Bound 'Round

With 1,500 gallons of gas in the tanks, America's most purposeful playboy, Howard Hughes, at the controls, and a wad of gum on her tail for luck, a silver Lockheed monoplane roared up off Floyd Bennett Field, Long Island, one hot evening this week. The New York World's Fair 1939 was bound for Paris with a crew of four--Navigator Harry P. M. Connor, veteran of Captain Erroll Boyd's Montreal-London hop in 1930; Navigator Lieut.

Thomas L. Thurlow, lent for the flight by the U. S. Army; Flight Engineer Edward Lund, and Radio Engineer Richard Stoddart. Flier Hughes was guided by the most reassuring set of flying gadgets ever packed into a private airplane. Kept on his course by a homing radio compass, another taking bearings from ships at sea, and a new periscopic drift indicator perfected by Lieutenant Thurlow, Flier Hughes let a gyro-pilot do most of the flying, chatted every half hour or so over a powerful radio transmitter to a base at the New York World's Fair that was using a towering trylon of that future exhibition for an antenna.

Averaging 218 miles an hour Pilot Hughes flew the Lindbergh route as it never had been flown before. When Manhattan went to bed he was veering off Newfoundland. When it rose for breakfast he was over Ireland. Before lunch the radio reported him in at Le Bourget Field, 3,641 miles away in Paris, 16 hours, 35 minutes after his takeoff, more than twice as fast as Lindbergh's time, 33 hours, 30 minutes.

Ostensible purpose of the Hughes Flight was to bid foreign aviators to come to the New York World's Fair, to which Hughes is aeronautical adviser. But most people knew that Howard Hughes had for months been planning a world flight, and some of them knew that what kept him from starting off long ago was Governmental unwillingness to let him fly into curious foreign lands with new and strictly U. S. flying instruments. Another stumbling block was the unwillingness of foreign lands to let anyone fly over with cameras possibly spotting military secrets. But eight hours after he blew into Le Bourget, Howard Hughes was aloft again with a jounce that rattled his landing gear. Soon he was flying discreetly high and fast over Germany, aiming for Moscow, then on around the world.

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