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1930s National Air Races: Speed and Spectacle| Aviation History | 2 comments | Print This Post | Email This Post 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. Subscribe Today
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. Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to
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2 Comments to “1930s National Air Races: Speed and Spectacle”
Most of this article is viably the truth. One inconsistency is that the pilot killed at the Indianapolis takeoff was Russell Boardman and not BayLes as stated. I will explain the death of Lowell Bayles in a shortly. Russell Boardman was a wealthy record breaking distance pilot who took major stock control of the Gee Bee operation after the death of Lowell Bayles. Through his vested power, he appointed himself the 1932 race pilot for the Gee Bee R1 racer. Just before the Cleveland national races Boardman borrowed a Gee Bee commercial plane for transportation and in what was to be his potentially lethal style, hastily pulled the little Gee Bee off the ground too quickly, too steeply, stalled and spun the plane into the trees. He survived but would not heal in time to Race the R1 in the Thompson trophy at Cleveland. Jim Doolittle without a plane after crash landing his Super Solution race plane due to landing gear mechanical problems, was asked to race the Gee Bee R1 by Zantford Granville. The rest of the story for the 1932 Thompson is history. Boardman, after healing from his injuries set out in 1933 to race the R1 in both the Bendix long distance races and the Thompson pylon speed races. The R1 was now fitted with an even larger Pratt & Whitney Hornet Engine and extra fuel tanks needed for the Bendix. These changes did not sit well with engineer Pete Miller and Zantford Granville, but as it always does, money talks. In Indianapolis Boardman was agitated when his teammate Russell Thaw in the R2 racer damaged a wingtip upon landing. Boardman topped off the tanks of the big R1 and hastily pulled the laden ship into the air only using a fraction of the available and much needed runway. The big racer went into a stall, rolled on it’s back, and crashed. Boardman died later, marking the financial end and company control of the Gee Bees. One must remember these were, after all, race planes, and you don’t fly them like a trainer and you don’t win races with a trainer. Just like performance aircraft today, the racers of that period required skills that were only endowed to a few top notch pilots at the time. Poor pilot choices for whatever reasons and design changes beyond the Granville Brother’s control were apparently at fault in most, if not all cases from that point on.
I’ll get back to Lowell Bayles now. Bayles, like Doolittle was an extremely talented pilot. Slim, quite and well liked, he was a gracious aviation hero and icon. Bayles was killed in an attempt to break the world land speed record at the Wayne County airport in Michigan on Dec. 5, 1931. The Gee Bee “Z” model had been refitted with a 750 HP Pratt & Whitney Wasp R-1340. At the speeds being approached at the time a phenomenon known as aileron flutter caused handling and structural problems not then understood. It is theorized that Bayles was hit, stunned, or knocked unconscious by a gas cap that came loose and blew though the windscreen. This caused a radical movement of the controls causing in-flight structural failure. The fact that two young boys found the gas cap and Bayle’s goggles far from crash site leads to this conclusion. An exact replica of the Gee Bee “Z” was built by Kimball Enterprises and tested in the mid 1990’s. It was tested and found to have definite aileron flutter above 240 mph. Since Bayles was said to be doing 314 mph at the time it is possible that flutter alone could have been the problem. Zantford Granville, Gee Bee founder, was devastated as Lowell Bayles was seen as one of the Granville Bother’s to him. The Granville’s did not take risks and many other engineers and pilots of the time touted them as great airplane builders. I is the Media that created the “death trap” myth. Contrary to popular belief the Granville’s always had an aeronautical engineer (Bob Hall and Pete Miller) aiding design and for the famous 1932 R1 actually did wind tunnel testing in NY, a new technology at the time. They were not backyard builders. Later Gee Bee planes were extensively modified by third party owners of the planes against the wishes of the Granville’s and flown by less than the very best pilots. The inexperience in piloting and design changes, led to a series of crashes bringing bad press to and tarnishing the Granville name.
By Wayne on Feb 2, 2009 at 3:51 pm