Hughes H-1B Racer by Planet Models

1/48 scale
Kit No. 168
Retail: $45.00
Decals: One version – 1937 transcontinental flight
Comments: Detailed radial engine, engraved panel lines, recessed rivet detail, vacuform canopy, two bladed propeller with individually mounted blades – Not for Beginners

History

The Hughes H-1 racer, designed by Howard Hughes and Richard Palmer and built by Glenn Odekirk, was developed to be the fastest landplane in the world. On September 13, 1935, flying his purpose-built H-1 racer, Howard Robard Hughes Jr. achieved his goal of setting a new world speed record of 352 mph (567 kph) at Santa Ana, California. The H-1, also known as the Hughes 1B, was designed with two sets of wings. A short set was built with a span of 7.6 meters (25 feet), designed to achieve maximum speed for the record flight. A separate long set of wings with a span of 9.2 meters (31 feet, 9 inches) was built to provide maximum lift in addition to speed for tackling the transcontinental flight that Hughes would attempt and conquer just 16 months later on January 19, 1937.

Flying from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey, in 7 hours, 28 minutes, and 25 seconds, Hughes set a new speed record for transcontinental flight. His average speed for the 4,000-kilometer (2,490-mile) flight was 332 mph (535 kilometers per hour). To put Hughes’ achievement into context, front-line fighter aircraft such as the Seversky P-35, introduced in 1937, had a maximum speed of just 280 mph. The Curtiss P-36, entering service in 1938, had a top speed of 313 mph. The previous world speed record for landplanes, 314.32 mph, had been set by French World War I fighter ace and test pilot Raymond Delmotte, flying another monoplane design, a Caudron C.460, on Christmas Day 1934.

In the early 1930’s, Howard Hughes hired an ace aeronautical engineer named Richard Palmer and a skilled mechanic and production chief, Glenn Odekirk. In 1934 they set to work in a shed in Glendale, California. Hughes’ aim was not only “to build the fastest plane in the world” but to produce something that might recommend itself to the Army Air Corps as a fast pursuit plane. His ambition in this regard was not misplaced; the rise of fascist regimes in Europe and Asia spelled potential trouble for the United States in the years ahead.

Hughes was no stranger to flying when he commissioned the building of the H-1. Having learned to fly prior to the filming of his 1930 movie, Hell’s Angels, he demanded that a stunt pilot perform certain aerobatics for the camera involving a steep dive to low altitude and a strafing run against “enemy” troops. Paul Mantz, who was in charge of the stunt pilots, refused, calling it “suicide.” Hughes immediately replied that he’d do it himself.  He took a bi-plane up, a single-seat Thomas Morse Scout, took it to altitude with the cameras rolling, and went into the dive.

As Mantz predicted, the wings could not take the strain and folded up. Hughes lost control of the plane somewhere around 700 feet and crashed, suffering a concussion, a fractured skull and several other injuries. Against his doctor’s orders, he was back on the set of Hell’s Angels two days later, but ultimately had to have minor facial surgery. Doctors at the time suspected but never confirmed that Hughes had suffered slight brain damage. It would be the first of many aviation crashes in Hughes’ life that in later years, would lead to an increasing dependence on painkilling drugs.

The H-1 not only shattered records but broke new ground in aircraft design, including flush riveting  minimizing drag, an oxygen system allowing high altitude flight, and wing fillets that smoothly integrated the wings with the H-1’s sleek fuselage. In-line engines were more streamlined, but radial engines ran cooler and gave less mechanical trouble. Hughes chose a Twin Wasp Junior radial engine built by Pratt & Whitney, which could produce 900 hp if properly fed on 100-octane gas. It was small for a radial, only 43 inches in diameter, and housed in a long, bell-shaped cowling to cut down drag.

In building the H-1, reducing drag became a guiding design principle. The retractable landing gear, powered by hydraulics rather than cranked by hand, were incorporated to reduce drag and increase speed and range, and folded up into slots in the wings so perfectly that even the outlines could scarcely be seen. Its plywood-covered wings were short, having a span of only 24 feet 5 inches, and had been sanded and doped until they were as smooth as glass. In what would later be called flush riveting, Hughes’ team developed a new construction technique in which the thousands of rivets used on the surface of the plane’s aluminum monocoque fuselage were all countersunk, their heads partly sheered off and then burnished and polished to make a perfectly smooth skin. Every screw used on the plane’s surface was tightened so that the slot was exactly in line with the airstream.

By August 10, 1935, the H-1 was finished. On the 17th, Hughes flew the plane for 15 minutes and landed. “She flies fine,” he growled to Odekirk. “Prop’s not working though. Fix it.” He scheduled the official speed trial at Santa Ana down in Orange County for Thursday the 12th of September.

Speed trials, under the aegis of the International Aeronautical Federation (FAI) in Paris, measured the best of four electrically timed passes over a three-kilometer course at no more than 200 feet above sea level. The contestant was allowed to dive into each pass, but from no higher than 1,000 feet. And for a record to be set, the plane had to land afterward with no serious damage.

Darkness fell on the 12th before an official trial could be recorded. On Friday the 13th, no less a figure than Amelia Earhart turned up, officially flying cover at 1,000 feet to be sure Hughes stayed within the rules. Watched by a flock of experts on the ground, the H-1 took off, flew back over beet and bean and strawberry fields, dove to 200 feet and made its runs.

To reduce weight the plane carried enough gas for five or six runs, but instead of landing, Hughes tried for a seventh. Starved for fuel, the engine cut out. The crowd watched in stunned silence under a suddenly silent sky. With stubby wings and high wing-loading (the ratio between a plane’s lifting surfaces and its weight), the H-1 was not highly maneuverable even with power. Characteristically cool, Hughes coaxed the plane into position over a beet field and eased in for a skillful, wheels-up belly landing. Though the prop blades got folded back over the cowling like the ends of a necktie in a howling wind, the fuselage was only slightly scraped. The record stood. At 352.388 mph the H-1 had left the Caudron’s record in the dust.

Hughes would next go after the transcontinental speed record. The H-1 had cost Hughes $105,000 up to that point ($2.4 million in 2024 dollars). It would ultimately cost $40,000 more ($921,000 when adjusted for inflation). Palmer and Odekirk set to work, designing a longer set of wings-for more lift. They installed navigational equipment, oxygen for high-altitude flying, and new fuel tanks in the wings to increase capacity to 280 gallons. Hughes practiced cross-country navigation and bad-weather flying, buying a succession of planes and renting a Northrop Gamma from the famous air racer Jacqueline Cochrane.

By late December 1936, the H-1 was ready again. Hughes tried it out for a few hours at a time, checking his fuel consumption after each flight. On January 18, 1937, after only 1 hour 25 minutes in the air, he landed, and he and Odekirk stood beside the ship, making calculations. Their figures tallied. “At that rate,” said Hughes, “I can make New York. Check her over and make the arrangements. I’m leaving tonight.” Odekirk objected. So did Palmer, by phone from New York. The plane had no night-flight instruments. But Hughes’ mind was made up.

That night Hughes did not bother with sleep. Instead he took a date to dinner, dropped her off at home after midnight, caught a cab to the airport, checked the weather reports over the Great Plains, climbed into a flight suit and took off at 2:14 a.m., a time when he was accustomed to doing some of his best thinking. He rocketed eastward at up to 20,000 feet, higher than anyone had flown up to that time, using the H-1’s oxygen system and riding the airstream at speeds faster than the sprints done that year by the Thompson Trophy racers at Cleveland. The tiny silver pencil of a plane touched down at Newark at 12:42 p.m., just in time for lunch. It had taken 7 hours 28 minutes 25 seconds, at an average speed of 327.1 mph. That record stood until 1946, to be broken by stunt pilot Paul Mantz in a souped-up World War II P-51 Mustang.

After landing in Newark, the H-1 simply sat for nearly a year and was finally flown back to California by someone else. Hughes eventually sold it, then bought it back. But he never flew the H-1 again. Still, Hughes often noted that its success had encouraged the development of the great radial-engine fighters of World War II: America’s P-47 Thunderbolt and Grumman Hellcat, Germany’s Focke-Wulf Fw 190 and Japan’s Mitsubishi A6M Zero.

Following World War II, Hughes would most often refer to the Japanese Zero as having been influenced by his H-1. He claimed that “it was quite apparent to everyone that the Mitsubishi A6M Zero had been copied from the Hughes H-1 Racer.” He claimed the wing shape, tail design and general similarity of the Zero were derived from his racer. Jiro Horikoshi, designer of the Mitsubishi Zero, vehemently denied the allegation that the Hughes H-1 influenced the design of his fighter. Whichever side you take in this debate, there was one abiding similarity between the two designs: they were both undeniably built for speed.

While Howard Hughes would gain fame and notoriety for his womanizing, his eccentricities and his movies (notably “Hells Angels” starring Jean Harlow and “The Outlaw” starring a then-unknown Jane Russell), he is on record as wanting to be remembered most for his contributions to the world of aviation. In fairness, Hughes was a self-taught aerospace engineer and his contributions were in a word, immense; over the course of several decades, Hughes Aircraft became a major defense contractor, building state-of-the-art helicopters and expanding into electronics and pushing the bounds of aviation technology and avionics to new heights, supplying both the U.S. military and the U.S. intelligence community with a broad range of devices and weapons systems, including the AIM-54 Phoenix over-the-horizon air-to-air missile carried by the Grumman F-14 Tomcat. When, in 1975, shortly before his death, Hughes donated the H-1 to the Smithsonian, the plane had been flown for only 40.5 hours, less than half of that by Howard Hughes himself.

Construction

The Planet Models kit represents the long wing version of Hughes H-1B, which broke the transcontinental speed record in January 1937. This is a short-run, all-resin kit, and it is not for beginners. I hit the first snag early on, and it nearly stopped the project dead in its tracks. No sooner had I assembled the radial engine than I realized that it would NOT fit inside the confines of the cowling without significant alteration of the parts. Both front and rear openings of the one-piece cowling have too small a diameter for the engine to fit inside. Studying the cowling, I noticed a panel line forming the demarcation of its lip. Using a razor saw, I cut the lip off the cowling, then used a Dremel tool to slowly sand down the interior of the cowling until I had removed enough material to wedge the radial engine inside — this required several test fittings between sessions with the Dremel, but no cement of any kind was required. The engine had to fit into the cowling deep enough for the lip to be cemented back on with cyanoacrylate.

The cockpit was simple enough with the seat molded onto the floor, and a separate part for the control yoke. The next fit challenge was the headrest, to be separately mounted atop the pilot’s seat. This headrest is far too large to fit in the small space between the top of the seat and the fuselage. I had to cut it in half, preserving the headrest itself but cutting away a good portion of the frame around it. Only then did it fit in the small space provided. The fuselage closed up well enough around the cockpit once the headrest issue was resolved, and required only minor puttying. There is a neatly molded control panel with recessed dials and a separate instrument panel hood, but this latter part was just a bit too small to cover the width of the area required.

The wings form a single, crisply molded piece which fits relatively well into the bottom of the fuselage, but does require some puttying, especially along the upper surfaces of the wing joins. But it is a nicely detailed part with engraved panel lines representing the ailerons and fuel caps. The two-bladed propeller has individually mounted blades and a detailed airscrew. With a little effort, it assembles smartly.

Painting

The H-1B’s fuselage was airbrushed in AK Interactive’s Polished Aluminum, and the wings are covered in Model Master Blue Angel Blue, an enamel. The cockpit interior was airbrushed with Tamiya Yellow Green, which closely approximates Yellow Zinc Chromate.

Markings

The kit features all of a dozen markings, registration numbers for the wing and tail and a few small stencils, illegible but good enough to add a bit of detail. The registration numbers on the tail are in blue and fully in register, and there is a small amount of bleed around the edges of the large yellow registration markings for the wings, but not enough to degrade the look of the finished kit.

Conclusion

This is a wonderful kit of the H-1 racer that modelers with some experience with resin kits should tackle expecting to do a bit of extra work. It will not fall together, but for the patient modeler it will yield a great reward in the look of the finished kit — representing a major milestone in aviation history.

References

• National Air & Space Museum ~ https://airandspace.si.edu/
• “Howard Hughes’ H-1 Carried Him ‘All the Way’ ” ~ by Timothy Foote; Smithsonian Magazine, February 1995.
• Howard Hughes, Aviator by George J. Marret; Copyright 2016 Naval Institute Press, Annapolis.
• Howard Hughes: The Untold Story by Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske; Copyright 1996 Penguin Books USA, New York.
• https://www.thisdayinaviation.com