Customer Reviews

Howard Hughes: Aviator

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Oh gosh, this is a good read. Buy it! Take it with you when you go to see Leonardo playing Howard on the big screen, so you can keep the airplanes straight and also remind yourself that, for all his genius, Howard Hughes was a rather shabby pilot. (A ***** stick, as they say in the Air Force.)

To save money on aeronautical charts, he flew with the road maps handed out free by oil companies. He ignored air-traffic controllers, filed misleading flight plans, identified himself with the name of his co-pilot, flew under visual rules in bad weather, and cut off the pilot ahead of him in the pattern. Even as a passenger, George Marrett writes, Hughes could turn a routine flight into a debacle. His big ambition was to outshine Lindberg.

Of course Howard Hughes was more than an aviator: he made movies, ran an airline, designed the half-cup bra, founded aerospace companies, made billions, and was the country's most famous hypochondriac. But those are incidentals as for a fellow pilot like George Marrett, who flew a rescue Skyraider in Vietnam and wrote about it in Cheating Death, and who afterward became a test pilot for Hughes Aircraft. By concentrating on the aviation side of his former boss, Marrett has written a short, readable, and fascinating biography. In his hands, Howard Hughes turns out to have been a lot more interesting than Charles Lindbergh, though he never came close to him as an aviator.

-- Dan Ford

This is a remarkably fine book, and the author has done an excellent job sorting out myth from fact. Marrett, a highly regarded test pilot himself, writes with real authority as a Hughes insider who knew many of the people featured in this book. There have been some good works on individual Hughes aircraft (for example, Paul Matt on the H-1 Racer, and Charles Barton on the HK-1 flying boat), but this book is the first to really integrate the story of Hughes' aviation activities with his other interests, and to assess Hughes' own position within the aviation community and aviation history. Highly Recommended!

This was the first Hughes book I've read, although I've chased down several more since. It's probably impossible to write a full bio of Howard Huges, given the extra large size of his life and all of his accomplishments... and the extra deep depths of his fall.

George Marrett has probably realized that, and limits the bio to some of the larger events of Hughes life, centered around aviation. He does a great job there, with inside stories (from extensive interviews of Hughes contemporaries) that are fascionating, and inspiring (for Hughes accomplishments - which were many and unique).

Don't buy this book expected to see the full story of Hughes life... or a more detailed view of The Aviator movie (which apparently took more than a few liberties). Buy it to more fully understand Hughes great aviation contributions... and the times in which he lived.

Fortunately, the book stays classy to the end, and avoids the tabloid view of Hughes life (and his end). We can get that type of view elsewhere.. if we want to waste our time. For now lets focus on the great persona of Hughes, and the the fascinating times in which he made his greatest contributions.

Well written and well documented book tells about Hughes life from the aviation perspective. Although it probably wasn't the author's primary intent, I was shocked to read how bad a pilot Hughes was with questionable flying ability and certainly flawed judgement. By 1948, Hughes had had 9 major head injuries with at least 5 of them in an aircraft (which may explain his erratic behavior in his later years). A must read for flying buffs.

Written from a test pilot's perspective, this is the real story of an unusual man who was a magician with lots of money. Hughes was a true pioneeer in aviation, constantly on the newsreels. He had a fascination with planes, even those which could float on water. There is a picture of the Hercules after it was brought of storage in 1980.

The pictures of so many airplanes brought the story so much better than words could do and Hughes contribution to the war effort. He was truly the Aviator of all time, better then the celebrated Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh. I'm glad he had Bruce Burk at his side to aid in this quest.

After he changed TWA to TransWorld Airlines, he ran into conflict with PanAm president who told him in the Coconut Grove, where a lot of the personal interaction took place, that no airline should have a monopoly on international travel.

There were scandals with the women, though he appeared to enjoy touching planes more than women. He "interviewed" many young starlets under contract to him. He was clear at the end that aviation was the great love of his life. He was dubbed as capricious and eccentric, but mainly he was afraid of people -- paranoid, thinking there were spies in his midst to learn his secrets.

If he loved any woman, it was Kate Hepburn who left him for Spencer Tracy, He visited her family in Conn. but felt alienated, and she tried to dominate him. He wanted to control Ava Gardner and asked her to marry him. Both women appeared in his delusion to prepare for the Senate hearing. He was alo involved with Rita Hayworth and Terry Moore, who claimed to be his wife when he died. The senator accused him of producing a dirty movie and making airplanes which don't fly.

At the hearing, it was promoted that the whole world will see what he has become. The Hercules (later dubbed the Spruce Goose) became Howard's folly, the sixty-ton white elephant with a wing span the length of a football field. It was meant to fly 200 tons of army equipment. When he successfully got that plane out of the water, it proved his ability to overcome his tarnished reputation. The senator charged Hughes with defrauding the government for accepting millions of dollars for spy planes he never delivered.

George Marrett wrote CHEATING DEATH: COMBAT AIR RESCUE IN VIETNAM AND LAOS in 2003. This is the real story of Howard Hughes contribution to aviation, his first and last love.

This is a good book and it reads pretty well. The story often deviates from Hughes (especially in the second half) to go into stories about many of the pilots and engineers that worked with Hughes. This isn't unreasonable because these are the people that the author had access too and they also have interesting lives. However, I feel that this distracts from the Hughes story and I suspect is done to fill in the many gaps when no one knew what Hughes was actually doing. If you are interested in the aviator side of Hughes I feel its worth the purchase.