Hughes Sets a New Record

On July 10, 1938, aviator and industrialist Howard Hughes lifted off from Floyd Bennett Field in New York aboard a specially modified Lockheed 14N Super Electra, embarking on an attempt to shatter the existing around-the-world speed record. The aircraft had been purpose-built for the mission, equipped with additional fuel tanks and navigational equipment that gave it a range of nearly 5,000 miles — essential for the vast over-water and over-wilderness stretches the route demanded.

Hughes was accompanied by a crew of four, and the flight path took them eastward across the Atlantic to Paris, then onward through Moscow and across the Soviet Union, with stops at Omsk and the remote Siberian city of Yakutsk, before continuing to Fairbanks, Alaska, and finally to Minneapolis before returning to New York. The routing was a feat of logistical planning as much as airmanship, threading through some of the most inhospitable and least-mapped terrain on earth.

Hughes completed the circuit on July 14, 1938, touching down back at Floyd Bennett Field after 3 days, 19 hours, and 8 minutes in the air — nearly four days faster than the previous record set by Wiley Post in 1933. The achievement was greeted with enormous public enthusiasm, and Hughes was welcomed home with a ticker-tape parade through the streets of New York. The flight demonstrated not only the capabilities of modern long-range aircraft but also the advancing state of aerial navigation and meteorological support.

For Hughes, already celebrated as one of America's premier aviators, the record cemented his place alongside Lindbergh and Earhart in the pantheon of golden-age aviation heroes, though his greatest contributions to aviation technology and the American aircraft industry still lay ahead.