Today in History—November 2: The Spruce Goose Is Loose

On this day in 1947, aviation pioneer Howard Hughes took the controls of the enormous Spruce Goose seaplane docked in Long Beach, California.

The gathered spectators and journalists expected Hughes to keep the wooden craft on the water’s surface and merely take a few spins around the harbor.

Instead, he fully engaged the plane’s eight engines, and the Goose flew into the air. The short sortie—which lasted about a mile and reached only about 70 feet in altitude—made the 320-foot-wide behemoth the largest airplane ever to take flight.

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The debut was a long time coming. In 1942 the United States was in the thick of World War II and losing numerous transport ships in the Atlantic Ocean to German U-boats. To meet the need for safer transit options, the U.S. government signed a contract with Hughes and shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser to design and construct a plane capable of bringing some 750 troops at a time to the battlefields of Europe.

In 1947 Hughes’s prototype, officially called the H-4 Hercules, was finally nearing completion. By that time, the war had ended, and Kaiser had left the project. Hughes’s failure to deliver on his promises became the subject of committee hearings in the U.S. Senate, where he was accused of being a war profiteer. Amid that scrutiny, Hughes worked feverishly to demonstrate that his plane was viable and that the government’s money had not been wasted.

The flight on November 2 was the only time the plane flew. The eccentric Hughes kept it in working shape for decades, stored in a specially built hangar, and it survives today as a museum attraction.

The Spruce Goose held the record for the largest airplane, in terms of wingspan, to fly until 2019, when it was beaten by the 385-foot-wide Stratolaunch.