Ghost of a Goose Hovers at Old Plant

Long before anyone ever dreamed of the Playa Vista development, industrialist Howard Hughes chose the breezy three-mile-long corridor beneath the Westchester Bluffs as the place to build the world’s largest airplane.

Today a small group of workers make helicopter blades in the cavernous wooden hangar where during World War II Hughes assembled his famous Flying Boat, better known as the Spruce Goose.

The world’s longest private runway was ripped up and hauled off several years ago in anticipation of the planned residential, office, hotel and shopping development.

And the faded green buildings that once were the nerve center of an aircraft empire--including the eccentric billionaire’s own mahogany-lined office suite--are dark and empty.

It is one of aviation history’s more ghostly venues.

Its days probably would have been numbered even without developer Maguire Thomas Partners’ ambitious plans to create a community of 29,000 residents on the 1,000-acre Playa Vista property.

Hughes Aircraft Co. and Hughes Helicopters, which once filled the cluster of buildings between the bluffs and Jefferson Boulevard, have been gobbled up by corporate giants and their assets scattered since the billionaire’s death in 1976.

Hughes Aircraft, which once employed thousands at the site, is now part of General Motors and has only about 600 radar workers there. Although the company’s headquarters is nestled in the bluffs nearby, its employees have been dispersed to El Segundo, Fullerton, Canoga Park and Malibu.

The helicopter operation, now McDonnell Douglas Helicopters, maintains even less of a presence, with fewer than 250 workers turning out machine parts destined for the company’s main plant in Mesa, Ariz.

Each company plans to pull out entirely by the end of next year, when their leases expire.

Playa Vista’s developers--who include Summa Corp., Hughes’ old real estate holding company, as a limited partner--have already begun trying to recruit new tenants.

The eventual fate of the factory complex itself has not yet been determined.

For Hughes veterans, it will mark the end of an era.

“You hate to see it end, but that was yesterday, and this is today,” said Mitch Krause, 73, a retired machinist who came to work at the aircraft factory in 1942 and helped build the Flying Boat.

Like other Spruce Goose veterans, his memories of the plant span a pioneering age.

“It was a wonderful time,” he recalled. “We weren’t this big conglomerate where everybody wore suits. It was more like a big family.”

Howard Hughes began building airplanes in Glendale in 1935. He didn’t settle on the site for the Culver City plant--so named because there was nothing much else nearby in those days--until 1940, when the war in Europe and China helped his fledgling aircraft company land its first government contracts.

The place was a swamp.

But having searched in vain elsewhere, Hughes picked the site because it offered an ocean breeze and it was large enough to accommodate the 9,300-foot-long grass runway he wanted.

Hughes had a penchant for grass runways, insisting that hard surfaces were too rough on a plane’s landing gear. It wasn’t until years later, after jets made grass runways obsolete, that he reluctantly agreed to pave it.

In the spring of 1942, with U.S. cargo ships being sunk by German U-boats, shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser conceived the idea of the Flying Boat, and shortly afterward the Roosevelt Administration approved Hughes as the prime contractor.

The stipulation, of course, was that because of a shortage of light metals, both the aircraft and the building that housed it would have to be made of wood.

Completed in 1943, the Flying Boat hangar was then the largest wooden structure ever built. It is six stories high and 740 feet long--nearly 2 1/2 football fields.

“In some respects it was as impressive as the airplane,” said Robert N. Good, 57, whose father, a cabinetmaker, helped supervise the special Duramold process Hughes devised for laminating wood. The process was used to make the huge beams that supported the Flying Boat hangar, and on the Flying Boat itself.

The hangar’s exterior has since been covered with aluminum siding and painted the blue of McDonnell Douglas.

Its two enormous bays are separated by a three-story loft that once housed offices and test facilities, but that area is now mostly empty. In the 1950s, after Hughes Aircraft shifted its focus to radar and missile production, the government maintained a highly restricted electronics surveillance office there; its existence was not common knowledge even within the plant.

The building was later used by Hughes Helicopters to turn out thousands of choppers for the Army during the Vietnam War.

As for the Spruce Goose, it was put together piecemeal, the fuselage and tail section in the hangar’s south bay and its enormous 160-foot-long wings in the north bay.

By the time the plane was finished in 1946, the military no longer needed it.

But Howard Hughes, who had been accused of profiteering on the project, had something to prove. The plane was trucked in segments to Terminal Island, where it was assembled and prepared for its lone brief flight--with Hughes as the pilot--over Long Beach Harbor in 1947.

Relics of an earlier age, two small buildings where the Flying Boat was designed and engineered also lie vacant.

Like other older buildings on the property, they are distinguished by the bilious chartreuse color that came to be known as Hughes green. Some Hughes veterans say the billionaire picked the color because he liked it. Others insist it was surplus paint chosen because it was cheap.

Sparrows have taken over the tiny hangar where Hughes spent months plotting the Flying Boat’s instrument panel and hydraulic system. The plane’s prototype nose section, stored there for years, has long since disappeared. But a World War II-vintage firetruck remains.

Next door, the aircraft company’s once-gleaming former headquarters offers an even starker reminder of how times change.

Known as Mahogany Row for its fine hardwood interior, the two-story rectangular building served as corporate offices for Hughes and his top lieutenants.

Abandoned in 1986, it had an upstairs conference and executive dining room with a gourmet kitchen and projection equipment for film screenings.

Oddly, its elegant conference table is the only piece of furniture left in the building.

Wall spots mark where photos of various Hughes products were mounted, including a picture of the Flying Boat that adorned the lobby.

An oil painting of Hughes, also once displayed in the lobby, was moved to the helicopter company’s corporate offices in Arizona.

“I still keep a piece of the runway on my desk as a souvenir,” said Hal Klopper, a public affairs officer who once worked in Mahogany Row before being transferred to Arizona.

By some accounts, the fastidious Hughes was said to be so concerned about the building’s appearance that, for a time, even the janitor was required to wear a tie.

Barbara Lochemes, 66, a receptionist there in the 1950s, doesn’t recall the janitor, but remembers the parade of military brass and secretaries of the Air Force and Navy who passed through the door.

“We used to have a board we would keep out of sight with the pictures of all the big shots so that we could identify them,” she said. “Nobody got in who didn’t belong.”

One person she never saw enter the lobby was Howard Hughes.

In fact, a later occupant of the upstairs corner office reputed to have once belonged to Hughes said that the industrialist spent little time at the plant after the 1940s.

“Howard was always around, but he had his other interests and he was in and out,” said Jack Real, 78, a close associate who became president of the helicopter company after the billionaire’s death.

Real accompanied Hughes around the world during the industrialist’s reclusive final years. When he arrived at the helicopter plant in 1978, he was surprised to find 278 mobile homes crammed with engineers and other personnel.

“No new buildings were supposed to be built without Howard’s personal approval,” he said. “And with Howard not around to give permission, they just kept bringing in trailers.”

Even when Hughes was actively involved in the plant’s affairs, his presence there usually seemed shrouded in mystery.

“I met him once and I think that’s one time more than a lot of others,” said Leo Cloth, 78, an engineer at the plant for nearly 30 years.

“For a while in the ‘50s, when he was still around, he kept a little apartment over the cafeteria building,” Cloth said. “There were also rumors that he had a room down by the salvage yard where he would get away to sleep. You never really knew.”

Bill Herman, 65, who retired last week after 30 years as a Hughes Aircraft spokesman, offered a similar view.

“When it comes to Howard Hughes,” he said, “the people who knew him usually didn’t talk about him and those who talked about him usually didn’t know him.”

Krause, the Spruce Goose machinist, agreed.

“By anyone’s estimation the old Hughes (plant) was a great place to work, and even though they didn’t know him, most employees ascribed the credit to Howard Hughes,” he said.

Last year, before the big plane was loaded onto an ocean barge and hauled away to a new home in Oregon, Krause, who lives in Thousand Oaks, made a final pilgrimage to Long Beach.

“It dawned on me that my grown kids had never even seen it,” he said. “So I took them. And we said goodby.”