Hughes AirWest was an airline that was backed up by multi-millionaire Howard Hughes. Hughes AirWest flew routes around the Western United States, and to certain points in Mexico.
Hungry for another adventure in the airline industry, TWA's former owner Hughes bought the airline in 1970. The airline was then renamed Hughes AirWest.
Hughes saw his new airline expand to several other Western USA cities, and to Mexico. The airline participated in some movies in the 1970s, more notably Clint Eastwood and Sandra Locke's The Gauntlet.
Hughes AirWest's planes were rather recognizable because of their all banana yellow fuselage and tail colors. Because of this, their airplanes have sometimes been nicknamed such nicknames as the top banana of the skies, etc. Most nicknames given to Hughes AirWest airplanes on aviation books and magazines have to do with bananas. Apart from their all yellow scheme, the airplanes also featured a blue logo that resembled three diamonds on their tails. The name Hughes Airwest, in computer-style lettering, was featured below the front passenger windows.
Hughes Aircraft thrived on wartime contracts during World War II (though not on the only two contracts it recieved to actually build airplanes), and by the early 1950's was one of America's largest defense contractors and aerospace companies with revenues far outpacing the original oil tools business.
In 1953 Hughes Aircraft became a separate company, and was donated to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as its endowment.
This became the "new" Hughes Tool Company while the remaining parts of the business were placed in a new holding company, the Summa Corporation.
Hughes swiftly became known world wide for his pioneering in the use of the new tools, inventing grass roots neighborhood systems that empowered ordinary small business, small organizations, and small and remote towns with global connectivity.
During this period Hughes, extremely concerned that American education, particularly early education K-12 in remote and rural areas adapt to the new modes of teaching and learning, focused part of his effort on developing modes of distance education - again decades before it was being practiced by universities.
Hughes words were circulated so widely that media, from the New York Times, Baltimore Sun, Rocky Mountain News, and CBS Television interviewed him, and he in turn pointed them to others who should be interviewed.
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