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On Nov. 2, 1947, Howard Hughes piloted his Hughes H-4 Hercules, nicknamed the “Spruce Goose,” on its one and only flight; a massive wooden seaplane with a wingspan longer than a football field, it remained airborne for 26 seconds.
And that was it. The plane never advanced beyond the prototype.
Per historians , the Spruce Goose was first conceived during World War II, when German submarines were sinking hundreds of Allied ships, and there was a growing need to move troops and materials across the Atlantic Ocean. Henry Kaiser conceived the idea of a massive flying transport and turned to Hughes to design and build it. Hughes took on the task, made even more challenging by the government’s restrictions on materials critical to the war effort, such as steel and aluminum.
Six times larger than any aircraft of its time, the Spruce Goose, also known as the Hughes Flying Boat, is made entirely of wood and flew just once, in Long Beach, California.