hands frequently until 1907 when it was bought by one Edmund Jacobs living near Ramona in the heart of the mountains. He drove it for several years in the roughest kind of work. Then he bought a new Ford and sold his old one. By 1915 No. 420 had passed into the hands of a man named Cantello, who took out the motor, hitched it to a water pump, rigged up shafts on the chassis and now, while the motor chugs away at the pumping of water, the chassis drawn by a burro acts as a buggy.”

Ford repeatedly returned to a user-centered focus on service: “A manufacturer is not through with his customer when a sale is completed. He has then only started with his customer…. A man who bought one of our cars was in my opinion entitled to continuous use of that car, and therefore if he had a breakdown of any kind it was our duty to see that his machine was put into shape again at the earliest possible moment… If your car broke down you had to depend on the local repair man—when you were entitled to depend upon the manufacturer… We met that situation squarely and at the very beginning.”

Chapter four of the 1922 autobiography is titled “The Secret of Manufacturing and Serving.” In it Ford wrote, “I adopted this slogan: ‘When one of my cars breaks down I know I am to blame.’”

could get every man, woman and child in this country to feel safe up there. An airplane with the ability to fly into the substratosphere, across the country, across the world. Now that is the future.

May + June 2008

[ 1] Unlike Ford, Hughes took his planes on tours and to competitions. He focused on design and use, but not on the manufacturing process. Prior to working for him, Hughes’s brilliant engineer Glenn “Odie” Odekirk built automobiles and took them on demonstration tours, the common practice that Ford avoided with his laser focus on product improvement and manufacturing efficiency.

Howard Hughes

It was 1939. The president of TWA had a problem. TWA’s fleet was growing obsolete. In “The Aviator,” Martin Scorsese’s well-researched albeit fictionalized account, a young Howard Hughes meets Jack Frye. A few years earlier, Hughes Aircraft had produced the revolutionary, streamlined H- 1, with which Hughes set several world speed records[ 1]. Now Frye wanted Hughes’s help in designing a new plane. The meeting in the film did take place; the exact words were of course reconstructed.

interactions

Frye: Try 50 seats with a ceiling of 12,000 feet.

Hughes: No. No, 20,000. Think about it Jack, what does 20,000 feet give you?

Frye: Less turbulence.

Hughes: Right, because it’s above the weather. Jack, we want to fly above the weather. Only 1 percent of the American population has ever set foot on a commercial airliner. Why? Because they’re scared to death, Jack, and they should be. I mean, 7,000 feet is bumpy as shit. You know that. We build a plane that flies above the weather, we

Howard Hughes himself had no fear of turbulence. He was a stunt pilot and held numerous flying records. Unlike Ford, he was captivated by speed and had no need for money. Why did he shift his focus to commercial aircraft? How was he so sure that allaying passenger fear justified a less fuel-efficient, less economical design?

Seven years earlier, in 1932, already a successful filmmaker, Hughes formed his aircraft company. One of his first steps was to assume the pseudonym Charles Howard and work for two months in various capacities on the American Airlines commercial route between Fort Worth and Cleveland. The accompanying photo of Hughes as a baggage handler next to a Fokker Trimotor is from Charles Barton’s book Howard Hughes and his Flying Boat. The plane had a ceiling of 8,500 feet. Its range was 700 miles, so passengers endured multiple takeoffs and landings. Howard Hughes, participant observer and requirements analyst, saw terrified passengers. Many passengers were no doubt aware of the Fokker Trimotor crash in Kansas of a commercial flight the year before, which killed American football legend Knute Rockne and all seven others aboard. Prior to World War II, all flight attendants were registered nurses.

After making these observations, Hughes tracked aircraft developments. When Douglas Aircraft produced the safer, more comfortable metal-bodied DC- 2 in 1934, Hughes again worked a commercial route incognito, observing passengers and crew. In 1938 Boeing produced the first plane with a pressurized cabin; Hughes personally bought one of the 10 307s ever made. He was prepared for the 1939 discussion with Jack Frye.

Instead of building a plane for troubled TWA, Hughes bought TWA. An anti-trust decree had mandated separation of airlines and airplane manufacture, so he had Lockheed build his plane. Requirements for the Lockheed Constellation included a high cruising altitude, pressurized metal cabins, and a further sacrifice of efficiency to provide a range of 3,500 miles ( 5,600 kilometers), which enabled nonstop transcontinental and U.S.-to-London flights. TWA bought the first couple years of Constellation production, after which it