Hughes Aircraft Company

The Hughes Aircraft Company was a major American aerospace and defense contractor founded on February 14, 1934 by Howard Hughes in Glendale, California, as a division of the Hughes Tool Company. The company produced the Hughes H-4 Hercules aircraft, the atmospheric entry probe carried by the Galileo spacecraft, and the AIM-4 Falcon guided missile.

Hughes Aircraft was founded to build Hughes' H-1 Racer world speed record aircraft, and later modified other aircraft for his transcontinental and global circumnavigation speed record flights. The company relocated to Culver City, California, in 1940 and began manufacturing aircraft parts as a subcontractor. Hughes attempted to mold it into a major military aircraft manufacturer during World War II. However, its early military projects ended in failure, with millions of dollars in U.S. government funds expended for only a handful of prototypes, resulting in a highly publicized U.S. Senate investigation into alleged mismanagement. The U.S. military consequently hesitated to award new aircraft contracts to Hughes Aircraft, prompting new management in the late 1940s to instead pursue contracts for fire-control systems and guided missiles, which were new technologies. The company soon became a highly profitable industry leader in these fields.

In a 1953 accounting maneuver designed to reduce his income tax liabilities, Howard Hughes donated most of Hughes Aircraft's stock and assets to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a charity he created himself, and subsequently ceased managing the company directly. Hughes retained a small cadre of engineers under his personal control as the Hughes Tool Company Aircraft Division, which initially operated from the same Culver City complex as Hughes Aircraft, despite being separately owned and managed. This entity subsequently became fully independent from Hughes Aircraft and changed its name to Hughes Helicopters. After Hughes' 1976 death, Hughes Aircraft was acquired by General Motors from HHMI in 1985 and was put under the umbrella of Hughes Electronics (which became DirecTV in 1994), until GM sold its assets to Raytheon in 1997.

During World War II, the company designed and built several prototype aircraft at Hughes Airport. These included the famous Hughes H-4 Hercules (better known by the public's nickname for it, the Spruce Goose), the H-1 racer, D-2, and the XF-11. However, the plant's hangars at Hughes Airport, the location of present-day Playa Vista in the Westside of Los Angeles, California, were primarily used as a branch plant for the construction of other companies' designs. At the start of the war, Hughes Aircraft had only four full-time employees; by the end of the war, the number was 80,000. During the war, the company was awarded contracts to build B-25 struts, centrifugal cannons, and machine gun feed chutes.

Hughes Aircraft was one of many aerospace and defense companies which flourished in Southern California during and after World War II, and was at one time the largest employer in the area. However, employment had dropped to 800 by 1947. By the summer of 1947, certain politicians had become concerned about Hughes' alleged mismanagement of the Spruce Goose and the XF-11 photo reconnaissance plane project. They formed a special committee to investigate Hughes which culminated in a much-followed Senate investigation, one of the first to be televised to the public. Despite a highly critical committee report, Hughes was cleared.

The company then expanded into the booming electronics field, eventually employing 3,300 Ph.D.s. Hughes hired Ira Eaker, Harold L. George, and Tex Thornton to run the company. By 1953, the company employed 17,000 and had $600 million in government contracts.

In 1948, Hughes created a new division of the company, the Aerospace Group. Two Hughes engineers, Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge, had new ideas on the packaging of electronics to make complete fire control systems. Their MA-1 system combined signals from the aircraft's radar with a digital computer to automatically guide the interceptor aircraft into the proper position for firing missiles. At the same time other teams were working with the newly formed US Air Force on air-to-air missiles, delivering the AIM-4 Falcon, then known as the F-98. The MA-1/Falcon package, with several upgrades, was the primary interceptor weapon system of the USAF for many years, lasting into the 1980s. Having failed to reach an agreement with Howard Hughes regarding management problems, Ramo and Wooldridge resigned in September 1953 and founded the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation, later to join Thompson Products to form the Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge based in Canoga Park, with Hughes leasing space for nuclear research programs (present-day West Hills). The company became TRW in 1965, another aerospace company and a major competitor to Hughes Aircraft.

In 1951, Hughes Aircraft built a missile plant in Tucson, Arizona due to Howard Hughes' fear that his Culver City plant could be attacked. By the end of that year, the U.S. Air Force had purchased the property and contracted Hughes (and subsequently Raytheon) to operate the site as Air Force Plant 44.