the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 78
difficulty. Just to house the flying boat’s construction in Culver City on the
edge of Los Angeles, Hughes had to build what probably was the largest
wooden building ever, a structure eight stories high and the length of two
and a half football fields. For the plane itself, Hughes opted to use Duramold,
a pro cess patented in the 1920s for laminating and molding thin
sheets of plywood together, but never before used for anything but small
aircraft. His workers had to develop new pro cesses and equipment to
shape each gigantic piece of plywood to exacting specifi cations. Keeping
the plywood parts fastened together was another problem, until a subcontractor
figured out how to glue the aircraft together using epoxy resins
cured at high temperatures. (The pieces were held together temporarily
by nails—eight tons of them—until the glue dried.) Hughes became so
fascinated with wood that even when the metal shortage eased in 1943, he
stubbornly refused to follow government offi cials’ recommendations that
he switch to aluminum.
Continually having to come up with such innovations ate up a lot of
time—as did Hughes’s increasingly disorderly mind and leadership style.
He was an extreme micromanager who insisted on being consulted on
every detail, no matter how small. But Hughes’s mysterious schedule often
paralyzed the project; he was absent from the plant for weeks or
months at a time, and when he did show up, it was usually in the middle
of the night. When Hughes was around to make decisions, they frequently
turned out to be bizarre ones. For example, he inexplicably hired a manufacturing
supervisor who had no experience either building airplanes or
working with wood. And when an alarmed government offi cial pointed
out to Hughes that his specifications called for engines bigger and more
powerful than anything in production, Hughes just said he would take
responsibility for however things turned out.
In the spring of 1943, Hughes slipped away to Lake Mead, ostensibly
to gather data on amphibious landings for the flying boat. There, he
crashed his personal Sikorsky S-43 seaplane, suffering yet another head
injury. His behavior became even more erratic. With the first plane due