HUGHES ENDS WORLD FLIGHT, SETTING 3-DAY, 19-HOUR MARK (7/15/38)

Five weary-eyed men with bearded faces and clothing that was soiled and wrinkled stepped from an airplane of unblemished sheen into a bedlam of noise and confusion at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn yesterday afternoon, completing the fastest journey that man has yet made around the ever contracting planet.

Mobbed and hemmed in by well-wishers, Howard Hughes and his four companions gaped and stammered, as inarticulate as men from Mars and as helpless as robots in the hands of the crowd and the police who propelled them from one spot to another to broadcast, be photographed, interviewed and welcomed and finally to escape to the privacy of hotels.

The historic flight of the five men around the world came to an official end when the big silver-winged New York World’s Fair 1939 raced out of the murky western sky and shot like an arrow to earth at 2:37 P. M.

With Hughes, young millionaire sportsman and motion picture producer at the controls, it taxied up to the administration building and stopped almost on the spot from which it took off at 7:20 o’clock Sunday night. Only three days, 19 hours and 17 minutes had elapsed, yet the big plane had touched wheels at Le Bourget in Paris, heard the cheers of Soviet citizens in Moscow, rolled through Siberian mud at Omsk and Yakutsk and raced across Artic wastes to touch American soil again in Alaska and at Minneapolis before competing [sic] its epochal flight.

After one riotous interview at the field and a more decorous one in the home of Grover A. Whalen, the four members of the crew of Hughes’s plane fled to Hampshire House on Central Park South, where rooms were ready for them. There they found seclusion and rest.

Hughes, however, managed to escape without being followed. Some time later he arrived in a taxicab at the home of Katherine Hepburn, at 244 East Forty-ninth Street. Earlier in the day a woman who said she was the motion picture actress telephoned Floyd Bennett Field and left a telephone number to be given only to Hughes. When the aviator saw men with cameras around the steps of the Hepburn home, he motioned to his chauffeur to drive on and disappeared.

Later he went to the Drake Hotel, at Fifty-sixth Street and Park Avenue. He was carrying two sweaters under his arm. He nodded to an official and said, “I’m awfully tired – I can’t wait to get to bed” and was taken to a room. Hotel officials said later that he had gone to bed and had left orders that he be not disturbed by any one.

Hughes, the careful planner and scientific aviator, with his carefully selected navigators, radio operator and mechanic, more than halved the time it took the late Wiley Post to circumnavigate the earth in the Winnie Mae a little less than five years ago.

Post, flying alone, took seven days, 18 hours and 49 ½ minutes to complete a slightly longer course at an average speed in the air of 127.43 miles per hour. With his assistants and his mechanical aids to flying, Hughes spent only 20 hours and 3 minutes on the ground, while Post, who damaged his landing gear at Flat, Alaska, was earthbound for 71 hours and 13 minutes.

For the precision and speed with which they carried out their flight, which Hughes said was as much to test new radio and flying apparatus as to advertise the World’s Fair, the fliers received the official greeting of Mayor La Guardia and Mr. Whalen and were invited to participate in a parade up lower Broadway and a City Hall Reception today at noon.

For the sheer thrill of seeing the end of this latest effort of mankind to conquer time and space, a crowd of 20,000 to 25,000 swarmed to the field and lined up behind a wire fence for hours, growing stiff-necked peering at the overcast sky while waiting for the plane to appear. They yelled themselves hoarse competing with the sirens and bells of fire engines when the two-ruddered monoplane appeared, after several false alarms, in the western sky.

Like a silver torpedo, the big plane raced with a roar over the administration building, the façade of which was almost hidden by the throngs standing on tables, chairs and window sills of the terrace. It was 2:34 P. M. The wives of Harry P. Connor and Thomas Thurlow, navigators, and Richard Stoddart, the radio operator, danced with joy. Mrs. Thurlow regretted that she had forgotten to bring along a clean shirt for her husband, as the two other wives had done.

Once the plane circled the field. Then it shot earthward in a long straight incline. Hughes made a “tail-up landing,” with motors roaring. Then he applied the brakes and the fuselage settled on the dolly. More slowly the big plane taxied up to a place in front of the administration building. At this point there came the first in a series of breakdowns in the elaborate plans that had been made for an orderly and dignified reception.

Hughes chose a different runway from the one at which Mayor La Guardia and Mr. Whalen were standing. They were waiting several hundred yards from the spot where the plane finally alighted and they had to sprint to get there in time to perform their official functions. Mr. Whalen, an old hand at the business of greeting, however, was on hand when the plane’s door opened and the fliers’ heads appeared.

From that time on everything went awry. The program called for the crowd of sightseers to stay behind the fence, for reporters to stay inside the tent that had been provided for them and for photographers to do their work on the field from a platform on a truck. Pictures would be taken on the field at a safe distance from the plane and Mr. Hughes would be brought to the press tent for a quiet talk about the flight. So Mr. Whalen had planned.

Just before the big plane came into sight from behind the straggling clouds which seemed to stream from its wingtips like filmy lace, Albert L. Lodwick, manager of the flight, had painted a rosy picture of the orderly reception he believed awaited Hughes and his companions. In a broadcast to the plane, he said t taxi right up to the Administration Building and assured the reticent and retiring Hughes that he was “in no danger of being mobbed.”

The program which had been arranged in advance and rearranged by popular demand called for Hughes to lay a wreath of lilies upon the concrete star embedded in the earth where Wiley Post ended his record-breaking solo flight around the world in 1933. The marker is inscribed:

“On this site Wiley Post landed the Winnie Mae completing the first solo flight around the world in 7 days 18 hours 49 ½ minutes. Started July 15 1933. Returned July 22, 1933.”

Hughes never was able to lay the wreath, however. Some one else placed it in its proper place and Hughes later expressed regret that he had been deprived of the privilege of paying his respect to the memory of a flier whose achievement, he said modestly, was “the greatest of all time.”

More than 1,100 policemen were on the field, lined up along the fence and in solid lines reaching far out along the runways to see that the program was carried out. Motor-cycle men were to encircle the plane and escort it up to Hangar 7, out of reach of souvenir hunters. Hughes’s landing, however, caught them as much off base as Mr. Whalen and the Mayor and it was several minutes before they got into position.

In the meantime 100 or more sightseers, most of the reporters and all the photographers had broken from the places assigned to them and surrounded the plane. Several hundred policemen, locking arms, formed a ring of blue around the plane, elbowing late-comers away. The trouble was that they hemmed in those who had swarmed around the plane early, so that 500 or more half-hysterical men and women were pressed up against the plane, under its wings and before its stationary propellers.

Microphones were as thick as cameras in the crowd and the noise that came over the public address system sounded like a convention of jungle monkeys more than anything else. For a time there was just a jumble of gibberish. Then words were distinguishable, not all of them suitable for the ears of women and children. Then there came an occasional phrase above the babel. It went like this:

This last was in the weak, tired voice of Hughes. So was the following in reply to some indistinguishable question:

A great shush, which sounded like the blast of a seam whistle as it came over the loudspeakers, was heard and then came the voice of the Mayor.

“Seven million New Yorkers offer congratulations for the greatest record established in the history of aviation. Welcome home.”

“In behalf of the World’s Fair – greatest flight – proud of you and so is the world of aviation. See you tomorrow to return the compliments of the Mayor – parade tomorrow.”

With policemen half dragging them through the galloping crowd, Hughes and his companions were taken across the field to be interviewed in the press tent, which by that time was so full of taxicab drivers, World’s Fair employes and ordinary sightseers that there was little room for reporters. Photographers climbed on tables and chairs and yelled directions.

Those in the front rows, swaying against the chests of the fliers as those on the outer fringes pushed in, fired a few questions, heard some answers and then agreed with Mr. Whalen that it would be just as well to give it all up as a bad job. Before departing, however, Hughes declared emphatically that he “never again” would attempt another flight around the world and asserted that there was not much to tell about the trip.

Then with their greeters, the fliers and their wives fought their way with the assistance of the police to a string of waiting cars and were driven with an escort to Mr. Whalen’s house at 48 Washington Mews where Hughes, Stoddart and Lund described their flight, telling how they might have flattened themselves against mountain peaks in Western Siberia had they placed all their faith in maps.

“It’s damned good thing I did not try to fly out of Yakutsk at night,” said Hughes in the upstairs living room of Mr. Whalen’s home while cocktails and appetizers were served to the guests. Hughes explained that the mountains he had to cross were 2,500 feet higher than shown on the map.

Before the interview began, while Hughes was enjoying a shower, Mr. Whalen sent his man out to a store to buy the aviator a clean shirt, neck size 15 ½. Hughes appeared before the invited guests and interviewers wearing a shirt of pristine freshness, but he did not stop to remove the stubble of beard he had acquired in nearly four days of racing against time around the world.

A crowd had gathered around the Whalen establishment, one of a row of stables made over into studios, and rather than face another mauling the flier and his companions slipped out the back way and were driven to their hotels, where they were guarded like royalty from questioners and autograph seekers.

Before a large audience Colonel Clifford Harmon presented a trophy and medal to Miss Batten, who used the occasion to propose three cheers for Howard Hughes and his crew.

Hughes, however, managed to escape without being followed. Some time later he arrived in a taxicab at the home of Katherine Hepburn, at 244 East Forty-ninth Street

Note the absence of the words “love nest.” That proves The Times is a high-class operation.

do you happen to know what plane he was flying?

A "special Lockheed 14 plane." There is a phonto of it posted under my June 25 article talking about the impending flight. The article contains more specifications also. You can find it by searching for HUGHES IS READY FOR OCEAN FLIGHT.

What’s your point. This was 1938.

My point is - on July 15, 1938 the hot topic was Howard Hughes' flight around the world. For some reason that summer America got all interested in feats of aviation. Check back on Saturday for a report on another highly publicized flight.

My real purpose is to follow contemperary news accounts of the period leading up to and during World War II. Although Western Civ was about to walk off a cliff most people apparently didn't think too much about the ominous developments in Germany, Spain and the Far East. So aviation stories and the pennant race were what sold newspapers.

In addition to all that - it's fun. I have learned a whole bunch of stuff about twentieth century history since I started doing these posts.

Does that make sense? If not, I know where there is a story about a teen-ager who found a bat in her bra. Tell me what the point of that one is.

"do you happen to know what plane he was flying?
A "special Lockheed 14 plane."

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