The Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes's Wooden Giant
Near Mcminnville, Oregon
Under this roof rests one of the strangest triumphs in aviation history, the Hughes H Four Hercules, better known by a nickname its own builder hated, the Spruce Goose. During the Second World War, German submarines were sinking Allied ships faster than they could be replaced, and the industrialist Henry Kaiser imagined an enormous flying transport that could carry troops and cargo above the reach of the torpedoes. He turned to the aviator and film producer Howard Hughes to design and build it.
Because steel and aluminum were reserved for the war effort, Hughes built his giant almost entirely of laminated birch, though the Spruce Goose name stuck anyway. The result was staggering. Its wingspan stretched nearly three hundred and twenty feet, longer than a football field and wider than any airplane that had flown before.
The war ended before the aircraft was finished, and critics in the United States Senate mocked it as a flying lumberyard and a waste of taxpayer money. On the second of November, nineteen forty seven, in the harbor at Long Beach, California, Hughes silenced them. During what was supposed to be a simple taxi test, with journalists and engineers aboard, he opened the throttles, and the great boat lifted off the water.
It flew for about one mile just above the waves, at a height that accounts place somewhere between twenty five and seventy feet, and stayed airborne for roughly half a minute. It never flew again. Hughes kept the plane hidden in a climate controlled hangar, paying a full crew to maintain it until his death in nineteen seventy six.
For a time it seemed destined to vanish. Then the founders of this museum, the Evergreen family, won the bidding for it in nineteen ninety two. Workers dismembered the giant and floated its pieces by barge up the Pacific coast and up the Columbia and Willamette rivers to Dayton, Oregon, then trucked them here to McMinnville.
Reassembly finished in two thousand one. Today the Spruce Goose fills this hall, a monument to ambition so large it could barely leave the ground, yet it flew, and it proved the doubters wrong.
