Hughes company gets £5m boost

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A Belfast-based company with links to eccentric millionaire movie maker Howard Hughes is creating 50 new jobs with the help of a £5m investment.

Hughes Christensen, based at Montgomery Road in the city, is a Baker Hughes company, which makes drill bits for the oil and gas industry.

Plant manager Ian Warke said Belfast had beaten competition from other factories world-wide.

"We're competing with areas in the company to make this product," he said.

"The growth of the market is markedly in the eastern hemisphere, and we are strategically placed to service that market - the growth in this particular product is forecast to be 100% in the next five years."

Invest NI is backing the development

The project is receiving nearly £900,000 funding from Invest Northern Ireland.

The firm can trace its lineage right back to eccentric star Howard Hughes.

His father was the man who invented and patented the tri-cone roller bit, which was to revolutionise the oil industry.

But it was Howard Jnr, a Hollywood film maker from the 1920s and a passionate aviator, who grasped people's imaginations.

He helped launch the career of Jean Harlow and Jane Russell - for whom he designed a special bra for the film The Outlaw - and was reported to have enjoyed romances with Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Gene Tierney and Ava Gardner.

The Outlaw was a controversial film at the time

He produced classics such as Hell's Angels, The Front Page, Flying Leathernecks and Scarface.

He was a lifelong aircraft enthusiast, pilot, and self-taught aircraft engineer who broke world records and designed and built aircraft.

But he spent the last 20 years out of the public eye living as a recluse in hotel penthouses around the world.

Some reports say he had a phobia of germs that kept him out of contact with the outside world - in darkened rooms, eating little and wearing nothing for fear of catching a disease.

One of Hollywood's most intriguing and perplexing figures he was the subject of Martin Scorsese's blockbuster The Aviator in 2004.