100 th Anniversary of birth of Howard Hughes

From the stories that I have heard about Howard and his flying, I wonder if he was much of one. maybe in his early days he could fly okay but in his adult years he wa so preoccuppied that he was dangerous. My favorite is the account of his flying a Connie ALONE from Burbank to New York. He took off and put it on auto pilot and started to go through some business papers in which he got very engrossed. He noticed something fly past the window and a bit later something else. He left his papers and went forward to look and saw that he was in the middle of the Rocky Mountains that were much higher than the altitude set on the auto pilot. This was his admission to a Boeing test pilot when he was flying the -80 on a demonstration flight.

 

Why would someone just put a plane on auto-pilot and go in back to read up on some papers?

/Remembers some of the things from the Aviator.

Oh yeah.

 

Another incident related to me by a Boeing test pilot was the near disaster when Hughes was flying the 367-80 on a demonstration flight at night some where in the valley east of L.A. he wanted to try a night landing at an airport. He missed the airport completely and got set up on a freeway. On the second try, he almost did the same thing until the test pilot took over and made the necessary corrections. Not to dismiss Hughes early successes and abilities but he put the scare into a few people in his latter days.......just like I did before I quit.