Spruce Goose finds a new home

Sometime in the next few weeks, the big Goose will be hauled out of its nest and taken to a new perch either at Long Beach or San Diego. Fewer than 300 people have seen the plane in the hangar. Until his death, Hughes insisted that the plane be kept in condition good enough to fly within three months.

Even by today’s standards, the Spruce Goose is a Titan of a plane. When it was being built, 25 years before the first Jumbo flew, it must have defied the imagination.

The Goose, standing 24. 5 metres tall, is 1. 5 metres taller than a Jumbo and nearly double the height of a Boeing 707. The wingspan is more than double that of the 44-metre-wide 707. The Spruce Goose is about four metres shorter than a Jumbo, but 20 metres longer than a 707. Its wings are so deep that engineers could walk through them during flight. Hughes designed the plane to hold military equipment for 750 combat troops.

The idea for the Spruce Goose sprang from a meeting between Hughes and the Californian industrialist Henry Kaiser. Many of the ships being built by the Kaiser were being scuttled by German U-boats as they tried to take war supplies from America to Britain. Kaiser conceived the idea of huge transport planes and put it to Hughes.

Hughes said he would build such a plane if the US Government issued contracts. Most people thought Hughes was crazy, but the government ordered three test aircraft and paid

$18 million to have them delivered within two years.

The Spruce Goose might never have taken to the air if Hughes had not been challenged and taunted by Republican senators who were trying to make a political issue out of Democratic mismanagement during the war.

Hughes decided to prove the charge wrong. His co-pilot, Mr Dave Grant, now 63, recalls: “I did not exactly expect to fly that day. But after two runs, Hughes asked me to let the wing flaps down 15 degrees. I knew then he was going to take off. The lift-off was smooth, despite choppy seas, and we took o,ff at 70 mph. We flew for a mile at a height of about 80 feet and the landing was extremely smooth. ”

Over the next five years, Hughes made minor modifications, then gradually lost interest. The Spruce Goose was put away. But Hughes never allowed it to be dismantled. That would have been a sign of defeat.