The Quest to Replicate the Splendor of the H-1 Racer

The aeronautical vision of Howard Hughes continues to beguile us. 

For over a decade now, an ambitious project has been underway in the lower level of the San Diego Air & Space Museum, which is located in the city’s scenic Balboa Park. The museum’s volunteer craftsmen—myself among them—are building a reproduction of Howard Hughes’ H-1 Racer, also known as the Hughes 1B. The replica won’t be airworthy, but the project remains a considerable challenge since there are no original plans for us to follow. We’re reverse engineering this magnificent airplane from photographs and measurements taken of the original aircraft—currently on display at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.

Howard Hughes was many things: a wealthy playboy, movie mogul, and a driven—some would say eccentric—man who lived large. He was also a fearless aviator who formed his own aircraft company to build an airplane designed to capture the landplane speed record set by Raymond Delmotte of France in 1934 while flying a Caudron C-460. Hughes sent a telegram to Dick Palmer, a brilliant young engineer, asking him if he would be interested in helping create the “fastest plane in the world.” Palmer, along with Glen Odekirk, a seasoned airplane mechanic, would become the core of a dynamic team building what would become the H-1 Racer: a record-breaking aircraft that embodied a significant advance in aircraft design.

Initially working out of a shed in Glendale, California, the team built the racer in just over 16 months, completing construction in August 1935. The H-1 was a graceful, superbly streamlined aircraft powered by a reliable air-cooled Pratt & Whitney R-1535 radial engine enclosed within a bell-shaped cowling engineered to reduce drag.

The engine was rated 700 horsepower at 8,500 feet, but it could deliver nearly 1,000 ponies when fueled with 100-octane gasoline. 

Robert van der Linden, a curator in the National Air and Space Museum’s aeronautics department, likes to gesture toward the H-1 while giving tours and announce: “Imagine it’s 1935, and you had all the money in the world to build the fastest landplane in the world. What would it look like? The answer is…it would look like that.”

The Record Breaker

Just as Hughes had intended, his sleek racer broke the world’s landplane speed record. On September 13, 1935, the H-1 achieved a then-sensational speed of 352 mph, breaking Delmotte’s record by 38 mph. To reduce weight, the H-1 had carried a minimal amount of fuel, and the flight ended with a wheels-up forced landing in a Santa Ana, California beet field due to fuel starvation. After exiting the cockpit, Hughes was ebullient, declaring: “We can fix her. She’ll go faster.” He would later confide to Palmer: “It’s a beautiful airplane, Dick. I can’t see why we can’t use it all the way.” By that, Hughes meant setting a new transcontinental speed record. 

On January 19, 1937, after building and installing a larger wing that incorporated more fuel tanks, Hughes launched out of Burbank, California, for a nonstop transcontinental run. Landing in Newark, New Jersey, after a seven-hour and 28-minute flight, averaging 332 mph, Hughes handily beat the old transcontinental speed mark­—which he himself had previously set in a borrowed Northrop Gamma—by two hours. 

Hughes built only one H-1, and the handcrafted masterpiece would be the last airplane financed, built, and flown by a private individual to set a world speed record. Once Hughes set the new transcontinental record in his racer, he would never fly it again. Instead, the H-1 was ferried back to California by a hired pilot (after languishing for nearly a year in New Jersey).

Although well-maintained, the racer was sequestered for decades inside a dusty Quonset hut located at the Culver City Airport. (Hughes had a quirk about keeping airplanes he owned in flying condition, whether he ever flew them again or not.) In 1967, Mike Glenn was working as a flight line mechanic for Hughes Aircraft at the company’s Culver City location when a friendly watchman making his rounds ushered Glenn into the building where the H-1 was stored. Glenn eagerly made his way to the famous racer. “I would guarantee you that it could have flown tomorrow with some tire changes,” says Glenn.

In 1975, the H-1 was donated to the Smithsonian by the Summa Corporation, a now-defunct holding company for the business interests of Howard Hughes, who died the following year.

Lauding the artistry of the original aircraft, van der Linden says: “It’s magnificently made, like a fine Swiss watch. The fuselage looks like it’s a single piece of metal. It’s not. The aluminum alloy panels are butted against each other; the seams are almost unintelligible. And they’re polished like a mirror—you really can see yourself in it. It’s amazing, a mirror finish.” The H-1 wasn’t just an airplane. With its flush-riveted, all-metal monocoque fuselage, it was a finely engineered piece of “streamline moderne” industrial art.

Also critical for reducing drag was the H-1’s wing design. Says van der Linden: “A lot of people don’t know this. The wings are not metal, they’re made of wood.” Hughes wanted the smoothest airflow possible. While metal wings offer strength, wood wings, when meticulously shaped and finished, provide a superior, smoother surface finish for reducing aerodynamic drag. “With the technology of the time, engineers and designers could not build a [metal] wing with this airfoil shape, but they could do it with wood,” says van der Linden. “So, the airfoil shape is perfect, with a finish like a fine piano. It’s that nice.”

 A hallmark of the airplane’s beauty and functionality are the sensuous metal wing fillets between the wing root and fuselage. The fillets not only stabilize airflow, but they also further reduce drag and tail buffeting. The overall craftsmanship is evidence that Hughes spared no expense to build the world’s finest racing machine. 

The quality, precision, and finish of this hand-built racer couldn’t be matched using mass-production methods. Yet, the H-1 was a major milestone aircraft on the path to factory-built, radial-engine-powered World War II fighters such as the American Grumman F6F Hellcat and Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, the Japanese Mitsubishi Type 0 (Zero), and the German Focke-Wulf Fw 190. While not a direct blueprint for these fighters, the H-1 helped advance the engineering for high-performance aircraft, demonstrating that meticulous attention to aerodynamic cleanliness was the key to unlocking the next echelon of speed. Hughes’ racer also proved that a properly designed radial-engine aircraft—powered by the air-cooled Pratt & Whitney R-1535 Twin Wasp Jr.—could compete with lower-drag inline designs and their smaller frontal areas. Says van der Linden: “What the racer did was demonstrate that you could get high performance out of a properly designed radial-engine airplane if you paid close attention to drag reduction.”

It’s no small wonder then that aviation aficionados have long been drawn to the H-1, which has spawned several replicas across the decades. The first was a full-scale reproduction displayed in a geodesic dome built to house Hughes’ H-4 Hercules flying boat (known as the Spruce Goose) at Long Beach Harbor, California; this reproduction was later acquired by the short-lived National Air Race Museum in Reno, Nevada. In 1988, the Howard Hughes Corporation donated a full-scale model of the racer to the University of Nevada. 

A Los Angeles-based company, Aero Telemetry, was tasked with building a half-scale replica of the H-1 for the 2004 award-winning film The Aviator. To recreate the racer’s sublime mirrored surface, the modeling team led by Joe Bok used single-sided aluminum tape, painstakingly applied by hand over the entire fuselage and cowl. “The H-1 Racer obviously has beautiful lines due to the many compound curves, so you can imagine how difficult and tedious it was to apply that and not get any wrinkles in there,” says Bok. “The process took two people, three days to complete.”

The late Jim Wright built a full-size flying replica. Wright, like Hughes, dreamed big. An avid pilot and a can-do type, Wright began toying with the idea of building a flying replica of the H-1 in 1978 after reading a magazine article. Recruiting an experienced team of aeronautical artisans, Wright began construction in 1998.

He reportedly spent several hundred man-hours trying to locate the H-1’s original blueprints but failed to find any. Ultimately, his team made several pilgrimages to the National Air and Space Museum to make precise measurements of the original, which they used to reverse engineer the racer as accurately as possible. When asked about the lack of original plans and drawings for the H-1, van der Linden says: “We don’t have them. Howard Hughes was unique—maybe he didn’t want anyone else to build one. Maybe he destroyed them. Maybe they’re sitting in a hangar somewhere. Nobody knows. In all the years I’ve been here [50 years], there’s been not even a hint of the location, if they even exist, of the drawings.”

Following 35,000 hours of effort, Wright’s gleaming H-1 replica was completed in 2002. It was so faithfully reproduced, the Federal Aviation Administration issued serial number two of the H-1 type to his aircraft. First taking flight in July 2002, Wright’s replica became a hit on the airshow circuit. But tragedy struck on August 4, 2003. Flying back from the Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual AirVenture event in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to his hometown of Cottage Grove, Oregon, Wright experienced propeller problems. After steering away from sightseers on the ground while attempting an emergency landing in Yellowstone National Park, he crashed and his replica exploded in a fireball. 

Building a Racer

The San Diego Air & Space Museum’s H-1 construction effort started in 2011—all because of one man’s passion for 1930s-era racing airplanes. The late Gerry Heveron, a retired tool-and-die maker and a museum aircraft restoration volunteer, provided the seed money to get the project started. As a young lad, Heveron had attended the Cleveland National Air Races during the 1930s and become fascinated with racing aircraft. “Back in the 1930s, air races were as popular as NASCAR races are today, if not more so,” says Tony Beres, the San Diego museum’s aircraft restoration manager. 

But without original H-1 blueprints, we would have our work cut out for us. Heveron, along with other volunteers initially working on the H-1, were all skilled craftsmen who had worked in the aircraft industry following World War II. During the 1990s, it wasn’t unusual to have 20 to 30 of these talented people working on different aircraft projects in our museum’s basement restoration area, which resounded with the whine of pneumatic drills and the pounding of rivet guns. 

Unfortunately, these men are all gone now and their expertise is sorely missed. People with their skills aren’t volunteering anymore, so we’re down to a crew of seven or eight. We’re building a complex airplane from scratch, learning as we go. 

Bob Parker has been a stalwart museum volunteer for nearly two decades now. He’s a pilot, though he’s never worked in the aircraft industry. But he’s a quick study, and he has become an accomplished metal worker, basically learning on the job. He manages the overall project, but he’s focused mostly on the fuselage and getting the cockpit set up as authentically as possible. 

The original H-1 had two sets of wings. In its current state, on display at the Smithsonian, it has been fitted with the set that spans 31 feet, 9 inches. Built for range and endurance, they were used when Hughes broke the transcontinental speed record. Our replica in San Diego will sport the shorter 25-foot low-aspect wing ratio. Beginning the effort to build the wing was the late Dan LeMay, a retired engineer, who worked alongside Paul Hudson, a computer-savvy troubleshooter. Although the wing team had no original construction drawings to work from, what we did have were aviation historian Paul Matt’s scale drawings of the racer with its external dimensions accurately noted. 

That was a start, but LeMay and Hudson had to also generate detailed drawings of the wing’s internal ribs, which give the airfoil (the wing’s cross-section) its shape. For this, they used the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ airfoil series numbers listed on Matt’s drawings. These numbers—typically four-, five-, and six-digit designations—are a system used to encode information about an airfoil’s structure, including its curvature and maximum thickness. After many iterations using a computer program, LeMay and Hudson were able to visualize the rib profiles and their spacing within the wing.

Among his many talents, LeMay was also a master woodworker. After studying photos of the racer’s landing gear taken at the Smithsonian, he built a wood mockup so we could see how the mechanism worked. Designed to be retracted into the wing to reduce drag and increase speed and range, the H-1’s landing gear is so perfectly fitted that the gear fairings and doors are difficult to see without looking closely. When LeMay’s wood mockup was finished, drawings were prepared and provided to our machine shop for metal fabrication of the landing gear legs and their miscellaneous parts. 

Additionally, LeMay constructed a working model of the flight control system to explore how the cockpit stick activated the various control surfaces. The H-1 had an innovative set of ailerons that not only rolled the aircraft in flight, but they could also droop 15 degrees for additional lift when the flaps were fully extended—a novel idea for the time. 

Dick Bezman, a retired chemist, was our go-to guy for crafting and setting up the aileron-control linkages. Besides dealing with the mechanical efficiency of cockpit control-stick inputs, Bezman had to fabricate the control system so that it could be easily disassembled—enabling the wing to be removed from the 27-foot-long fuselage so that both sections would fit through the door into the museum’s display area, where they would be reassembled for exhibition. Ever frugal, Bezman salvaged discarded metal tubing found in a scrap pile to repurpose into the torque tubes used to transmit control-stick movement to the ailerons.

“This work is worthwhile and keeps the skill base intact for our museum,” says Bezman. “With these old pieces of specialty technology, as people die off, the skill base goes with them. I think younger people don’t appreciate stuff like this, so the expertise goes away. Nobody is interested enough anymore to learn about these things.”

The reproduction team also wanted our replica’s cockpit canopy to be mechanically functional. With the H-1’s small cockpit situated over the trailing edge of the wing, Hughes realized that visibility over the long nose would present a problem, especially for landing. The solution: The H-1’s cockpit windscreen was designed to be adjustable. It could be cranked forward for cockpit entry and then aft for flight. Once airborne, the canopy sides were slid up from fuselage slots to join at the top. The sides were retracted for landings so that the adjustable cockpit seat could then be raised high enough to give Hughes a better view over the nose.

The job of crafting our H-1’s canopy was assigned to Pat Watson, a retired airline pilot. Not trained formally as a mechanic, Watson picked up his metalworking skills on a farm and by volunteering at a small airport in Minnesota. During his 25 years of volunteer service at the museum, Watson has worked on several scratch-built projects, among them: the Gee Bee R-1 racer, Boeing P-26 Peashooter, Bell X-1, Boeing FB-5, and now the Hughes racer. A snowbird, Watson flees the Minnesota winters to work at the restoration shop. “I’m not a beach person,” he says. “I’d rather be doing something with my hands, so the museum is a getaway for me. I’m proud of the work we do here, it keeps me coming back.” 

Over the years, we’ve learned to build prototype parts from wood or have our project draftsman and computer-aided-design operator, Glen Willier, a former U.S. Air Force pilot, print samples on a 3D printer before cutting metal. Willier has saved us time and money—not to mention frustration—by printing items such as cockpit levers, flight control parts, and the racer’s odd-looking pitot tube in plastic for test fits before we fabricate the parts in metal. 

In 2011, an aviation enthusiast donated a very rare Pratt & Whitney R-1535 Twin Wasp Jr. radial engine to the museum, which added even more authenticity to our project.                                          

“With our H-1 effort, we’re focusing on an era of aviation that people don’t often focus on, and that’s the 1930s, when designers were trying to go faster, longer, higher,” says Jim Kidrick, president and CEO of the San Diego Air & Space Museum. “Everything was about performance, and certainly the H-1 was the epitome of that.”

The Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center features a glassed-in mezzanine, where visitors can view restorations in progress. Kidrick observes that the San Diego museum’s H-1 project has a similar appeal. “They like to see the metalworking equipment and the welding shop,” he says. “For them, seeing an airplane being built is as interesting as seeing it completed.” 

Reflecting on the ongoing H-1 reproduction effort, Parker notes that the multi-curved racer is by far the most difficult project he’s ever worked on. “If there is a straight line on this airplane, I have yet to find it,” he says. “And you know, this has to be museum quality—we’re not just trying to get by.” 

When asked by visitors when our project will be completed, Parker grins and says: “Maybe by Wednesday.” He’s just not too specific about what year. 

Robert Bernier is a former naval aviator and commercial pilot now working as an aircraft restoration volunteer at the San Diego Air & Space Museum. 

This article, originally titled "Slow-Building a Speedster,"  is from the Fall 2025 issue of Air & Space Quarterly, the National Air and Space Museum's signature magazine that explores topics in aviation and space, from the earliest moments of flight to today. Explore the full issue.

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