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 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.
History
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.
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