the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 76
he’d accomplished miracles before. And as Hughes thought more about
the deal, the more alluring it probably seemed. He’d been trying fruitlessly
on his own to break into defense contracting, but this might be the
ticket. Two days later, the news broke in papers across the nation that
Kaiser and Hughes were joining forces to build the world’s biggest aircraft.
To signify the Hughes-Kaiser partnership, they would name it the
HK- 1 Hercules.
Now that Kaiser had a partner, the War Production Board didn’t
dare turn him down, for fear of inciting a public backlash. The newspapers,
after all, had given the fl ying boat plenty of ink, and it was the sort
of thing that captured the imagination of a citizenry eager to believe that
good old American ingenuity could vanquish the Nazis. So the government
authorized Kaiser and Hughes to build three fl ying boats.
A Flying White Elephant
There were, however, a few downsides to the deal. The contract
was good for only two years, and as Kaiser had originally promised, they
had to deliver the first of the three planes in less than a year. It was an
insanely short deadline for a project of such an unparalleled scale, fi lled
with so many unknowns. No one had ever built a two-hundred- ton plane,
let alone tried to build one out of wood—another of the government’s requirements,
since offi cials didn’t want to risk scarce aluminum on such a
risky experiment. And they had a strict bud get amounting to $215 million
in today’s dollars. As economist Eliot Janeway once put it, the situation
was like telling Kaiser he could have a sandwich, as long as he baked his
own bread and stole the meat. Aviation historian Charles Barton, whose
1982 book, Howard Hughes and His Flying Boat, is the most detailed history
of the project, notes that Hughes himself was so worried by the challenges
that a month or so before the agreement was fi nalized, he showed
up in the middle of the night at a government official’s hotel room, lamenting
that the deadline was impossibly short.
To make things even more difficult, the two moguls’ work styles