Wings reattached to world's largest wooden airplane

PORTLAND, Ore. - Nearly a decade after it was disassembled, the world's largest wooden airplane has gotten its wings back.

The ''Spruce Goose'' - designed by billionaire eccentric Howard Hughes - will be the star exhibit at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, southwest of Portland, which is to open by spring.

The 219-foot-long flying boat has been undergoing restoration at Evergreen International Aviation since 1992, when Evergreen founder Del Smith decided to give the massive troop carrier a permanent home.

In September, the airplane was moved section by section into the new museum at Evergreen Aviation. Workers reattached the wings - which stretch wider than a football field - this month as they put the finishing touches on the reassembly.

The ''Spruce Goose'' will never fly again. But it will stand as a monument to the era of propeller-driven aviation.

It was designed by Hughes during World War II to transport troops by air and avoid German submarine patrols in the North Atlantic.

The plane was not completed until the year after the war ended, and the only model ever built flew just over a mile with Hughes at the controls in a dogged effort to prove it worked.

Hughes spent $1 million a year to keep the plane flight-ready until his death in 1976, and it eventually was moved to a specially constructed dome in Long Beach, Calif., for display in 1982.

The airplane was powered by eight 28-cylinder engines and weighs 2,000 tons. It was designed to cruise about 185 mph with a ceiling of nearly 21,000 feet and carry 750 soldiers.

The wings, which include the only spruce used in the plane, span nearly 320 feet.

By comparison, a Boeing 747 jumbo jet has a much shorter wingspan of 210 feet but weighs more than twice as much as the Spruce Goose.

Evergreen purchased the Spruce Goose from Disney Corp. in 1992. The Spruce Goose - which is actually made mostly of laminated birch plywood - was painstakingly disassembled and hauled by ocean and river barge to McMinnville.

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On the Net:

http://www.sprucegoose.org