Spruce Goose (Hughes H-4 Hercules)

Wood-construction biggest-aircraft example. Used to make the "you use the materials you have" point.

But if I'm going to build something like an aircraft, you look at the strength to density — the specific weight of the material — we make aircraft out of all these things. One of the biggest aircraft ever built, Howard Hughes's Spruce Goose, was made out of wood. In the 1940s when you wanted to make the biggest aircraft in the world, you didn't make it out of aluminum, you made it out of spruce. They only built one of them, but it worked.