1930s National Air Races: Speed and Spectacle

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The weather was clear and cool in Cleveland, Ohio, on the Labor Day afternoon of September 6, 1937. The crowd of about 100,000 jammed the grounds of the Cleveland airport and filled to overflowing the grandstands that had been erected for the air races.

All was in readiness for the 200-mile contest. On the field sat nine airplanes, the fastest and the finest unlimited air racers in the world. The planes were lined up side by side at 100-foot intervals. Fifty-foot-high pylons marked the limits of the rectangular 10-mile course laid out across the surrounding Ohio countryside.

As the explosion of a signal bomb echoed across the field, the planes roared to life and took off toward the official starting line of the course a half-mile away. Frank Sinclair was the first off the ground and the first across the starting line, but his silver Seversky SEV-S2, a stripped version of the P-35 army fighter, was too slow on the closed course to hold the lead for long. By the end of the first lap, Steve Wittman, a tall ex-schoolteacher from Oshkosh, Wis., had taken the lead.

The high speed and the tight turns created by closed-course racing were a severe test for both pilots and planes. With their engines generating as much as 1,000 hp, the planes had potential airspeeds approaching 300 mph. The G-forces created by the turns were so great that pilots often became lightheaded during the race, adding to the danger of the wing-tip-to-wing-tip competition. Nonetheless, the pilots pushed their planes on at top speed.

Lap after lap, Wittman’s home-built racer continued to increase its lead over the field. Soon he had built a half-lap lead over second place. With only two laps to go, Wittman’s victory seemed assured.

Such certainty could be very fleeting in air racing, however. Wittman’s plane struck a bird, bending the propeller and causing an oil lead in the engine; he was soon forced to slow down. With one lap to go, the Laird-Turner racer Meteor, racing plane of the flamboyant Roscoe Turner, flew past the disabled Wittman and into the lead.

Turner’s hopes of victory proved no less fleeting. With oil covering his windscreen and obscuring his vision, Turner inadvertently cut inside a pylon on one of the turns. Turner was forced to return and circle the pylon or face disqualification, thus giving up the lead.

On the final lap, 28-year-old Lemont, Ill., pilot Rudy Kling just managed to push the nose of his Folkerts SK-3 Jupiter past Earl Ortman’s Keith-Rider racer for the victory. Nonetheless, the prestigious Thompson Trophy, to say nothing of the $9,000 in prize money, belonged to Kling, who had covered the 200 miles at an average speed of 256.910 mph.

Each sport has its premier event. Baseball has the World Series. Automobile racing has the Indianapolis 500. Horse racing has the Triple Crown. But for America’s air racers of the 1930s, the event was the National Air Races, and nothing on earth could compare with the event. Begun in the 1920s as an odd collection of racing events, military demonstrations, stunt-flying and parachuting exhibitions, the National Air Races had grown by the 1930s into the nation’s outstanding aeronautical event. Some of the races measured endurance. Others measured speed and skill in t he tight and treacherous closed-course races. But together they provided a challenge for both planes and pilots and created one of the most colorful and exciting chapters in the history of American aviation.

The years following the end of World War I were difficult ones for America’s aviation industry. Not only did peace mean an abrupt end to government contracts, but manufacturers soon found themselves competing with their own products as the sale of war surplus aircraft more than saturated the limited peacetime market for airplanes.

Part of the problem, industry leaders thought, was the public perception of aviation. Most Americans of the time accepted the airplane as a military tool. Few, however, saw the possibilities of commercial aviation in peacetime. As part of an effort to bring public attention to the civil potential of peacetime aviation and to breathe new life into the sagging industry, the National Air Races were born.

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