Top Gun: Maverick: Howard Hughes. By Gene W. Edwards. Posted 7/6/2022.

Who was the greatest airplane pilot of all time? Maybe it was Howard Hughes (1905–1976), not Tom Cruise’s fictional character — so marvelously well played — in Top Gun: Maverick, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell? The Elon Musk of his day, Hughes had an indelible, all-encompassing memory and was quite visual, and visionary. He was also rigid, obsessive compulsive (OCD), and linear minded, all these off the charts, OCD to a psychotic degree in all of his later years. He may have been the sexiest man on the planet (well hung), was one of the world’s richest men, was a film producer, director, and movie scion, a consummate test pilot and record breaker, the owner of numerous companies, pioneered a host of technologies, and became the most eccentric hermit of all time!

You would totally enjoy watching the movie Aviator starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, but my favorite Hughes source is the off-the-charts humorous book titled I Killed Flies for Howard Hughes (1976) by Ron Kistler (deceased). I reread it about once a year. It always has me rolling on the floor with laughter! I have read it so many times, the pages are all falling out. It is out of print and even hard to find used. By the way, this is my favorite blog.

Flies? After having a horrible plane accident in 1946, Hughes, always obsessive, changed into a total recluse and germophobe, the one Kistler writes about. Kistler, who hailed from hick town Monte Vista, CO, had been the personal bodyguard of Hughes. Ron…