Posted on 10/14/2002 12:53:46 AM PDT by WaterDragon
30 years after the Wright Brothers made their first successful powered flight a young and successful businessman, Howard Hughes, decided to build the world's fastest land plane. The aircraft was Hughes' first design and was therefore dubbed the "H-1."
Howard Hughes had three major goals in the design of the H-1: it had to be the fastest land plane in the world, it had to have a range that would carry it from coast to coast without refueling, and it had to be a practical aircraft to fly and to operate.
Howard Hughes and his design team met each goal with stunning success...(snip)
For full article and photo, click here.
As for Mr Hughes i have to say he is by far stranger than fiction. That fellow surely had a knack for breaking barriers and living a life that seemed to be straight from an Ian Fleming novel!
I am sure freepers know of that CIA mission to retrieve a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine (a boomer that was part of the Soviet SLBM nuclear subs). The CIA went to Hughes, and together they told the media that Hughes was going to do some 'deep sea drilling' in a ship ....however the catch was that the 'drilling ship' was actually a multi-million dollar invention that had huge arms that could go deeper than anything had gone before at that time, and they planed to lift up the sub into a hidden area in the belly of the ship (yep, just like in a Bond flick the ship could open its bottom).
The plan was so unorthodox that the KGB (who had acquired leaks on the proposed mission) outrightly dismissed it as 'impossible' since they could not do it (i always find it strange that whenever someone says something is impossible someone else is doing it)! And the mission worked very well, even though one of the arms broke and a lot of the sub went back to the depths (that fact is still disputed though and some insiders say the whole sub was lifted not just part)!
And the info got from the captured sub helped the US get such a huge advantage over the USSR when it came to nuclear submarines that essentially the USSR offered no match whatsoever when it came to both Boomers and attack subs! None! And when the USSR found this out they went on a crazy spending spree that eventually bankrupted their coffers! Which is why some corners say it is the USN submarine service that eventually ended the Cold War by forcing the Soviets to overspend in a bid to catch up (and by the way they never did catch up). The Soviets were so worried about the US subs (especially the hunter-killers that had become so profecient at tracking Soviet boomers) that Soviet subs started to stay in their docks instead of heading out to sea (since the USN subs could hear and track them ...but the Ruskie subs could not reciprocate). And being blind to an enemy, especially when the enemy is a US hunter-killer, is simply suicidal! I would rather be in a MiG-17 facing a F-22 that to be in a Soviet boomer getting tracked by a US hunter-killer (at least in the MiG-17 i have the option of bailing out of the plane ...but in the sub the only warning i will get will be the acoustic signature of torpedoes, and by then it will be way too late to do anything but start some serious prayer).
Anyways Hughes had a large part in this, and thus did a great service to the US.
However as he aged he seemed to get weirder and weirder, until he stopped being eccentric and became simply crazy! However in his heyday he was sure the chap!
However i ahve always wondered about his business and whether it was fully legit or if it had some CIA 'assistance.'
It scared the crap out of the Soviets who assumed that the sub was too deep to recover.
Regards,
Pratt&Whitney 'Twin Wasp'? I'd be crying like baby . . . .
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I think he peaked out with actress Jane Russel. In The Outlaw she was, and still is, the greatesr exhibition of raw sexuality in film history.
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