Spruce Goose recaptures glory

Associated Press

McMINNVILLE, Ore. — It was only airborne for 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 forever.

The Spruce Goose, dubbed the "flying boat," returned to the limelight once more on Wednesday as more than 3,000 visitors came to see the restored wooden airplane during the Evergreen Aviation Museum’s grand opening.

"You really can’t imagine how big it is until you get up underneath it," said 70-year-old airplane aficionado Cliff Halvorson. "It’s unbelievable. It’s like flying a cruise ship."

More than 100 volunteers spent eight years restoring the Spruce Goose after it was barged to McMinnville in 1992 from Long Beach, Calif., where it had been kept for 45 years.

The 3 1/2-acre Evergreen Aviation Museum was built across the street from the old museum to hold 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 from 1921 to the present.

The Spruce Goose and the new museum are a tribute to Capt. Michael King Smith, son of Evergreen Aviation president Delford "Del" Smith. Michael Smith, an accomplished military pilot, was killed in a car crash in 1995.

The elder Smith has spent $21 million on restoring the Spruce Goose and the new museum, and plans to spend $8 million more before the facility is finished.

"You have to live here in McMinnville to appreciate this," said 75-year-old visitor Dale Burkett. "To me, that’s a real way to honor your son. I don’t know how you could beat it."

The museum is a living tribute to aviation. Many museum volunteers are World War II veterans who flew missions or served as gunners in the planes on display — B-17s, P-38Ls and Flying Tigers.

"We just love airplanes," said Ken Mills, who served as a ball turret gunman on B-17s that flew weather missions over Europe. "We wouldn’t work this hard for pay."

Designed to land on water or land, the massive Spruce Goose designed to hold 750 soldiers or two Sherman tanks. A grown man can walk upright inside its hollow wooden wings. During its only flight, the plane’s hull and wing floats were filled with hundreds of beach balls to give it extra buoyancy.

Once the brunt of aviation jokes, the Spruce Goose was built in the mid-1940s to fly troops across the Atlantic Ocean because German submarines were sinking too many carrier boats.

The federal government gave 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.

The Spruce Goose pushed the limits of 1940s aviation technology, and 747s still benefit from some of Hughes’ innovations, said Tracy Buckley, the museum curator.

"The precision fitting and engineering on this plane, for its day, is just phenomenal," said Dave Christian, a volunteer who helped reassemble the craft.

The plane was called the HK-1 — the first Hughes-Kaiser plane ever built — but naysayers and reporters nicknamed it the Wooden Wonder, the Flying Lumberyard and the Spruce Goose.

Though the majority of the plane is made of birch, the nickname Spruce Goose stuck. Hughes hated it.

Kaiser abandoned the project in 1944. By 1946, a prototype still wasn’t done and a U.S. Senate subcommittee was trying to kill the project.

Though World War II was over, a stubborn Hughes continued to build the craft. He poured $7 million of his own money into the project and renamed the plane H-4 to stand for the fourth Hughes airplane ever built.

On Nov 2., 1947, Hughes took the controls of the completed Spruce Goose for a "taxi test" in Long Beach, Calif. Suddenly, Hughes took off on a one-mile, one-minute flight while startled workers still sat in the tail and wing compartments.

"He surprised everybody," Buckley said.

That flight would be the plane’s last. Hughes hid the plane from view for 33 years, reportedly paying $1 million a year to maintain it until his death in 1976.

"We don’t know if it could have flown farther," Buckley said. "Hughes never flew it again, and it’s a mystery as to why."

On the Net:

Spruce Goose Web site: http://www.sprucegoose.org