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, piloted by Hughes himself, the aircraft crashed in Beverly Hills, California. The production aircraft had been canceled 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.[2] 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. On the urgent recommendation of Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, who led a team surveying several reconnaissance aircraft proposals in September 1943, General Henry "Hap" Arnold, chief of the U.S. Army Air Forces, ordered 100 F-11s for delivery beginning in 1944. In this, Arnold overrode the strenuous objections of the USAAF Materiel Command, which held that Hughes did not have the industrial capacity or proven track record to deliver on his promises. (Materiel Command did succeed in mandating that the F-11 be made of aluminum, unlike its wooden D-2 predecessor.) Arnold made the decision "much against my better judgment and the advice of my staff" after consultations with the White House. The order for 100 F-11s was reduced at the end of the war to just three. Hughes delivered only one, a static test model, the other two were either destroyed in a hangar fire or in his crash. Numerous difficulties of both a technical and managerial nature accompanied the program from the beginning. From 1946-1948, the Senate subcommittee to investigate the Defense Program, popularly known as the Truman Committee and then the Brewster Committee, investigated the F-11 and H-4 programs, leading to the famous Hughes-Roosevelt hearings in August 1947. The program cost the federal government $22 million.
