ALIVE: 'Spruce Goose,' unappreciated in Long Beach
LandonEx
McMINNVILLE, Oregon (AP) -- It was airborne for only one minute, skimming just
70 feet above the water on a fall day in 1947 before billionaire Howard Hughes
landed the world's largest plane for the last time.
The Spruce Goose -- dubbed the "flying boat" -- returned to the limelight last
Wednesday as more than 3,000 visitors came to see the restored wooden airplane
during the Evergreen Aviation Museum's grand opening.
"It's unbelievable. It's like flying a cruise ship,'' said 70-year-old
airplane aficionado Cliff Halvorson.
Once the brunt of aviation jokes, the Spruce Goose was built in the mid-1940s
to fly troops across the Atlantic Ocean.
The federal government had given Hughes and ship builder Henry Kaiser $18
million to build three "flying boats.'' The planes had to be built without
using critical war materials, including aluminum and steel.
Hughes' plane was called the HK-1 -- the first Hughes-Kaiser plane -- but
critics and reporters nicknamed it the Wooden Wonder, the Flying Lumberyard and
the Spruce Goose. The plane's hull and wing floats were filled with hundreds
of beach balls to give it extra buoyancy on its only flight.
Kaiser abandoned the project in 1944. By 1946, a prototype still wasn't done,
and a Senate subcommittee was trying to kill the project.
Hughes continued working on the craft, pouring $7 million of his own money into
the project. On November 2, 1947, at Long Beach, Calif., he took it on its
only flight.
"We don't know if it could have flown farther,'' said Tracy Buckley, museum
curator. "Hughes never flew it again, and it's a mystery as to why.''
More than 100 volunteers spent eight years restoring the Spruce Goose after it
brought by barge to McMinnville in 1992 from Long Beach where it had been
stored for 45 years.
The 3-1/2-acre Evergreen Aviation Museum was built to house the plane, which
has a wingspan wider than a football field and weighs 400,000 pounds when fully
loaded. The facility also displays 36 other historical airplanes dating from
1921 and including a B-17 Flying Fortress and a P-38 Lightning.
Many museum volunteers are World War II veterans who flew missions in the types
of planes on display.
"We just love airplanes,'' said Ken Mills, who served as a ball turret gunner
on B-17s that flew weather missions over Europe. "We wouldn't work this hard
for pay.''
06-11-01/ 13:07 EDT
=L=
Jon Nadelberg
>
> >More than 100 volunteers spent eight years restoring the Spruce Goose after it
> >brought by barge to McMinnville in 1992 from Long Beach where it had been
> >stored for 45 years.
>
>
No! It's Long Beach!
--
See 1970s Disneyland!
http://home.pacbell.net/jonvn
Mack Twamley
"David Carson" <da...@neosoft.com> wrote in message
news:86A436B58A62DCAC.BAB3CACE...@lp.airnews.net...
> >More than 100 volunteers spent eight years restoring the Spruce Goose
after it
> >brought by barge to McMinnville in 1992 from Long Beach where it had been
> >stored for 45 years.
>
>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
True. Right in the heart of L.A.
and right next door to the bedspread king's store!
Actually, what sort of puzzles me about the story is that the plane had
been displayed for years in a huge dome next to the Queen Mary liner, and
was certainly not unappreciated, having been seen and entered by gazillions
of people over the years. They make it sound as if it were stored in a
dusty warehouse. Also, if they took it by barge to McMinnville OR in 1992,
what have they been doing for almost a decade with it? It needed no
restoring, only a building to house it. Sounds as if they were sitting on
their hands for a long time....
Mary O'Neill
They have been restoring it and building a building a museum. I remember thinking
when I found out they were moving it to McMinville that I would get to see it. I lived
close enough to make it a day trip. I was disappointed to find out it would be years
before it would be on public display. Plus more years because I moved to Arizona in '96.
According to sprucegoose.org...
In 1988, Walt Disney Company acquired the Wrather Corporation and with it the lease
on the Hughes Flying Boat. Two years later, after disappointing financial returns,
Disney revealed plans to convert the Queen Mary/Hughes Flying Boat complex to a major
sea park with "no provisions for the Spruce Goose."
http://sprucegoose.org/spruceGoose.t?request=A%20Brief%20History
Has the rest of the history.
Mo
--
"We all fell down from the milky way..."
- Jimmy Buffett, 'Barefoot Children in the Rain'
Dave Sill
> The plane's hull and wing floats were filled with hundreds
> of beach balls to give it extra buoyancy on its only flight.
Unless those beach balls were lighter than air, they wouldn't have
added bouyancy until the hull was breached.
--
Dave Sill <MaxFr...@sws5.ctd.ornl.gov> <http://web.infoave.net/~dsill>
Oak Ridge National Lab, Workstation Support
<http://www.lifewithqmail.org>: almost everything you always wanted to know.
Jon Nadelberg
>
> land...@aol.comnospamno (LandonEx) quotes an AP article:
>
> > The plane's hull and wing floats were filled with hundreds
> > of beach balls to give it extra buoyancy on its only flight.
>
> Unless those beach balls were lighter than air, they wouldn't have
> added bouyancy until the hull was breached.
>
They weigh a lot, too. You can fill a C5 cargo hold with 3 school
buses, and it will fly. But if you fill it with ping pong balls, it
would be too heavy to take off.
Mack Twamley
"Dave Sill" <MaxFr...@sws5.ctd.ornl.gov> wrote in message
news:wx07kyf...@sws5.ctd.ornl.gov...
> land...@aol.comnospamno (LandonEx) quotes an AP article:
>
> > The plane's hull and wing floats were filled with hundreds
> > of beach balls to give it extra buoyancy on its only flight.
>
> Unless those beach balls were lighter than air, they wouldn't have
> added bouyancy until the hull was breached.
>
> --
> Dave Sill <
I seem to recall that back in the 30s, the bandleader and 'sportsman'
aviator Harry Richman wanted to fly the Atlantic in his plane and was going
to fill the wings with pingpong balls to aid in bouyancy if he went down at
sea. Whether the flight ever took place I don't know.
asbest...@deja.com
They couldn't get enought marshmallows and weiners for the proposed
bonfire.
da boss