Jim Wright was just trying to get over the Rockies and make it home. To get him there, he was depending on a machine that looked as if it belonged in an aviation museum.  In fact, the only other one like it was in the Smithsonian, and hadn’t flown since 1937.

Now, however, there were two: One built by Howard Hughes in 1934, and the other built by Wright in 2002. It was a beautiful, clear day, and Wright was flying back home to Cottage Grove, Oregon, from the Experimental Aviation Association AirVenture show at Oshkosh, Nebraska. There, as everywhere else he’d brought his airplane, it had been the toast of the event, a perfect replica of one of the most important planes in history, with a one-digit serial number — 2. Airplane enthusiasts and history buffs alike found the replica to be a virtual time machine. Everything on it was either custom-made or a restored original component from the early 1930s: The enormous round engine, the cockpit controls, even the twin-blade Hamilton Standard constant-speed propeller hub that was modified in exactly the same way Hughes’ had been to complement the 1,000-horsepower engine it was mated to.

It was that insistence on authenticity that would, that day, destroy his priceless aircraft and make a widow of Betty, his wife back home in Cottage Grove.

The dream takes form

I first met Jim Wright in 2002, when he was putting the finishing touches on the plane — the H-1 Racer. At the time, I was the editor of his hometown newspaper, the weekly Cottage Grove Sentinel. A small town at the southern tip of the Willamette Valley with farmland to the north and timberlands to the south, Cottage Grove’s newspaper is correspondingly small. There were three of us — me, reporter Matthew Treder and photographer Jared Paben. Technically it was Treder’s story, but naturally we were all very interested — a major nationwide sensation was brewing up right in our own back yard.

And it was no exaggeration to call the H-1 that. It was an astonishing piece of industrial art, a shining silver tube of polished aluminum with electric-blue wings sitting on tall, spindly landing gear, the cockpit pushed way back toward the tail. Sitting there on the tarmac, with that massive, blunt engine thrust up into the air, it had an austere, uninviting, all-business look, like an unmanned missile with a propeller on the front. In the air, though, with the landing gear up and the fuselage level, it looked like the very finest industrial sculpture of the art-deco 1930s -- sleek, streamlined, fabulous.

Yet on the air or on the ground, one could easily see that any beauty it possessed was strictly incidental to its real purpose. The long, liquid lines in gleaming polished aluminum weren’t there to be admired; they were there to slip the air past faster so that an extra two miles per hour could be squeezed from it. The engine was round because that was the shape of the most powerful engine available at the time. The wing lines flowed out of the fuselage not for looks, but so that the wings could carry the structural load, saving a few dozen pounds. Just sitting there on the ground, pointing skyward at a 30-degree angle, it was an irrefutable demonstration that beauty and function live in the same place and may even be married to each other.

Wright himself was as quiet and unassuming as his airplane was striking and noticeable. A self-taught engineer who’d never bothered to go to college, Wright was a natural mechanic, having started out working on lawnmowers at a very young age.

“He was a real smart, real affable guy,” Treder remembered later. “Generous with his time.  He was a great interview; he was kind of a natural-born storyteller.”

He was half of the husband-and-wife team that started Wright Machine Tools in 1976. During the 25 years that followed, they built it into a lucrative business that produced machines that sharpened and maintained industrial carbide saws, among other things. By the late 1990s it had become the kind of business that quietly overshadows the place in which it’s located. It may have occupied an unassuming beige building on the outskirts of a tiny Oregon town, but it was a big, profitable enterprise.

Throughout the time from the founding of the company to the building of the H-1, Wright himself didn’t change much. Most of the time, his face wore one of two expressions: A huge, open grin or a focused look of intense concentration. Though he liked himself just fine and loved exotic toys, he did not display the ego of a wealthy businessman. His office was modest, a bit cramped, dusty, stocked largely with cheap-but-serviceable furniture made of particle board covered with vinyl printed to look like oak. The computers, originally beige, had turned yellow with age. Wright’s desk faced the wall like a workstation, not the door like a command center.

Through a window on that wall, Wright could look out at the airport and watch planes come and go. It was no coincidence that his business was located right next to the little private airport. Wright’s father was an aviator and passed the “bug” on to his boy; Wright bought his first plane, a Taylorcraft that he still owned, when he was just twenty-one years old.

As his business grew, Wright started acquiring more fast, exotic things: a rare Honda CBX six-cylinder motorcycle from the early 1980s, a red Corvette that he used for his regular driving, even a street-legal Formula race car that he drove around on special occasions -- a gift from Betty.

On the airfield outside the shop was parked an early-1950s Beechcraft Bonanza, one of those V-tailed hot rods of the sky like the one Ritchie Valens and Buddy Holly went down in. In his hangar he kept a Glassair III, a sleek kit-built plane that flew two and a half times faster than an entry-level Cessna.

But the Hughes racer: That was to be the highlight, the crown jewel in his hangar.

And so it was, for a time.

He’d dreamed of building the plane for almost thirty years, since he read about it in an article in an old magazine from the 1930s. And he’d been fascinated by the Hughes plane since he was young – its blinding speed, its secretive inventor who hurried to hide it from the world after breaking his second record with it in 1937, the persistent rumors — given extra weight by Hughes himself — that its design had been sold or leaked to Japan and had inspired the dreaded Type Zero fighter from World War II.

By the late 1990s, Wright’s business was successful enough that he was able to earn the means to pursue that dream.

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