Another popular air racer and racing plane builder, Benny Howard, built a number of very popular and successful racers. His most famous, Mister Mulligan, won both the Bendix and Thompson Trophy races in 1935. He was said to have begun his career building small, fast planes for bootleggers during prohibition.

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Fans seemed to prize this spirit of individual enterprise that was part of the National Air Races throughout the 1930s. When rumors spread that the French government had spent $1 million developing Frenchman Michel Detroyat’s 1936 Thompson Trophy winner, for instance, the eventual three-time Thompson Trophy winner Roscoe Turner spoke the sentiments of many when he said, “It just isn’t fair for a foreign government to trim a bunch of little guys who build airplanes in their backyards.”

The Depression-era crowds could easily identify with the get-rich efforts of such designers and builders, and the use of such “backyard” creations added greatly to the danger of the events. Many also questioned the advancement of aircraft design and technical innovation. “The records show that they [the National Air Races] have been about the same value to commercial aviation that motorboat racing has been to battleship construction,” said an article in the New York Times.

The complaint was not without some justification. All too often, especially in the early 1930s, technical innovation meant little more than adding bigger and bigger engines to the smallest possible airframes. Such combinations often proved lethal.

The danger such aircraft presented to pilots did not escape public attention. “Most American racing planes are built in small shops by inexperienced, if enthusiastic, designers,” Newsweek magazine reported in 1937 after the death of two pilots, including that year’s Thompson Trophy winner, Rudy Kling, during a single air race at Miami. “Speed is attained by cutting down wings, control surfaces, and cockpits to absolute minimums, then installing as big of engines as the ship will stand.” All too often such racing planes proved to be unstable and contributed to the growing number of fatalities. And of all the planes of the 1930s, none had more of a reputation as killers than the infamous Gee Bees.

The name Gee Bee was taken from the name of the planes’ manufacturer, the small, Springfield, Mass., firm Granville brothers Aircraft Company. Founded by Zantford D. (”Granny”) Granville, the company began business by rebuilding wrecked airplanes at the Boston Airport.

In 1929, having secured a loan from a local business man, the company built a handful of small racing planes called “Sportsters.” The commercial success of these planes enabled Granny Granville to design and build a series of more powerful unlimited racing planes.

The resulting craft were planes built for speed, not beauty. One observer, not unjustifiably, said the planes looked like “a section of sewer pipe which had sprouted stubby wings.” They were small, only 15 feet long with only a 23 1/2-foot wingspan. But they were also powerful. At first the plane was powered by a 535-hp Wasp Junion engine. This was then replaced by an 800-hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine.

No one denied that the resulting planes were fast. In the first of these super-racers, the Model Z, pilot Lowell Bayles covered the 100 miles of the 1931 Thompson Trophy Race in 25 minutes, 23.88 seconds to win easily with an average speed of 236.239 mph.

The following year, Jimmy Doolittle flew the second Gee Bee racer, the R-1, to victory in the Thompson Trophy Race at a record speed of 252.686 mph, and he also set a landplane speed record of 294.38 mph during trials for the event.

Unfortunately, however, the Gee Bees proved as deadly as they were fast. Bayles was killed in a crash of a second Gee Bee after a refueling stop at Indianapolis during the 1933 Bendix Trophy Race. Even the smaller Gee Bee racer would take its toll as well. Female air racer Florence Kilingensmith and even Granny Granville himself would die in Gee Bee crashes. In all, three of the large racing Gee Bees were built, and each would crash, killing its pilot.

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