Hughes' Goose as spruce as ever

A Russian Yakovlev YAK-50 emphasizes the sheer size of the Spruce Goose tail section.

In a flat field outside the small town of McMinnville in northwest Oregon is a building so large that cars slow on the highway so the occupants can take a look at it. Even in America - the birthplace of bigness - this enormous squat A-frame with its frontage of glass panels is an outstanding structure.

And it houses one of the biggest and most eccentric aircraft in the world.

The building is the Evergreen Aviation Museum and it contains - alongside dozens of reconstructions, replicas and original aircraft - the legendary wooden flying boat designed and built by Howard Hughes and his corporation.

It flew only once - 1.5km and just 20m above the bay near Los Angeles in November 1947 - but it has entered the popular imagination for its sheer conceit.

It is the so-called Spruce Goose, a name Hughes hated, as the plane is mostly made from birch.

The film The Aviator is to be released tomorrow on DVD in which Leonardo DiCaprio displays the eccentric, driven, billionaire inventor and playboy Hughes. And so a new generation has become fascinated by the story of this man and his marvellous creation.

The Hughes H-4 - also known as the HK-1 - is the world's largest wooden aircraft with the longest wingspan ever constructed. Just to the left of its enormous nose is a replica of the Wright Brothers' 1903 craft which flew about 37m.

The fragile object could have flown that distance and still been on the same wing of the H-4.

Beneath the gigantic wings of the H-4, other aircraft like a Douglas A-26C Invader and a Phantom 11 fighter jet are dwarfed.

Inevitably, such an ambitious project as the H-4 had a troubled history. All of it is recounted on video and in booklets available in this museum which is dedicated to the life and memory of Captain Michael King Smith, a gifted F-15 pilot and leader of the 123rd Fighter Squadron of the Oregon Air National Guard.

He was the son of Evergreen International Aviation founder Delford M. Smith, and it was Michael's dream to have an educational museum of flight.

Pride of place would be Hughes' flying-boat.

He did not live to see his dream realised. He died in a car accident in 1995 at age 29, two years after the H-4 was dismantled in California and moved by sea to Portland on its way to the museum.

The aircraft was reconstructed and opened to the public in June 2001.

Visitors can climb up a flight of steps to enter the body of the aircraft and gaze down its extraordinary length, long enough to contain two 30-tonne tanks with armour and their crews. It is so long it disappears into the distance, the ribbing seemingly becoming smaller and smaller concentric rings down a never-ending hallway.

Its size makes you think of it more as a feat of sculptural engineering than an aircraft. And what makes it remarkable is that despite its metallic silver sheen it is all made of wood.

Hughes had the idea for a huge flying-boat after America entered World War II and its seagoing ships were being blown out of the Atlantic by Germany's U-boat fleet.

An airbridge for troops and supplies was considered, but, because of shortages and the pressing need for aluminium for already proven aircraft, Hughes was commissioned by industrialist Henry Kaiser to look for alternative materials. With financial assistance from the government, the idea was that Hughes and his corporation would design and build three huge aircraft, one for testing and two for commission.

But by the time the war ended three years later the plane was still in pieces.

After congressional hearings in which Hughes - the stormy petrel of aviation, says newsreel narrator Ed Herlihy - had to fight allegations of cost over-runs. The aircraft was finally taken out for tests on November 2, 1947, with Hughes in the pilot's seat.

It was expected the aircraft would make a couple of practise runs, but on the second pass Hughes lifted it off the water and for a minute the plane some said would never fly was airborne.

"I like to make surprises," Hughes told a BBC reporter on board.

Legend has it that the aircraft was then mothballed in a hanger built for it in California.

But that wasn't the case. Engineers and designers modified it for many years, even after Hughes - who became increasingly eccentric and eventually a recluse - lost interest in it.

After Hughes' death in 1976 it was scheduled to be disassembled, but entrepreneur Jack Wrather secured the aircraft and built a hangar for it near the Queen Mary in Long Beach.

It was opened to the public in 1983, but five years later the Disney Corporation bought Wrather's company and wasn't interested in a huge and expensive aircraft that didn't fly.

Michael King Smith bid for it, saying Evergreen Aviation would provide a specially constructed home for it opposite their office and factory site outside McMinnville.

The H-4 was taken apart and shipped by barge to Oregon, then brought down to the farmlands and vineyard country of the Willamette Valley around McMinnville.

And that is where it is today, the centrepiece of the aircraft museum which it dominates.

At the other end of the scale in the museum is the one-seater BD-5B Micro, not much longer than an ordinary car.

The BD-5B Micro was the brainchild of another visionary inventor, Jim Bede, who said in the early 1970s that you could buy a kitset model of his plane to assemble at home for only US$400 ($1800 today) deposit.

The plane, attractive though it was, had one - sometimes fatal - flaw. And that was the lack of a suitable engine. While enthusiasts built their own personal flying-machines in sheds and garages, Bede was beset with problems in finding an engine to get the thing off the ground. He tried one from a snowmobile but the fuselage couldn't take the strain. He then tried a Japanese Xenoah but it proved expensive and complex.

Eventually Bede ran out of money, so enthusiasts tried their own engines. In one month in 1975 four micros crashed.

Peter Garrison observed in Homebuilt Airplane magazine: "Those BD-5Bs that do fly stay within gliding distance of an airport."

Other people, however, liked the manoeuvrability, speed and handling of these tiny machines.

You can get inside the one at Evergreen but it is a squeeze and, even with the safety of solid ground beneath you, you feel terrifyingly close to the front should you have the misfortune to be plummeting to the earth. No bonnet for emotional security.

The other problem was that the first time you took off you would, by definition, be flying solo on a test flight. That scared even the most seasoned pilots.

But there it is, a tiny and eccentric machine - one man's dream being dwarfed by that of another.

It is a peculiar conjunction that one of the world's smallest aircraft and one of the biggest - the Hughes H-4 has a wingspan longer than that of the newly unveiled Airbus 380 - are inside the same huge building by the highway outside modest McMinnville in northwest Oregon.

* Graham Reid flew to San Francisco courtesy of Air New Zealand.

Getting there

Air New Zealand's basic fare to San Francisco is $1899, plus taxes. If you want to continue to Portland, the closest major airport to McMinnville, the basic fare is is $2321, plus taxes.

Further information

Evergreen Aviation Museum (see link below)