Hughes XF-11

XF-11
The second Hughes XF-11 during a 1947 test flight
Role	Reconnaissance
Manufacturer	Hughes Aircraft
Designer	Howard Hughes
First flight	7 July 1946
Status	Cancelled
Primary user	U.S. Army Air Force
Number built	2
Developed from	Hughes D-2

The Hughes XF-11 was a prototype military reconnaissance aircraft, designed and flown by Howard Hughes and built by Hughes Aircraft for the United States Army Air Forces. Although 100 F-11s were ordered in 1943, only two prototypes and a mockup were completed. During the first XF-11 flight in 1946, Howard Hughes crashed the aircraft in Beverly Hills, California. The production aircraft had been cancelled in May 1945, but the second prototype was completed and successfully flown in 1947. The program was extremely controversial from the beginning, leading the U.S. Senate to investigate the F-11 and the Hughes H-4 Hercules flying boat in 1947–1948.

While Hughes had designed its predecessors to be fighter variants, the F-11 was intended to meet the same operational objective as the Republic XF-12 Rainbow. Specifications called for a fast, long-range, high-altitude photographic reconnaissance aircraft. A highly modified version of the earlier private-venture Hughes D-2 project, in configuration the aircraft resembled the World War II Lockheed P-38 Lightning, but was much larger and heavier. It was a tricycle-gear, twin-engine, twin-boom all-metal monoplane with a pressurized central crew nacelle, with a much larger span and much higher aspect ratio than the P-38's wing.

The XF-11 used Pratt & Whitney R-4360-31 28-cylinder radial engines. Each engine drove a pair of contra-rotating four-bladed, controllable-pitch propellers, which can increase performance and stability, at the cost of increased mechanical complexity. Due to constant problems with the contra-rotating propulsion system, the second prototype had regular single four-bladed propellers.

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