Howard Hughes: Aviator

Rating:
Summary: take it to the movies!
Review: Oh gosh, this is a good read. Buy it! Take it with you when you go to see Leonardo playing Howard on the big screen, so you can keep the airplanes straight and also remind yourself that, for all his genius, Howard Hughes was a rather shabby pilot. (A ***** stick, as they say in the Air Force.)

To save money on aeronautical charts, he flew with the road maps handed out free by oil companies. He ignored air-traffic controllers, filed misleading flight plans, identified himself with the name of his co-pilot, flew under visual rules in bad weather, and cut off the pilot ahead of him in the pattern. Even as a passenger, George Marrett writes, Hughes could turn a routine flight into a debacle. His big ambition was to outshine Lindberg.

Of course Howard Hughes was more than an aviator: he made movies, ran an airline, designed the half-cup bra, founded aerospace companies, made billions, and was the country's most famous hypochondriac. But those are incidentals as for a fellow pilot like George Marrett, who flew a rescue Skyraider in Vietnam and wrote about it in Cheating Death, and who afterward became a test pilot for Hughes Aircraft. By concentrating on the aviation side of his former boss, Marrett has written a short, readable, and fascinating biography. In his hands, Howard Hughes turns out to have been a lot more interesting than Charles Lindbergh, though he never came close to him as an aviator.

-- Dan Ford

Rating:
Summary: A good book but not a great book...
Review: This is a good book and it reads pretty well. The story often deviates from Hughes (especially in the second half) to go into stories about many of the pilots and engineers that worked with Hughes. This isn't unreasonable because these are the people that the author had access too and they also have interesting lives. However, I feel that this distracts from the Hughes story and I suspect is done to fill in the many gaps when no one knew what Hughes was actually doing. If you are interested in the aviator side of Hughes I feel its worth the purchase.

Rating:
Summary: The Best Book to Date on Hughes the Aviator
Review: This is a remarkably fine book, and the author has done an excellent job sorting out myth from fact. Marrett, a highly regarded test pilot himself, writes with real authority as a Hughes insider who knew many of the people featured in this book. There have been some good works on individual Hughes aircraft (for example, Paul Matt on the H-1 Racer, and Charles Barton on the HK-1 flying boat), but this book is the first to really integrate the story of Hughes' aviation activities with his other interests, and to assess Hughes' own position within the aviation community and aviation history. Highly Recommended!