Nothing Sensational

At 11:30 a. m. one day last week, a 31-year-old millionaire named Howard Hughes was eating a combination breakfast and luncheon in Los Angeles. To this oilman-cineman-aviator came a telephone report that weather was fine all the way across the continent. Cramming a last mouthful Howard Hughes dashed out to Burbank, where for three days a stock model Northrop "Gamma" with a special engine had been waiting with 700 gallons of gasoline aboard. Stopping neither to get food nor to tell anyone but his timer that he was out to add the transcontinental non stop record to the world landplane speed mark he already holds (TIME, Sept. 23), he gave his plane the gun at 12:15 p. m.

Up to 15,000 ft. Pilot Hughes immediately climbed. There he leveled off, tried to get a radio bearing, discovered his antennae had torn away in the takeoff. Nonetheless, he dashed on at 225 m.p.h., taking oxygen every five minutes. After an hour, as he whizzed over the Colorado River into Arizona, thick weather shut in around him, forced him to fly blind. Climbing another 3,000 ft., he found smoother air, came out into the clear over Santa Fe as his third hour ended. Hour later, he met night rolling in over Kansas.

At Wichita the air became so bumpy that it knocked his compass needle askew, left Pilot Hughes dependent upon maps and city lights below. He recognized the lights of Kansas City, St. Louis, Indianapolis at hour intervals. Near Indianapolis a tailwind lifted his speed to 295 m.p.h., carried him past Columbus in 35 minutes. There the moon came up, gave him a definite guidepost to the Atlantic Coast, which he reached in another 105 minutes.

At Newark, no one was aware of the Hughes flight until the plane swept down into the floodlights, shortly after midnight. When timers informed Pilot Hughes he had set a new record of 9 hr., 25 min., 10 sec., beating Colonel Roscoe Turner's 1934 time by 37 min. 47 sec., he shrugged: "I wanted to go to New York, so I tried to see how fast I could do it. I don't think there was anything sensational about it."

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