G. Kruska; Spruce Goose Worker
George Kruska, a Howard Hughes crew member who helped build Hughes’ legendary Spruce Goose and then in 1992 oversaw the giant Flying Boat’s dismantling for shipment from Long Beach Harbor to Oregon, died Monday. He was 80.
Kruska, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, died at home in Valley Glen in the San Fernando Valley, said his son, Denny Kruska.
“People say Hughes was odd, strange or whatever,” Kruska once told a Hughes company publication after the reclusive billionaire’s death. “I say he may have been a quiet person who knew what he wanted, expected people to do what he wanted and in most cases was right.”
Kruska should know.
After working briefly for Bendix Aircraft and serving in the Army Air Corps during World War II, Kruska became one of Hughes Aircraft Co.’s first employees in 1942. He was in the elite cadre that went everywhere with Hughes, and was flight mechanic for Hughes’ personal planes.
“When I first went to work for Mr. Hughes,” Kruska said when he received an award for overseeing aircraft construction, “he told us we were going to build the greatest airplane factory in the world.”
Kruska often referred to those early years with Hughes as the “best job in the world and an outstanding adventure.”
A licensed helicopter pilot who became a specialist in the wingless craft, Kruska helped create Hughes’ airborne radar system and various reconnaissance aircraft, as well as the first two-seat commercial helicopters, jet helicopters and the giant whirlybird called the Flying Crane.
But the plane most associated with Hughes and his crew was undoubtedly the one that flew a single time. Named the HK-1 Flying Boat, the seaplane with the 320-foot wingspan was designed by Hughes to ferry troops to war zones, although the war ended before its completion.
Denied aluminum or other metals for a prototype because of wartime rationing, Hughes built the craft of birch and a bit of spruce wood that led to the nickname he hated. The enormously expensive multimillion-dollar experiment was ridiculed by politicians and aircraft engineers alike who said it was too big, too heavy and would never fly.
But Kruska watched proudly as Hughes took the giant bird aloft over Long Beach Harbor for about a minute on Nov. 2, 1947.
Hughes never flew the plane again, keeping it in a temperature-controlled hangar until his death in 1976.
“I think his point was that after receiving so much criticism for it, he just wanted to prove that it would fly, and that was it,” Kruska said in 1992.
Kruska remained a lifelong fan of Hughes’ engineering genius in designing the Spruce Goose, noting that it had the most advanced hydraulic system of its day and the first fuel-dumping system for emergencies.
“We even had the first spiral staircase, and that’s what you saw in [Boeing] 747s 20 years later,” Kruska said.
Kruska knew something about 747s too. After retiring from the Hughes Culver City plant in 1989, he followed his friend Jack Real to Evergreen International Aviation in Mesa, Ariz. There, as vice president of international airlines operations, Kruska helped turn 747 passenger planes into cargo craft.
Evergreen brought him back to the Spruce Goose after buying the seaplane in 1992 for installation in an air museum in McMinnville, Ore., near Portland.
Kruska helped take apart the aircraft, which had been displayed under a large white dome near the Queen Mary in Long Beach for a decade before Evergreen acquired it. Although he retired in 1993, he continued to consult with Real and others, his son said, about reassembly of the plane in Oregon.
Born in Boston but reared in Los Angeles, Kruska earned an Air Force certificate of merit for Desert Storm support in the early 1990s.
He is survived by his wife, Florence; son, Denny; daughter, Lynda; and three grandchildren.
The family has requested that any memorial donations be made to the Center for Parkinson’s Disease, Keck School of Medicine at USC.
