In California: The Goose Lives!

By John Skow

Howard Hughes died batty and beset by phantoms, and all of us learned valuable lessons from his downfall: do not let your fingernails grow to excess, do not inherit too much money, do not fly too high. The man's decay was so pathetic and so gaudy that it is difficult now even for those with a good grip on middle age to remember that once he was a hero. A strange hero, certainly, but a real one; a test pilot of impressive courage and a gifted, self-taught aircraft designer at a time when aviation was the century's brightest adventure. In 1935 he set the world landplane speed record (352 m.p.h.) in an aircraft of his own design. Small boys wanted to be Howard Hughes, never mind the money and never mind Jane Russell.

The visitor knows this. Still, the Spruce Goose is a surprise. The mind is ready for a ponderous bad joke. The funny name suggests this. So does the knowledge that for more than three decades Hughes hid the enormous wooden flying boat, with its 320-ft. wingspan (it is the largest plane ever built), behind security so tight that some of his hangar maintenance men never got to see the aircraft. The big hangar itself, a cantilevered, air-conditioned marvel on Terminal Island at Long Beach, Calif., is being demolished now, sold off by what is left of Hughes' Summa Corp. The Goose, moved by tugboat last fall to a site a quarter mile away, has a temporary home in a circus tent. A reporter enters the tent prepared to see a dead whale on a flatcar.

The astonishing news is that the Goose lives. The observer's first impressions are not just of size, but of trimness, tightness and fine lines. This is no "flying lumberyard," as the plane was derisively called during World War II when it was under construction as the prototype for what was to be a fleet of air-freighters. The Goose is an airship, dry-docked for the moment. The sum of the visitor's realizations comes to this: the plane could fly. Given a few weeks for testing and tuning up, it could still fly.

"We hot-oiled the engines every six months," says Systems Engineer Stan Soderberg, 55, who has spent his adult life caring for the big plane. A parachute rigger fresh out of the Navy, he signed on with Hughes at 21, in 1946. "We ran the controls every other week, hydraulics one week and electrical the next." Soderberg is a lean, intense fellow who wears an airman's jumpsuit. He saw the plane's only flight, on Nov. 2, 1947, when Hughes lifted it off the water of Long Beach Harbor and flew it at a height of 70 ft. for about a mile. Hughes had announced he would only undertake taxiing tests, but Soderberg says he knew that Hughes' preparations had been too elaborate for mere taxiing. "When I saw that flap come down at 15DEG I told a photographer next to me, 'You'd better get it,' and it took off as easy as any flying boat I've ever seen."

And now? Soderberg points up at the FAA registration number painted in huge characters on the wing. "There's no X there, for experimental. Hughes had it taken off. It's a registered airplane. It flies."

Workers in the tent are busy with wood, linen and airplane dope making a new flying tab--the movable vertical control surface--for the 49-ft.-high rudder. Not long ago, rain and wind invaded the tent and damaged the rudder, which seems to have been repaired once before, since it bears an inked notation saying that it was worked on in April 1954. A few months before that, Soderberg says, floodwaters surged across Terminal Island, and the Goose was knocked loose from its tie downs, and the tail was damaged. The night of the flood, more than 25 years ago, says Soderberg, was the last time he saw Hughes.

The flying boat wasn't Hughes' idea in the beginning. Shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser proposed to build a fleet of big planes in the early days of the war, when German submarines were sinking U.S. freighters in convoys headed for Britain. They were to be made of wood because aircraft aluminum was in short supply. Kaiser brought Hughes and the Government into the project, then eventually dropped out himself. Hughes' commitment to the plane was passionate. Even after the war ended he pushed on with construction, despite a nearly fatal crash in 1946 when he was at the controls of another aircraft, his XF-11 reconnaissance plane. The next year he told a Senate committee investigating his war contracts that he would leave the country if the Goose did not fly.

It did fly. But the coming of peace had made it obsolete, and it seemed appropriate that the plane designed to carry 700 soldiers or vast quantities of military gear, up to and including a 35-ton Sherman tank, had as its cargo hundreds of beach balls, installed on Hughes' orders for flotation. A few of them are still kicking around inside the great, hollow fuselage. The outside of the Goose is a beautiful white, though it was aluminum colored when it flew. The ribbing inside looks like metal, but it is in fact neither metal nor spruce but laminated birch stuck together with glue. Everything is enormously outsize. At their thickest point the interior of the wings is 11 ft. high. A big man can walk out easily inside the wings to inspect the eight 28-cylinder Pratt & Whitney engines, the largest radial engines ever built. For that matter, it is possible to crawl up inside the rudder structure for 20 ft. or so. There is no crack or corrosion anywhere. The plane could fly . . .

The Goose belongs at present to the Aero Club of Southern California, a non-profit aviation group. Early next year it is scheduled for exhibition by the Wrather Corp., which also owns the Queen Mary, in a huge geodesic dome at Long Beach. That sounds fine, a dignified last berth for a plane too noble to break up for scrap. But here is what tickles the short hairs on the back of the neck: some time this summer, Wrather executives plan to taxi the Goose, under its own mighty power, to the dome site. The pilot in charge will have strict instructions, of course; threats and thunderations even; but who's to stop him--how could he stop himself--from revving up those monstrous old engines, easing back on the controls, and lifting the Goose off the water for one last flight into the sunset?

--By John Skow

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