On November 2nd, 1957, the Hughes Flying Boat, the largest aircraft ever built, was piloted by it’s designer, Howard Hughes for it’s only flight. The massive wooden aircraft had a wingspan longer than a football field and was designed to carry about 700 men into battle for World War II.

Howard Hughes was a successful movie producer in Hollywood when he made the Hughes Aircraft Co. in 1932. He designed the Hughes Flying Boat in 1937 and also broke the record of transcontinental flight-time. A year later, he flew around the world in three days, nineteen hours, and fourteen minutes.

In 1941, the U.S. government commissioned the Hughes Aircraft Company to build a very large flying boat to carry many men and materials during long distances and times. Because of the wartime restrictions on steel, Hughes decided to build his aircraft out of wood that was laminated with plastic and covered with fabric. Although it was mainly constructed of birch, the use of spruce (and the white-gray color of the aircraft) would later earn the aircraft the nickname Spruce Goose. It had a wingspan of 320 feet and was powered by eight giant propeller engines.

The development of the Spruce Goose cost about $23 million and it took so long that World War II had ended by the time the aircraft was completed in 1946. Thousands of people came to see the aircraft on water and were shocked to see when Howard Hughes piloted the aircraft 70 feet above the water and flew for about a mile before it hit the water.

Despite its flight, the Spruce Goose never went into production because officials thought that the wooden framework of the aircraft could break due to the heaviness of men and materials. From 1947 until his death in 1976, Howard Hughes kept the Spruce Goose prototype ready for flight in an enormous, climate-controlled hangar at a cost of $1 million per year. Today, the Spruce Goose is housed at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.