the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

CHOOSE THE RIGHT PARTNER 81
Barton. Finally, Hughes announced that he would begin testing in the
harbor on November 1, 1947. Thousands of spectators gathered to gape at
the silver behemoth as it was lowered into the water.
The next morning, Hughes invited reporters onto the plane with
him as he took it for what he told them would be a series of taxi tests at a
maximum speed of 40 mph. After the second run, he slowed to an idle and
answered his guests’ questions. Hughes insisted that the aircraft, which
still had plenty of bugs, wasn’t going to be ready for a flight test for months.
Most of the reporters caught a boat ride back to shore to file their stories,
while Hughes took one more taxi run.
To this day, it remains unclear whether Hughes was playing a sly
joke on them all along, or whether his unstable mind was seized by an
impulse, as he later suggested. Engineer David Grant, who served as
Hughes’s copilot, recalled in a 1987 interview that on the final test run,
Hughes told him to lower the flying boat’s flaps to 15 degrees—“that’s
takeoff position. He shoved the throttles forward and away we went.” As
the giant aircraft hit 95 mph, it suddenly left the water and rose about
seventy feet into the air. Hughes flew for less than a minute, covering
about a mile, before setting the plane down smoothly on the water.
In today’s dollars, the adventure cost about $3.75 million per
second.
Since the government had no use for the flying boat, Hughes
brought it back to Terminal Island, where he had a special air-conditioned
hangar built. He eventually bought it from the government for the equivalent
of about $5 million in today’s dollars, plus the title to another experimental
aircraft. He spent another infl ation-adjusted $9 million
annually to maintain it in perfect working condition for the next three decades,
until his death in 1976.
But Hughes never tried to fly the giant plane again, perhaps because
he knew, even with his deteriorating mind, that it was unsafe. In his
book, Barton quotes unnamed Hughes mechanics who recalled that the
glued joints in the wings showed signs of damage from the stress of fl ight,