80th Anniversary of Recluse’s Record-Breaking Flight

During the production of his 1930 blockbuster, Hell’s Angels — a World War I film that featured unprecedented airplane stunts — Howard Hughes conceived the idea to build a record-setting aircraft. Over the next five years, Hughes (and eventually, the newly-founded Hughes Aircraft Company) worked on designing and developing what came to be known as the “H-1 Racer.”



The Hughes H-1 Racer was a revolutionary craft that incorporated the latest technological advances in order to create the fastest airplane possible. Retractable landing gear and specially crafted flush rivets were amongst its unique features, while its streamlined design made it not only one of the most efficient, but also the most beautiful planes of all time.

Sept. 13, 1935 was selected as the day for the historic flight. Hughes and his $150,000 plane took off from Eddie Martin’s Airport, located about a mile north of present-day John Wayne Airport. Following a specially designed course, Howard Hughes was able to reach an average speed of 352 miles per hour — shattering the previous landplane speed record by more than 38 miles per hour.



Following the official portion of the flight, the H-1 lost power due to fuel starvation, sending both Hughes and the craft crashing into a Santa Ana beet field. Surprisingly, neither Hughes nor the airplane was significantly damaged, and it is alleged that his first words after walking away from the crash were, “We can fix her. She’ll go faster.”



Due to a technicality, Hughes’ record was immediately called into question. It took more than three months for the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale to officially recognize the flight as a world record — a move that helped to establish American prominence in the aviation world at a time when many records were being set by European countries.



The H-1 Racer went on to set several other transcontinental records with Hughes behind the controls, and to this day remains the last privately-built craft to set the world airspeed record. However, the influence of the H-1 Racer was even more widespread than anyone could have predicted. Several of World War II’s most famous and effective planes, including the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt and the Grumman F6F Hellcat, were directly influenced by the H-1 Racer’s groundbreaking design.



Although Eddie Martin’s Airport closed just a few years after Hughes’s feat, the original H-1 Racer still survives and is on display in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Even though his record was broken long ago, Howard Hughes’s record-breaking flight in Santa Ana represents an integral piece of Orange County’s aviation history.