Howard Hughes, the New York World's Fair Nineteen Thirty-Nine, and the Three Days Nineteen Hours That Circled the Globe in Nineteen Thirty-Eight

On July 14, 1938, Howard Hughes landed a modified Lockheed 14 Super Electra at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn after flying around the world in 3 days, 19 hours, 8 minutes, and 10 seconds. The existing record had stood at roughly 7 days and 18 hours. Hughes, age 32, had cut it very nearly in half using 1938 technology, five crew members, and what was fundamentally a modified commercial airliner.

Who Howard Hughes Was in 1938

The decades that followed left a complicated legacy, but in the summer of 1938, Hughes was a serious and disciplined pilot with a documented record of engineered achievements.

In 1935, he set the absolute landplane speed record at 352 miles per hour in the H-1 Racer, an aircraft he had largely designed himself. He had studied aerodynamics, understood stress calculations, and knew why flush rivets made an airplane faster than protruding rivets - and cared about that difference in ways wealthy men of his era rarely did. In 1936, he set the transcontinental speed record from Los Angeles to New York in 7 hours and 28 minutes.

In both cases, he had not just flown the records. He had engineered them.

The Aircraft: Lockheed 14 Super Electra, Modified for the Mission

Hughes chose the Lockheed 14 Super Electra - a twin-engine, low-wing, all-metal commercial transport. He then spent the better part of a year with Lockheed engineers and his own team making it capable of the mission.

Extra fuel tanks brought total capacity to approximately 1,400 gallons. The navigation suite was upgraded with the best radio direction-finding equipment available. The communications package allowed the crew to receive weather information from ground stations and report positions along the route - a meaningful operational capability in 1938.

Power came from Wright Cyclone nine-cylinder radials, each producing close to 1,000 horsepower, swinging Hamilton Standard constant-speed propellers. Hughes chose that engine deliberately. He wanted proven reliability over terrain where an engine failure meant no rescue, not performance on paper.

Hughes named the aircraft the New York World’s Fair 1939, tied to a sponsorship arrangement with the upcoming fair. But in the summer of 1938, with Europe’s news growing darker by the week, naming an airplane after a future celebration carried a certain weight. Progress was going to happen regardless.

The Crew: Four Men Who Deserve the Credit

Hughes assembled a crew of four, each chosen for a specific function.

Harry Connor, co-pilot and primary navigator, had flown the Atlantic before and was known for composure under pressure. He knew celestial navigation the way a good mechanic knows a torque wrench.

Thomas Thurlow served as second navigator. On a flight of this length and consequence, two people checking the numbers independently was not redundancy - it was minimum viable accuracy.

Richard Stoddart handled radio. In 1938, a skilled radio operator was mission essential. He was the crew’s only connection to weather information, position reporting, and emergency communication. The difference between knowing what weather was coming and flying blind into it ran entirely through Stoddart.

Ed Lund was the flight engineer. He spent most of the flight monitoring oil temperatures, cylinder head temperatures, and fuel consumption against plan with sustained attention. If something was beginning to go wrong with one of those Wright Cyclones, Lund would know it before anyone else.

The Route and What It Actually Required

The crew departed Floyd Bennett Field on July 10, 1938, at 7:17 in the morning. The sky was overcast. The first leg to Paris took 16 hours and 35 minutes - navigated over an open ocean with no GPS, no satellite weather, using celestial navigation when the overcast permitted, dead reckoning when it did not, and radio direction finding as they closed with the French coast.

They landed at Le Bourget - the same field where Lindbergh had arrived eleven years earlier - refueled, inspected the aircraft, and pushed on. Paris was a waypoint, not a destination.

Moscow followed, with diplomatic clearances arranged in advance. No detail of a Soviet overflight in 1938 could be assumed; the cooperation had been carefully arranged and it held. Hughes fueled and pushed east.

Siberia: The Part Most Accounts Rush Through

The Siberian crossing deserves more than a sentence.

The distances involved are at the outer edge of what the human mind processes as real. The terrain is among the most unforgiving on earth. In July it is not the frozen wasteland of January, but remote is insufficient language for it - hundreds of miles between anything that could be called a settlement, forests reaching to every horizon, rivers running their full length without a bridge. Weather reporting from those latitudes in 1938 was sparse and sometimes simply wrong. The maps had gaps.

If one of those Wright Cyclones had failed over the Siberian taiga, there was no search and rescue infrastructure, no emergency frequency with a guaranteed listener. The arithmetic was simple.

The crew knew this before they departed. You decide the preparation is sound enough and you push the throttles forward.

Lund monitored the engines with the attention of a physician watching a critical patient. The slightest deviation in sound got immediate attention. Ed Lund’s sustained vigilance across thousands of miles of wilderness was as responsible for the success of the flight as anything Hughes did in the left seat.

Stops at Omsk and Yakutsk - one of the most remote cities on the planet - kept the ground time minimal. Hughes measured the record in hours and minutes, and every hour not flying was an hour that cost.

Alaska, Minneapolis, and the Return to New York

From Yakutsk, the route bent northeast toward the Bering Strait. When the coast of Alaska appeared below them, the character of the risk changed. American soil meant that if the radio went silent, people would come looking.

They landed at Fairbanks to crowds larger than the city might have been expected to produce. Radio had been broadcasting position reports throughout the flight, and the people of Fairbanks understood they were watching something that would not happen again.

One final stop in Minneapolis for fuel and a weather check, then southeast across the upper Midwest toward New York.

Floyd Bennett Field. July 14, 1938. 2:22 in the afternoon.

Three days. Nineteen hours. Eight minutes. Ten seconds.

The Reception and What Hughes Did with It

Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was on the field. Estimates placed the crowd along Broadway at one million people. Ticker tape fell for blocks. Hughes rode in an open car through it and, by every account, looked genuinely overwhelmed - a private man thrust into the largest public celebration New York had seen in years.

At City Hall, he gave a speech. He thanked his crew by name - Connor, Thurlow, Stoddart, Lund - specifically and individually, making the crowd understand that four other men had completed this flight alongside him.

Then he donated the prize money. All of it - approximately $30,000 in 1938 dollars - to the mechanics and engineers who had built and prepared the airplane. The people who worked nights and weekends. The people whose names appeared in no headline.

What the Flight Left Behind

The record itself was the headline, but the engineering was what lasted. The Lockheed 14 design evolved directly into the Lockheed 18 Lodestar, which served extensively through the war years. The fuel system work fed back into Lockheed’s development pipeline. The long-range communications knowledge Stoddart had tested across 17,000 miles contributed to the body of practice for extended overwater operations.

Hughes went on to acquire Trans World Airlines and, characteristically, flew the routes himself rather than managing the company from a boardroom. He built the H-4 Hercules flying boat, still the largest-wingspan aircraft ever to fly at 320 feet, a machine called the Spruce Goose by everyone who never had to build it.

What followed those years - the illness, the isolation, the hotel rooms with blackout curtains - was real and eventually total. But on July 14, 1938, Howard Hughes was 32 years old, with two Wright Cyclones still running smooth and four men who had trusted him across every ocean and every empty mile between.

Key Takeaways

Hughes completed the around-the-world flight on July 14, 1938, in 3 days, 19 hours, 8 minutes, and 10 seconds - cutting the previous record of roughly 7 days and 18 hours nearly in half.
The aircraft was a heavily modified Lockheed 14 Super Electra with approximately 1,400 gallons of fuel capacity and Wright Cyclone radials selected specifically for proven reliability over remote terrain.
The Siberian crossing was the most dangerous segment: no rescue infrastructure, incomplete maps, sparse weather data, and thousands of miles of wilderness where an engine failure meant the flight ended permanently.
Hughes named every crew member by name at City Hall and donated the entire prize money - roughly $30,000 - to the ground crews who prepared the airplane.
The engineering developed for the flight fed directly into the Lockheed 18 Lodestar and advanced long-range overwater communications practice for years afterward.