Word: aircraft
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...empire. In Nevada, his aviation companies and seven hotels and casinos-including the Sands, the Desert Inn and the Castaways-are the second largest employer (more than 6,000 people) after the Federal Government. His aviation and defense companies even now affect the national interest; for example, Hughes Aircraft, which is the U.S.'s ninth biggest defense contractor, produces the Phoenix air-to-air missile, the Hellfire air-to-surface missile and radar...
...means all the success of Hughes' enterprises stemmed from his special relationship to Washington. Hughes Aircraft, for example, has top-flight managers and an excellent reputation. Even so, a recent Government study shows that although the company produces superior weapons, it also charges very high prices and makes big markups on equipment that it buys from outside suppliers and resells to the Pentagon...
During the past ten years Hughes Aircraft, which relies almost exclusively on Government work, has won nearly $6 billion in Government contracts, most of them on bids for weapons and electronic devices that were not open to competitors. There was also about 6 billion dollars more in secret contracts with the CIA over this period. "The huge contracts made Hughes Aircraft a captive company of the CIA," asserts one former Pentagon official. "Their interests are completely merged...
Meanwhile, Hughes, who learned to fly as a teenager, built his own highly advanced H-l racer in which he set a world speed record of 352 m.p.h. in 1935. Three years later, Hughes, who was already predicting the era of ocean-spanning aircraft, flew round the world in 91 hr. 14 min., breaking the old record by four days...
...time the Spruce Goose was finished. World War II had long been won. But a Senate subcommittee began investigating whether Hughes through his p.r. man had won rich Government contracts for the Goose and long-range reconnaissance aircraft by lavishly entertaining military officers, including Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, the late President's son. Facing down his congressional critics, Hughes vowed to leave the U.S. if the huge plane failed to fly. On Nov. 2,1947, he flew it-but only for slightly more than a mile off Long Beach, Calif., at an altitude of no higher than...