Spruce Goose: July 2009

It was July 2009 when I joined a friend on a most memorable road trip to the Evergreen Museum in McMinnville, Oregon. A mutual friend, Jim Ray, gave us a personal tour including a tour of the massive “Spruce Goose,” a one-of-a-kind aircraft designed and built by Howard Hughes.

A note on the Evergreen Museum website reads: “The Spruce Goose was first conceived during World War II, when German submarines were sinking hundreds of Allied ships, and there was a growing need to move troops and materials across the Atlantic Ocean. Henry Kaiser conceived the idea of a massive flying transport and turned to Howard Hughes to design and build it. Hughes took on the task, made even more challenging by the government’s restrictions on materials critical to the war effort, such as steel and aluminum. Six times larger than any aircraft of its time, the Spruce Goose, also known as the Hughes Flying Boat, is made entirely of wood and flew just one time on November 2, 1947, in Long Beach, California.”