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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
A 1941 affidavit puts his birth in Harris County, though even his birth date has been disputed.
Q 02The Hughes family fortune came from what invention patented by Howard Hughes Sr.?
A roller cutter drill bit
Hughes Sr. shrewdly leased the bits to drillers rather than selling them, and the Hughes Tool Company funded everything his son later did.
Q 03Which school did Hughes drop out of shortly after his father's death in 1924?
Rice University
His first wife, Ella Botts Rice, was a great-niece of the university's namesake William Marsh Rice.
Q 04At what age did Hughes sign a will that already called for a research body in his name?
19
The deaths of both parents within two years apparently inspired the clause; the institute finally launched in 1953.
Q 05Hughes poured a then-enormous budget into which 1930 aviation epic?
Hell's Angels
Three stunt pilots and a mechanic died during the three-year shoot; it earned an Oscar nomination for cinematography.
Q 06Which actress replaced Greta Nissen as female lead of Hughes's 1930 air-war epic over Nissen's accent?
Jean Harlow
The film contains the only color footage of Harlow's career; Hughes's aide Noah Dietrich said the producer personally disliked her.
Q 07Hughes produced the 1932 gangster film Scarface, whose title character was inspired by whom?
Al Capone
Ben Hecht wrote the script in 11 days; censors forced an alternate title, The Shame of a Nation.
Q 08Which director made Scarface for Hughes and was later replaced by Hughes himself on The Outlaw?
Howard Hawks
Hughes also swapped out cinematographer Lucien Ballard for Gregg Toland on The Outlaw.
Q 09Which actress starred in The Outlaw, and stayed under personal contract to Hughes for years?
Jane Russell
Her revealing costumes drew the censors' attention, and the film premiered in 1943 but had no national release until 1946.
Q 10What garment did Hughes design for The Outlaw's star because he felt the camera missed her figure?
A cantilevered underwire bra
He sewed curved metal supports under each cup and connected them to the shoulder straps.
Q 11Which struggling major studio did Hughes buy control of in 1948?
RKO
He shut production down for six months to investigate every employee's politics; output fell from about 30 films a year to nine.
Q 12By the end of 1954 Hughes had become the first person since the silent era to do what?
Solely own a major Hollywood studio
Buying out RKO's minority shareholders cost him nearly $24 million; he later claimed to have walked away with a profit.
Q 13Hughes bought every copy of one flop film, shot near a Utah nuclear test site, and watched it on repeat. Which film?
The Conqueror
Q 21How much did Hughes receive when he was forced to sell his TWA shares in 1966?
Roughly $550 million
His stalling on jet payments had led the airline's banks to demand his removal from management back in 1960.
Q 22Which actress was aboard Hughes's Sikorsky S-43 in May 1943, hours before it crashed into Lake Mead?
Ava Gardner
He dropped her off in Las Vegas first; the crash killed a CAA inspector and a Hughes employee.
Q 23Hughes's near-fatal July 1946 crash of the XF-11 came down in which neighborhood?
Beverly Hills
He was aiming for the Los Angeles Country Club golf course, destroyed three houses and was pulled from the wreck by a Marine sergeant.
So many cast and crew later developed cancer that it was dubbed an 'RKO Radioactive Picture'.
Q 14In 1932 Hughes founded Hughes Aircraft in a rented corner of whose hangar in Burbank?
Lockheed
The company began as a division of Hughes Tool, set up to build a single racing plane.
Q 15What speed did Hughes reach in the H-1 Racer to set the landplane record on September 13, 1935?
352 mph
It was the last time an aircraft built by a private individual set the world air speed record.
Q 16In January 1937 Hughes flew the H-1 non-stop from Los Angeles to Newark in about how long?
7.5 hours
He beat his own previous transcontinental record of nine hours 27 minutes; the plane now sits in the Smithsonian.
Q 17Hughes's 1938 round-the-world flight took about 91 hours, beating whose 1933 record by almost four days?
Wiley Post
He flew a twin-engine Super Electra with a crew of four and got a ticker-tape parade in New York on his return.
Q 18Which honor did Congress vote Hughes in 1939, which he then declined to collect at the White House?
Congressional Gold Medal
Harry Truman finally handed it over after the 1946 crash.
Q 19Which airline did Hughes quietly buy a controlling stake in, starting in 1939?
TWA
He never held an official position but hand-picked the board and issued orders directly to staff.
Q 20Hughes is credited as the driving force behind which long-range airliner ordered for TWA in 1939?
The Constellation
He personally financed 40 of them for $18 million, the biggest aircraft order in history to that point.
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
The original 'HK-1' designation stood for Hughes-Kaiser; Kaiser withdrew after disputes.
Q 26The 'Spruce Goose' was in fact built mostly from which wood?
Birch
The contract required 'non-strategic materials', ruling out aluminum; mechanics allegedly had a ruder, more accurate nickname for it.
Q 27How many times did the H-4 Hercules ever fly?
Once
On November 2, 1947, Hughes lifted it about 70 feet off the water and covered roughly a mile.
Q 28Where has the H-4 Hercules been on display since the 1990s?
McMinnville, Oregon
It sat in Long Beach from 1980 to 1992 before moving to the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum.
Q 29Which Maine senator did Hughes turn the tables on at the 1947 Senate war-contracts hearings?
Owen Brewster
The hearings asked why $22 million had produced only two XF-11 prototypes; they were widely read as a Hughes victory.
Q 30In 1953 all the aircraft company's stock was given to what new body, making it tax-exempt?
A medical research institute
The institute sold Hughes Aircraft to General Motors in 1985 for $5.2 billion and became one of the world's biggest biomedical funders.