I met and spoke with Hughes’ personal aircraft mechanic (post-flying boat days).

He said Hughe’s was a first rate engineer, while not a professional, he was as logical and scienfific as most back in those days. Having said that, if the racer didn’t kill him with flutter…and he designed it, he must have been good.

Remember, even during the war, professionals still did a lot of things wrong. So IF it had control problems, it might not have been his fault…if could have been the work of a “professional”.

No argument with most of that John,I think he was an ‘Ideas’ man but my overall impression about him was that he was a meddling control freak.
This computer is too slow to research anything much but he could afford to employ the best of design/engineers/engineering test pilots but his personality meant that he wanted to personally run everything and would not delegate important tasks to other more qualified people.
There is no doubt that he was a very talented pilot but he did not move with the changing face of test flying and I surmise that many of his employees had to be ‘yes’ men to keep their jobs.

rgds baz