Howard Hughes H-1 Racer

The Aviator | 'H-1 Racer Plane’ - Leonardo DiCaprio
I saw this movie when it came out back in 2004. It was pretty great. I saw this clip on YouTube and I think 'that's a pretty cool airplane'. And then I notice that in some scenes the aircraft has an open cockpit and in others it has a canopy, so I have to investigate.


Jim Wright 'Hughes H-1 Racer' replica speed record attempt
Seems that one Jim Wright of Cottage Grove Oregon built a replica of Hughes H-1 Racer, and the movie makers were planing on using it in the film, but then Jim, while flying back from the annual EAA fly-in in Oshkosh Wisconsin, crashed and died.

Half-scale model of H-1 Racer at El Mirage

Movie production is already underway, and the H-1 is a featured player, so they have a problem. Enter Joe Bok with his R/C aircraft company. He puts together a half-scale H-1 and they use that for the flying scenes. I don't know what they used for the taxi scenes. An H-1 mockup put together by the prop department?

P.S. I just put it together that Howard was flying an open cockpit airplane at 350 miles per hour. That's just nuts.

Douglas World Cruisers

Daring young men with their flying machine

I'm reading The Flying Tigers by Sam Kleiner and I come across this line:

"Gibbons grew up in Seattle, and he was only thirteen when four Douglas World Cruisers took off from a nearby lake in the successful attempt to circumnavigate the globe by air." [last page of chapter 3].

Douglas World Cruisers? Never heard of them before. Seems the Army was eager to make it big in the flying game so they contracted the Douglas Aircraft Company to build them four airplanes specifically to fly around the world. They made it all the way around, or at least some of them did, though it took them six months.

Seattle II Reproduction Douglas World Cruiser

Now some guys in Seattle are trying to duplicate this adventure with a reproduction Douglas World Cruiser. They were going to try going this year, the 95th anniversary, but they've decided to wait one more year.

Flight Plan of the Douglas World Cruiser

A couple other round-the-world flight have made been mentioned in this blog. Howard Hughes made a round-the-world flight in 1938, there was the flying boat that made the round-the-world flight at the opening of WW2, and then there were the Russians who flew over the North Pole.

Wien Alaska Airlines

Fairchild F27-A Propjet over The University of Alaska near Fairbanks

Wien Alaska Airlines operated in Alaska for 60 years, from 1924 to 1984. The Fairchild F-27 was a 1950's era twin-turboprop passenger aircraft. Posthip Scott sent me the above photo. Rooting around for more info I uncovered a cache of old photos on Alaska's Digital Archives. Some of them are pretty cool.

AIRCRAFT

First airplane operation in Nome - Seward peninsula area

Noel Wien in his Hisso Standard (likely a Standard-J powered by a Hispano-Suiza engine) in 1927 on first commercial flight to Nome

Wien first commercial flight

Noel Wien with a Ford Trimotor on skis

Ford Trimotor at Harding Lake

Howard Hughes stops in Fairbanks

F27A turboprop
Notice the long engine nacelles and the long legs on the main landing gear

CARGO

Baby Walrus being fed

Reindeer

Reindeer

Strange Cargo - A couple hundred pounds of jade and moose antlers

Wolf Carcass

Small plane fully loaded

Loading Wien tour bus abourd a C82 Flying Boxcar at Fairbanks

Old and new transport methods meet up

Dogs fly too

CONDITIONS

F-27A, Juneau Airport, Mountains, Glacier

Loading Wien Norseman Floatplane at Kotzebue Alaska
Yes, floatplanes can land on water, but do you want to do that when there are chunks of ice there as well?

Signs of Spring
Changing from skis to floats

Sigurd Wien by Cessna aircraft on sea ice at Nome
That's the ocean just past the dogs on the left hand side. 'Sea ice' means he landed on an ice berg.

LIFE

Christine Steve post mistress and agent
Stebbins Alaska

Eskimo lady pegging out large seal skins to dry at Point Hope

Wien Alaska Airlines Route Map

P.S. It took some time to download all the photos from the Alaskan archive (could they still be using dial up modems?) and I don't really have any place else on the net where I can display them, and then find them reliably. Nothing else has really panned out. Picasa is dead. Well, it's there, but it's a mausoleum. Nothing lives there. Flickr is for you own photos, not stuff you stole. Tumblr gives you a channel and lets you post pictures, but it's much the same as Blogger. Pinterest has lots of pictures, but no information about said pictures, like where they came from, or what's in the picture, or why it's there or really anything at all.

P.P.S. Most of the location names link to the same Google Map which has all the named locations plotted, but we don't have anything on the North Coast. That will have to wait for oil exploration.

Stress Gives You Daughters, Sons Make You Liberal

It seems that the sex of our children is not just determined by blind luck, but that other factors may have some effect. Nautilus has the story. Via Detroit Steve.

And who is Nautilus you might ask? I did. Seems to be all science, all the time, and no advertising. How do they do that? With grants from:

• John Templeton Foundation - Sir John Marks Templeton was an American-born British stock investor, businessman and philanthropist. Wikipedia
• Simons Foundation - James Harris "Jim" Simons is an American mathematician, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. He is a code breaker and studies pattern recognition. Wikipedia
• Howard Hughes Medical Institute - Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. was an American business tycoon, entrepreneur, investor, aviator, aerospace engineer, inventor, filmmaker and philanthropist. During his life, he was known as one of the most financially successful individuals in the world. Wikipedia

Calling Mr. White

Walter J. White, left, was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for dealing methamphetamine. | Bryan Cranston, right, in character as Walter White on AMC's television show "Breaking Bad." (Credit: Police Handout | Frank Ockenfels/AMC)

Dustubury tells us that Walter White has been busted for meth. Yes, life is imitating art. A real person with the same name as the chemistry teacher from Breaking Bad got busted for the same crimes as our TV character was committing.

Willard White, baritone

    But wait a minute, wasn't there a comic book character named Willard White? Some kind of big shot. We ask the Google and Google serves up the Jamaican born English Baritone by that name. Never heard of him before, but Willard White, that name sure rings a bell. Let's back up (and erase the last name) and see what else the Google can find, and lo and behold:

Willard Whyte, aka Jimmy Dean, as a stand in for Howard Hughes from Diamonds Are Forever

Just goes to show all roads lead to James Bond.

More Oil

Der Spiegel reports on a new oil field discovered in the Gulf of Mexico called "Jack 2".

The drilling rig was built in Singapore at a cost of half a billion dollars. They claim this field contains reserves of 15 billion barrels, which at today's price of $90 a barrel amounts to $1.3 trillion. Sounds like big money, eh?

15 billion barrels amounts to about one half of one cubic mile of oil, which is enough to fuel the United States for about six months.

Here are some photos of the rig. Most of them are very small. Typical news reports, the bigger the project, the smaller the photo.

The oil is five miles below the surface of the Gulf. The water is more than a mile deep. I think they may be reaching the limits of drilling technology. If they are using five inch pipe (which is just a wild guess on my part), the drill string is going to weigh on the order of 300 tons. The tensile strength of the pipe is going to be about 500 tons. God forbid anything should break. Is five inch diameter pipe even big enough to transmit the torque six miles down? How strong would the steel have to be to be able to withstand the pressure of the drilling fluid being pumped down the hole? People like to talk about rocket science like it's something special. These guys are doing things that are really difficult. Of course, there is lot more money in it, and not that much to see. It's all underground, out of sight and out of mind.

Update 1 - Welding Drill Pipe

I remember a guy telling me about working at Hughes Oil Tool in Houston a long time ago. They used to weld the couplings onto the drill pipe using friction. Here's a video of friction welding. I imagine this is similar to the way they were welding the drill pipe. While I was looking for this I also came across something called "Friction Stir Welding" which has only been around for 15 years or so. It is very weird.

Update 2 - More about the "Cajun Express"

Another slide show from onboard (dead link)
Industry newsletter article
National Geographic article

Update December 2016 replaced broken links.