What do Indiana and Howard Hughes have in common? Read on from todays Writers Almanac: It was on this day in 1937 that Howard Hughes broke the record for the fastest transcontinental flight. The previous record was held by Hughes himself, who had set it a year earlier. He completed the trip in 7 hours and 28 minutes, breaking his earlier record by more than two hours. Hughes had made a last-minute decision to attempt the flight after he heard that someone else might try to break his record; he said that he wanted the other pilot to have a more challenging number to work with. Hughes set off from Los Angeles at 2:14 a.m. The sky was overcast, so he flew above the clouds - at 14,000 feet for most of the trip. He barely saw the ground at all - once in Arizona, once going over the Mississippi River, and then more regularly once he neared his destination. He hit a tough patch over the Sierras - he was experimenting with his new oxygen mask, and it wasnt getting him enough oxygen, so he was getting faint. He let out a scream in order to equalize the pressure inside and outside his head, and that helped him. Finally he got his mask adjusted correctly, but then he ran out of oxygen over Indiana and had to continue without it. Everyone thought that he was going to land at Chicago, not Newark, so they were not ready to receive him. Newark was a busy airport, and there was a plane about to take off just where Hughes wanted to land, so he had to fly in circles around the landing field for about 20 minutes. By that time, a crowd had gathered. When he touched down in Newark, Hughes climbed out of the cockpit with a smile. His face was darkened from the exhaust smoke, and he admitted that he was very tired and a bit shaky, but he shared the statistics of his flight as well as he knew them. Hughes was a movie producer and business tycoon who became one of the richest men in the world. He said, I want to be remembered for only one thing: my contribution to aviation.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 21:52:42 +0000
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