4 Fly Same Type of Plane Used in 1938 World Trip : Hughes’ Global Flight Record Broken

Fatigued but happy, three Frenchmen and a Canadian flying a 1930s vintage plane Sunday shattered Howard Hughes’ 49-year-old speed record for a trip around the world in a twin-engine, prop-driven airplane.

Flying “The Spirit of J and B,” a Lockheed Lodestar 18, the same type of plane that Hughes used to set the record in 1938, the pilots landed at Le Bourget airport outside Paris at 9:59 a.m.

They began the 15,000-mile voyage from Paris last Wednesday and completed it in 88 hours and 48 minutes, beating Hughes’ record by 2 hours and 29 minutes.

The plane landed at Le Bourget in time for the end of the Paris Air Show, and many show participants crowded around the pilots when they arrived.

During the flight, Frenchmen Patrick Fourti, Henri Pescarolo and Hubert Auriol and Canadian Arthur Powell spent 72 hours and 18 minutes in the air with 16 1/2 hours spent on the ground during eight refueling stops.

Slept 3 Hours at a Time

They slept little. Every three hours, two men would take over pilot and navigator duties while the other two would rest.

“After we left Paris, we didn’t see night again until San Francisco, two days later,” said Auriol. “We are completely disoriented and we don’t even know if we should eat, sleep or if it’s coffee time.”

“We must render homage to Howard Hughes,” Fourti said, “because the record he established in 1938 was really difficult to beat 49 years later.”

Pescarolo said the plane fortunately had few mechanical problems, “or else we would surely still be on the North Pole waiting to be rescued.”

The plane stopped at Tromso and Svalbad in Norway, Fairbanks, Alaska; Vancouver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and Gander, Canada, before beginning the last stretch across the Atlantic into a head wind.

The pilots regretted that Moscow had refused them permission to fly across the Soviet Union, a request that was probably not helped much by West German teen-ager Mathias Rust’s recent flight in a light plane through air defenses to Red Square.

Hughes, the millionaire industrialist and moviemaker who died in 1976, made aviation history by flying about the same distance from New York to Moscow, to Siberia, then to Fairbanks and back to New York in 91 hours and 17 minutes. He had four assistants with him.

The new record will become official once the International Aeronautics Federation makes its usual investigation of the flight.

The pilots gave up the use of the automatic pilot, something from which Hughes benefited, in exchange for use of a ground crew in Paris for weather tracking.