Howard Hughes Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Howard Hughes trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Howard Hughes trivia quiz covers the Texas oil-tool heir who became a Hollywood producer, record-setting pilot, airline owner, defense contractor, Las Vegas casino baron and finally one of the most famous recluses in history. The easier questions cover the landmarks most people half-remember: the Spruce Goose, the film Hell's Angels, TWA, the Desert Inn and Leonardo DiCaprio's portrayal in The Aviator. The harder end is for people who have read the biographies: the drill bit that paid for everything, the 1935 landplane speed record, the 91-hour flight around the world, the 1946 XF-11 crash in Beverly Hills that left him dependent on codeine, the Senate showdown with Owen Brewster, the cantilevered bra he designed for Jane Russell, the CIA's Glomar Explorer, Clifford Irving's fake autobiography, the Mormon Will and the gas-station owner who claimed to have rescued Hughes in the desert, and the FBI fingerprints needed to identify his 90-pound body in 1976. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for Hughes, his aircraft, his films, his companies and the people around him before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our aviation, classic Hollywood and Las Vegas quizzes are the natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Howard Hughes was born in 1905 in which state?
Texas
Texas: orphaned there at 18, he had a judge who had been his father's friend declare him a legal adult, so that he could take over the family tool company without waiting to turn 21.
Q 02The Hughes family fortune came from what invention patented by Howard Hughes Sr.?
A roller cutter drill bit
A roller cutter drill bit: patented in 1909, its toothed cones ground through hard rock that stopped older bits, opening oil fields nobody could reach before, and it came to be used in most oil and gas drilling.
Q 03Which school did Hughes drop out of shortly after his father's death in 1924?
Rice University
Rice University, then the Rice Institute: he left at 18 on inheriting most of the family firm, and the next year married Ella Rice, a great-niece of the school's founder.
Q 04Stan Lee said he modelled which Marvel superhero's civilian identity on Howard Hughes?
Iron Man
Iron Man: Stan Lee gave Tony Stark the tycoon's looks, his defence contracts and his playboy reputation, and Marvel later named Stark's inventor father Howard.
Q 05Hughes poured a then-enormous budget into which 1930 aviation epic?
Hell's Angels
Hell's Angels: Hughes took over as director, was badly hurt crashing one of the planes himself, and spent so much that even a box-office hit could not earn the money back.
Q 06Which actress replaced Greta Nissen as female lead of Hughes's 1930 air-war epic over Nissen's accent?
Jean Harlow
Jean Harlow was an inexperienced 18-year-old when Hughes reshot his silent film with sound, which cost the Norwegian-accented Nissen the part, and the newcomer caused a stir in it.
Q 07Hughes produced the 1932 gangster film Scarface, whose title character was inspired by whom?
Al Capone
Al Capone: censors thought the film made a hero of him and held it back until Hughes took them to court, and it reached cinemas with a subtitle tacked on, 'The Shame of the Nation'.
Q 08Which director made Scarface for Hughes and was later replaced by Hughes himself on The Outlaw?
Howard Hawks
Howard Hawks saw both films stall at the censors: Scarface was held back until changes were made, and The Outlaw, finished by Hughes, waited years for a nationwide release.
Q 09Which actress starred in The Outlaw, and stayed under personal contract to Hughes for years?
Jane Russell
Jane Russell had never made a film, and the years of fighting with the censors over how The Outlaw displayed her made her nationally famous before most cinemas were allowed to show it.
Q 10What garment did Hughes design for The Outlaw's star because he felt the camera missed her figure?
An underwire bra
An underwire bra: he engineered it with curved metal supports, but the star found it so uncomfortable that she secretly discarded it and filmed in her own instead.
Q 11Which struggling major studio did Hughes buy control of in 1948?
RKO
RKO: he fired hundreds of staff within weeks, and his neglect doomed the studio; by 1957 it had stopped making films and its lot belonged to Lucille Ball's company, Desilu.
Q 12After buying out his film studio's other shareholders in 1954, what did Hughes do with it in 1955?
Sold it to a tire company
Sold it to a tire company: General Tire bought the studio in 1955, Hughes came away with a profit, and the sale all but ended his career in films.
Q 13Which panned epic, filmed downwind of a nuclear test site, did Hughes buy up every print of and reputedly watch nightly?
The Conqueror
Q 21Hughes was forced to sell his airline stake, for more than $500 million, after refusing to do what?
Appear in court
Appear in court: rather than testify in an antitrust suit the recluse went into hiding and lost by default, then sold his shares in 1966 and walked away with more than half a billion dollars.
Q 22In 1943 Hughes crashed a Sikorsky amphibian he was testing into which Nevada lake, killing two of the men aboard?
Lake Mead
Lake Mead: the deaths did not stop Hughes testing his own aircraft, a habit that nearly killed him three years later.
Q 23Hughes's near-fatal July 1946 crash of the XF-11 came down in which neighborhood?
Beverly Hills
The Conqueror cast John Wayne as Genghis Khan, and so many of its cast and crew later developed cancer that fallout at the Utah location came to be blamed.
Q 14Which company built the twin-engine airliner that Hughes flew around the world in record time in 1938?
Lockheed
Lockheed built the Model 14 he chose, and Hughes left little to chance: he fitted an autopilot and four radios and studied the weather along the whole route before taking off.
Q 15In 1935 Hughes flew the H-1, a plane built to his own order, to which world record for landplanes?
Speed
Speed: the H-1 was designed to be the fastest landplane in the world, and Hughes, who insisted on test-flying it himself, averaged 352 mph over a measured course in California.
Q 16Hughes's H-1, which he flew non-stop across America in 1937, now belongs to which museum?
The Smithsonian
The Smithsonian: Hughes made the seven-and-a-half-hour flight from Los Angeles to Newark, and the plane stayed with his company for almost forty years before it was donated in 1975.
Q 17Hughes's 1938 round-the-world flight took about 91 hours, beating whose 1933 record by almost four days?
Wiley Post
Wiley Post had needed nearly eight days flying alone in 1933; Hughes, with four crewmen to share the work, was back in New York in under four and was met with a ticker-tape parade.
Q 18Which honor was Hughes voted in 1939, a year after his record flight around the world?
Congressional Gold Medal
Congressional Gold Medal: the act praised him for 'advancing the science of aviation', which put him in the company of the Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh, earlier winners of the same medal.
Q 19Which airline did Hughes quietly buy a controlling stake in, starting in 1939?
TWA
TWA: he built up 78 percent of the stock and ran the airline for two decades without ever holding a title, until the banks that financed its jets pushed him out of control in 1960.
Q 20Hughes is credited as the driving force behind which long-range airliner, ordered for his own airline in 1939?
The Constellation
The Constellation: at his urging the airline asked for a plane that could cross the continent without stopping, and Hughes paid for the first forty out of his own pocket.
Beverly Hills: trying to reach a golf course, the plane tore through three houses and caught fire, and a Marine sergeant who happened to be visiting friends nearby dragged Hughes clear.
Q 24Which painkiller, first taken after his 1946 crash, did Hughes depend on for life?
Codeine
He eventually injected it into his muscles with glass syringes whose metal needles easily detached.
Q 25The giant H-4 Hercules flying boat began as a partnership between Hughes and which industrialist?
Henry Kaiser
Henry Kaiser, a shipbuilder, wanted cargo planes that German U-boats could not sink and sold Washington on a whole fleet; he then pulled out, leaving Hughes to finish the single HK-1 alone.
Q 26The 'Spruce Goose' was in fact built mostly from which wood?
Birch
Birch: wartime rules kept aluminium for combat aircraft, so the hull was moulded from thin layers of birch bonded with resin, and Hughes hated the nickname the press hung on it.
Q 27How many times did the H-4 Hercules ever fly?
Once
Once: in 1947 Hughes lifted it off the water for about half a minute during what were billed as taxi tests, then kept it in a climate-controlled hangar, with a crew to maintain it, until he died.
Q 28Since leaving Long Beach in 1992, the H-4 Hercules has made its home in which town?
McMinnville, Oregon
McMinnville, Oregon: after years as a tourist attraction beside the Queen Mary, the flying boat was taken apart and sent north by barge and truck to what is now the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum.
Q 29At the 1947 Senate hearings, Hughes accused his chief inquisitor, Senator Owen Brewster, of serving which rival airline?
Pan American
Pan American: Brewster had sponsored a bill that would have handed that airline a monopoly, and Hughes's charge of collusion helped turn the hearings in his favor.
Q 30In 1953 Hughes gave all the stock of Hughes Aircraft to what new body, making its profits tax-exempt?
A medical research institute
A medical research institute: critics called it a tax shelter, yet when it sold Hughes Aircraft to General Motors in 1985 for about $5 billion it became one of the richest medical charities in the world.