a neighborhood in Beverly Hills, California.

In August 1947, Hughes posed after piloting a B-29 plane across the country to testify before the Senate War Investigating Committee in Washington, D.C., which was probing allegations that Hughes failed to complete construction of a military transport plane for the U.S. government during World War II. Hughes denied the charges in a heated exchange with the committee’s chairman, Senator Owen Brewster, Republican from Maine, and ultimately won public support.

An aerial shot of the Hughes H-4 Hercules plane, then considered the largest plane ever built, parked on three concrete docks for its fuselage and wings. The plane’s wingspan was huge – 320 feet, longer than a football field. The idea for the plane came from Henry J. Kaiser, a shipbuilder, who teamed with plane-builder Hughes in the early 1940s to construct a military transport aircraft able to fly about 750 soldiers across the Atlantic Ocean. Kaiser, tired of the delays in development, left the project well before the plane’s only flight in late 1947.

On November 2, 1947, the Hughes H-4 Hercules made its way into Los Angeles Harbor for what would be its only flight. On board with pilot Hughes were about thirty other people, including co-pilots, crew, invited guests, and news reporters.

On November 2, 1947, Hughes succeeded in getting his massive H-4 Hercules plane airborne about seventy feet above Los Angeles Harbor, near Long Beach, California. The brief flight, the only one the plane would have, extended about one mile. Although the craft’s underpowered engines, coupled with its broad wingspan, may have made it difficult for Hughes to stay in the air, Hughes proved to skeptics that his Flying Boat could indeed fly. Hughes employed a staff to maintain the H-4 inside a private hangar for decades, all the way up to his death in 1976. In 1993, the Flying Boat was sent for restoration, and eventual display, to the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.