Thanks for the link Hans and great to hear it has made its first flight.
It would be wonderful to see it.
Did you ever see the Spruce Goose (the Hughes Hercules H-4)?
When it was housed in the big circular hangar down in Long Beach in the
'80's, they would first show a short documentary on the history of Howard
Hughes and the development of the Hercules H-4.
At the conclusion of the film, the wall on which it was being projected
would pull away and there in front of you was the aircraft itself.
Even when you were prepared for the fact that it would be really big,
you were still not prepared.
There was an audible gasp from the people around you.
Its enormity and the single-mindedness that went into engineering
something that big yet that could lift itself off the ground left me
awestruck.
It was so startling and astonishing a sight, I could feel my eyes starting to
well up.
The Hughes H-4 had a wingspan of 98m. By comparison the A380
has a wingspan of 80m. The 747's everyone was flying
in the mid-80's at the time I saw it had a wingspan of 64m, so for
an aircraft built a couple of decades earlier than the Jumbo Jet it was a
bold endeavour.
If you've ever flown in a DC-3 then this comparison of two scale models
provides some sense of scale :-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes...Comparison.JPG
