In the early 1930s, Gee Bees became synonymous with speed when the bullet-shaped racers blazed a winning trail at Cleveland. Yet the beautiful planes with their gleaming red-and-white finish soon acquired reputations as pilot killers. And so they were—in the 1930s.
The Granville brothers—Zantford, Thomas, Robert, Edward and Mark—used their wide range of skills to create a series of advanced biplanes and some good-looking sport monoplanes to propel themselves from shade-tree mechanic status to a full-fledged, highly respected aircraft manufacturing company. Led by Zantford (better known as “Granny”), the brothers combined their design, flying, welding, woodworking and other skills to create legendary, record-setting aircraft.
Granny was wise enough to know his limitations, however, and he engaged the personable Bob Hall as his chief engineer. Hall, later to become famous as a test pilot with Grumman, was the perfect complement to Granny. He could translate the elder Granville’s visionary ideas into rugged designs, and he also had many contacts in the industry. Deciding that they wanted to build an aircraft capable of winning the 1931 National Air Races, they fell to work with a passion, creating the Gee Bee Model Z in just a few months.
Christened City of Springfield, the Model Z won all five races in which it was entered at Cleveland in 1931, including the prestigious Thompson Trophy Race at a record 236.239 mph. In a single racing meet, the Model Z put Granville Brothers Aircraft in the forefront of aviation.
Sadly, on December 5, 1931, Model Z pilot Lowell Bayles was killed in an official attempt on the world’s landplane speed record. Newsreel cameramen were filming as he blazed through the speed trap and they caught City of Springfield as its right wing snapped off. The plane crashed into the ground, leaving a long trail of debris and burning gasoline. That snippet of celluloid, with the Gee Bee representing any number of aircraft, was subsequently aired hundreds of times in films and television productions.
Bayles’ accident was the first in a series of fatal crashes that led the public to believe all Gee Bees required superhuman pilots like Jimmy Doolittle to fly them and live. But the aircraft’s resulting bad reputation would be disproved many years later, when the great pilot Delmar Benjamin and his team created a perfect replica of the Gee Bee R-2 Super Sportster. From his first flight on December 23, 1991, Delmar demonstrated to everyone that the Gee Bee was not a killer but a superbly functional aerobatic aircraft.
Sixty years earlier, however, the crash of the Model Z devastated the Granvilles. Hall resigned, later building his own racer, the gull-wing Hall Bulldog. When Russell Boardman placed an order with Granville Brothers Aircraft for two new racers, Granny hired Howell W. “Pete” Miller to serve as chief engineer.
The swift but troubled Super Sportsters were essentially Granny’s design, fulfilling his vision that a teardrop was the ideal streamlined shape, a concept that Miller validated in wind tunnel tests. The Super Sportsters reached their peak in 1932, when Doolittle flew the R-1 to win the Thompson Trophy and set a world land speed record of 296.287 mph. In the following years, however, Gee Bee crashes killed many famous pilots, including Granny himself, Boardman, Florence Klingensmith, Cecil Allen and Francisco Sarabia.
The Depression, the crashes and the generally limited market for racing aircraft forced Granville Brothers Aircraft out of business. Granny, Miller and Don DeLackner formed a consulting firm. Their first design was a lengthened Gee Bee called the “International Sportster,” which would be flown by Jacqueline Cochran in the 1934 “MacRobertson” race from London to Melbourne.
Disaster struck before the International Sportster was built, however, when the 32- year-old Granny died in a landing attempt at Spartanburg, S.C., on February 12, 1934. Miller and the rest of the firm pressed on and completed the R-6H, known as Q.E.D. (Quod Erat Demonstrandum—for “so it is proven”). The aircraft, painted in “Lucky Strike green,” was flown by Lee Gehlbach in the 1934 Bendix, but failed to finish due to mechanical problems. It was then shipped to Great Britain, where Cochran and her co-pilot, the far more experienced Wesley Smith, made it to Bucharest before calling it quits.
Q.E.D., despite its 260-mph cruising speed and 1,850-mile range, was unsuccessful in the 1938 Bendix, after which it was sold to Captain Francisco Sarabia, the “Mexican Lindbergh.” Painted white and renamed Conquistador del Cielo, the R-6H brought Sarabia success in a record-setting flight from Mexico City to New York. Feted as a hero in the Big Apple and Washington, he was killed when he crashed into the Potomac River after a rag was sucked into the airplane’s carburetor intake after takeoff from the capital city.
One of the major figures of American aviation, Frank Hawks, needed a fast new airplane to stay competitive in 1936. He turned to Miller, who formed the New England Aircraft Company, with himself as president and Hawks as vice president. The firm functioned much as the old Granville Brothers firm had, with many of the same personnel. Design work on the plane began on June 12, 1936.
The Gruen Watch Company—then perhaps the most prestigious watch company in the United States—bankrolled the effort to develop the HM-1 Time Flies to the tune of about $70,000, and the aircraft had a performance equal to, or greater than, its more famous contemporary, the Hughes H-1 racer.
In an interview with Miller, I was told that Time Flies was slightly faster than the Hughes racer, had a much better rate of climb and a slightly greater range. Both aircraft used sleek plywood wings, but the all-metal semi-monocoque fuselage of the Hughes aircraft was much more sophisticated than the steel tube fuselage of the HM-1. Miller told me that from the start he had planned for the production version of Time Flies to be all metal.
Miller created an exceptionally clean aircraft, foregoing the classic Gee Bee teardrop for a sleek, streamlined fuselage constructed of Summerill chrome-moly tubing and faired to a perfectly circular section by wooden formers. It was covered with Haskelite plywood for a strong, smooth surface. Instead of a conventional enclosed cockpit, he used a modified automobile hydraulic jack to elevate the seat and windscreen only for takeoff and landing. During flight, the windscreen retracted flush, which meant that Hawks’ visibility was limited to teardrop-shaped side windows.
Miller, a courtly, courteous individual, developed a good rapport with Hawks, who was bright, intelligent and had a good sense of humor. Despite all the difficulties of the past, most of the team that produced the Gee Bees still managed to work in harmony. Hawks, like many other pilots, had previously had bad experience with carbon monoxide fumes, so at his suggestion Miller designed air intakes well out on the cantilever wings to funnel fresh air to the cockpit.
A Pratt & Whitney R-1830 engine was mated to a three-blade Hamilton Standard constant-speed propeller. Miller designed the aircraft to handle engines of up to 2,000 hp.
The undercarriage resembled a conventional fixed-gear Gee Bee in construction and shock absorption, but it was designed to retract inward to nestle in the fuselage. The retraction mechanism, powered by a Crosley automobile starter, turned out to be the source of problems.
On October 18, 1936 (four months and six days after work began), Hawks flew the beautiful Time Flies for the first time. After taking off from the Springfield, Mass., factory (the same former dance hall where the Gee Bees had been built), he flew to Rentschler Field in Hartford, Conn., where both Pratt & Whitney and Hamilton Standard technicians were available for a brief test program.
During the fourth test flight on January 6, 1937, Hawks pulled off his long fur gauntlets, a present from his wife, and put them in a hole in the instrument panel where the Sperry autopilot was supposed to be installed later on. When he extended the gear, the threaded gear mechanism grabbed the gauntlets, chewed them up—and jammed the gear halfway down. Hawks landed without the gear collapsing, but damaged the propeller tips and gear fairing.
Time Flies was quickly repaired, but Hawks was running out of time and money. Instead of doing something that really would have gathered attention, such as attempting to best the records Hughes had set, Hawks made a series of short flights. The most important of these was a record-setting trip from East Hartford to Miami in four hours and 55 minutes. On the return flight, he ran into headwinds and elected to stop at Newark, N.J., where a rough landing smashed the landing gear and broke the main wing spar.
Hawks tried to salvage something from his efforts by selling the plane to Tri-American Aviation, which was headed by Edward Connerton and Leigh Wade, a World War I test pilot in France who had piloted the Douglas World Cruiser Boston in a 1924 round-the-world flight. Tri-American wanted to convert Time Flies into a fast two-seat fighter/attack plane for use by South American air forces.
Wade, Connerton and Miller formed the Miller Aircraft Corporation in 1938 to convert Time Flies. The modification was initially called the HM-2, and later the MAC-1. Changes were kept to a minimum, with a fuel tank removed to allow two seats and the retractable canopy replaced by a conventional sliding canopy positioned well aft on the fuselage. Dual controls were installed, and the wings were modified to accept a single .50-caliber machine gun on each side. A flexible gun was installed for the backseater (only dummy guns were ever installed). The paint was changed to a military blue fuselage with orange wings and horizontal stabilizer, and a 900-hp Twin Wasp engine was installed.
Wade made the first flight in the MAC-1 on August 23, 1937—the same day that Hawks was killed in the crash of the weird-looking Gwinn Air Car (see the November 2005 issue of Aviation History). Hawks apparently had followed the conversion of Time Flies with interest.
The MAC-1 was entered in the 1938 Thompson Trophy Race. Wade flew the plane despite the fact that there had been little time for testing. He had no idea of what the fuel consumption would be. He flew a conservative race to ensure finishing, which he did in fourth place at 248.42 mph. Just as he touched down, the engine quit from lack of fuel. It had been a close call.
Earl Ortman (who had finished second behind Roscoe Turner in the Thompson, flying the Marcoux Bromberg Special) continued the test program when Wade had to go to South America on business. The first test was over a measured 25-mile course near Rentschler Field, and Ortman averaged an amazing 369 mph.
The next test was to measure time to climb, and Ortman achieved a blistering initial climb rate of 6,000 feet per minute. (The U.S. Army Air Corps’ first-line fighter, the Seversky P-35, had a top speed of about 285 mph and an initial climb rate of about 2,000 feet per minute.)
As the climb tests proceeded, however, the center of gravity moved back, and in a 425-mph dive and zoom, Ortman felt the stick jerk out of his hand in a series of oscillations of increasing amplitude. He hit the canopy quick-release and was hurled out of the airplane just as it began to break up. The tail separated from the fuselage. Ortman parachuted to safety, but that was the end of the MAC-1 Time Flies.
Miller went on to a profitable career, designing many smaller aircraft, but he always regretted that the HM-1 was not given a chance to show its full potential as a production all-metal aircraft.
Originally published in the July 2006 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.
