Hughes D-2

D-2
Howard Hughes inspecting the port engine c. 1943
Role	Fighter aircraft, Bomber
Manufacturer	Hughes Aircraft
Designer	Howard Hughes
First flight	20 June 1943
Introduction	Cancelled
Retired	1944
Primary user	U.S. Army Air Corps (intended)
Number built	1 prototype
Variants	Hughes XF-11

The Hughes D-2 was an American fighter and bomber project begun by Howard Hughes as a private venture. It never proceeded past the flight testing phase but was the predecessor of the Hughes XF-11. The only D-2 was completed in 1942–1943.

In 1937, Howard Hughes began the design of an advanced twin-engine, twin-boom interceptor in the hope of interesting the United States Army Air Corps (USAAC) in its procurement. The design was somewhat similar to the Lockheed P-38 Lightning that won the 1939 USAAC design competition. Hughes later testified to the U.S. Senate that Lockheed had stolen his design, although this was refuted by many others. Rather than abandon the project, as he later recounted in the 1947 Senate investigation, he "decided to design and build from the ground up, and with my own money, an entirely new airplane which would be so sensational in its performance that the Army would have to accept it."

Most of the airframe of the "DX-2" was made of Duramold plywood, a plastic-bonded plywood molded under heat and high pressure. This material was advantageous from an aerodynamic and a metals-shortage standpoint, but was difficult to work, and rejected as insufficiently robust by the USAAC. Initially, the aircraft was to have been equipped with a tail wheel but the landing gear was later changed to a tricycle configuration with the main undercarriage units retracting rearwards into the twin booms and the nosewheel retracting rearwards and rotating 90 degrees to lie flat in the small central fuselage. The powerplants were to have been a pair of experimental Wright Tornado 42-cylinder, liquid-cooled radial engines. The D-2 was built in secret at the Hughes Culver City, California factory with longtime associate, Glenn Odekirk, providing engineering inputs. The secrecy further alienated USAAC officers, especially when Hughes denied Materiel Command access to the plant. The USAAC had requested information about the project's progress, but did not enter into a formal contract until 1944. Final assembly and flight testing occurred at the Hughes Harper Dry Lake facility in the Mojave Desert. The finished D-2 looked like a scaled-up P-38 Lightning but, on paper, promised better performance; the Air Corps repeatedly compared it to the Lockheed XP-58 Chain Lightning.

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