AOPA Pilot Magazine - July 2011 - 76

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you can fit a .004-inch feeler gauge between skins.” Visitors to the shop thought the fit was so perfect that not even light could get through. The top of the aft fuselage sweeps up in a beautiful curve that simply becomes the leading edge of the vertical stabilizer. This task was turned over to metal magician Kent White. He hand-formed the two aluminum halves of the vertical stabilizer’s leading edge and found that it was not as simple as producing two mirror-image parts. Because the vertical stabilizer was offset to help counteract P-factor, the two halves were actually different shapes. The propeller had been a source of considerable head scratching. It was apparent from period photographs that the propeller had been modified, or different propellers with different counterweights had been installed. The Wright team decided to re-create the original prop as closely as they could and deal with any problems as they arose. Racer two In April 2002, Wright decided to introduce the Racer to the public and held an open house at his hangar in Cottage Grove, Oregon. Several hundred people arrived to find the hangar door open, a vintage movie featuring the H–1 running on a video monitor, and John Newberry in attendance. As a young engineer, Newberry had worked on the original airplane and at the age of 93 could still remember details of cable routings, wiring runs, and even the odor of the unwashed sneakers Hughes wore while checking progress on the project. Later in the afternoon, Wright decided to roll the airplane out of the hangar. When the deep blue wing and polished silver cowl emerged into the sunlight, conversation simply stopped. People who had spent their whole lives around airplanes brushed away tears. They would walk around it, slowly, wonderingly, and occasionally reach out and brush their fingers against a wing tip or a propeller blade, as if to reassure themselves that it was real. On July 9, 2002, after 40,000 manhours of skilled work, the airplane was ready to fly. For the second time in history, a tall, slender head of a tool company settled himself into the seat of an H–1 Racer, fastened the lap belt, and prepared for the aircraft’s maiden flight. With only the crew that had built the airplane in attendance, Wright aligned the gleaming cowl with the centerline of
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Cottage Grove’s 3,000-foot runway and slid the throttle forward. The R-1535 spun up with a snarl, the tail lifted easily, and seconds later the airplane was airborne and climbing strongly. As Wright leveled out and the speed picked up, he found the airplane handled extremely well, but there was something wrong with the propeller. It simply wouldn’t come out of fine pitch, and the geared engine was really turning fast to keep the airplane in the air. He landed safely on the long, wide runway at Corvallis, about 40 miles north. The problem was traced to inadequate counterweights on the prop—and suddenly everyone understood what had gone wrong on the original H–1’s first flight so many years earlier. After repairs, Wright resumed test flying. “This airplane is a big pussycat,” he said. “Stall behavior is pretty benign…at about 81 miles an hour it breaks straight ahead. Handling at speed is excellent. I wheel land it so I can see where I’m going. That demands precision because there are only a few inches of prop clearance in the wheel-landing attitude. Performance is just phenomenal. The airplane will climb over 4,000 feet per minute, and it is very fast.” Wright flew the airplane to the National Air Races in Reno, Nevada, on September 13, 2002—67 years to the day after Hughes’s closed-course record— and posted 304.07 mph over a three-km course. The full potential of the airplane couldn’t be realized, however, because the prop still limited the amount of power the engine could deliver. When development work and testing on a new prop was complete, he intended to recapture the transcontinental record. If he had his way, on the sixty-sixth anniversary of Hughes’s transcontinental flight, another H–1 would appear over Newark and claim a new record. It never happened. In July 2003 Wright flew the airplane to the Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where airplane lovers from all over the world could see and appreciate it. He parked it at show center and refused to even put a rope around it. He built it so people could understand what a tremendous achievement the original airplane had been. Wright encouraged visitors to run their hands over the wing and crawl underneath to see the incredible geometry of the landing gear. Although the flight from Oregon to Wisconsin went safely, the flight home

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2011

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AOPA Pilot Magazine - July 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - July 2011