A bare-aluminum monoplane with blue wooden wings, the Hughes H-1 racer was designed around a single goal: to be the fastest landplane in the world. Howard Hughes flew it to a world speed record of 567 km/h, or 352 mph, at Santa Ana, California, on Sept. 13, 1935. Sixteen months later, on Jan. 19, 1937, he used the same airplane to set a transcontinental U.S. speed record.
The aircraft survives. It was kept at the Hughes factory in Culver City, California, until it was donated to the Smithsonian in 1975 as a gift of the Summa Corp., and it is displayed in the Aerobatic Flight exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.
The museum’s object record for the Hughes H-1 Racer states the record plainly: “On September 13, 1935, Howard Hughes flew the H-1 to a world speed record of 567 km/hr (352 mph) at Santa Ana, California.” NASM credits the design to Howard Hughes and Richard Palmer, with construction by Glenn Odekirk.
Built to cut drag
The H-1’s speed came from attention to every source of drag. The museum lists a bell-shaped engine cowling, fillets smoothing the joint between wing and fuselage, retractable landing gear and ailerons that droop 15 degrees when the flaps are extended. “All rivets and joints are flush with the aircraft’s aluminum alloy skin,” the object record says.
Power came from a Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp Junior radial engine, which NASM says was rated at 700 hp at 8,500 feet and could deliver about 1,000 hp for high-speed flight. During development, a wind-tunnel model was tested at Caltech’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, and the museum says the real aircraft’s performance closely matched the predictions.
The racer was built with two sets of wings. Per NASM, a short set spanning 7.6 meters (25 feet) was used for speed records, and a long set spanning 9.2 meters (31 feet, 9 inches) for transcontinental flying. The airplane on display carries the long wings. Its license number was NR258Y, later NX258Y.
The record flight and a beet field
The 1935 run beat the previous landplane record of 314 mph, according to the U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission’s essay on Hughes by David H. Onkst, which places the flight at Martin Field near Santa Ana. Onkst writes that Hughes had already set the record after a few passes but kept flying until the H-1 ran out of fuel, and that he made an emergency landing in a nearby beet field and was not hurt.
Robert Bernier, writing for the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum blog in Smithsonian Magazine on Oct. 11, 2025, describes the same ending as a wheels-up landing in a Santa Ana beet field, and notes that the racer carried little fuel to save weight.
Coast to coast in 7 hours, 28 minutes
For the long-distance attempt the H-1 was fitted with the larger wing. NASM says Hughes broke the transcontinental U.S. speed record on Jan. 19, 1937, “flying from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey, in 7 hours, 28 minutes, and 25 seconds.” The museum gives his average speed as about 535 km/h (332 mph) over roughly 4,000 km (2,490 miles).
Sources differ on small details of that flight. Onkst’s Centennial of Flight essay dates it to Jan. 18, 1937, and both he and Bernier name Burbank, California, as the departure point. This article follows the museum’s record for the date.
A milestone on the road to wartime fighters
NASM places the H-1 in a direct line of development rather than treating it as a one-off. The museum calls the racer “a major milestone aircraft on the road to such radial engine-powered World War II fighters” as the Grumman F6F Hellcat, Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, Mitsubishi Zero and Focke-Wulf Fw 190.
Bernier draws the same line more carefully in his Smithsonian Magazine piece, writing that the H-1 was not a direct blueprint for those fighters but showed that careful drag reduction could make a radial-engine aircraft very fast. His article covers a separate effort at the San Diego Air & Space Museum, where volunteers have been building a non-airworthy reproduction since 2011, working from photographs and measurements of the original because no original blueprints are available.
The original, with its flush rivets and long transcontinental wings, remains on view at the Udvar-Hazy Center under inventory number A19750840000.
Top image: The Hughes H-1 racer on museum display. Image Credit: Don Ramey Logan — CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Combat Rated editors prior to publication.