Geebee Aircraft - The Gee Bee R1: The 1930s Hot Rod from Hell and the American Hero Who Tamed It
It was the fastest car in the world in 1932. It was 45 mph on Sir Malcom Campbell's land monster, 172 mph on Gar Wood's boat with four massive Packard jet engines, and let's not even waste our time on the locomotive. day It was led by a talented and courageous man who a decade later would become one of America's greatest war heroes and built by a band of brothers during a 90-day strike in an abandoned dance hall in Springfield, Massachusetts. The Airplane was the ultimate hot rod before the phrase was coined. The car was called the Gee Bee R1, and it was to become a race winner, a widower, and one of the most famous airplanes of its time in major air races in America.
Geebee Aircraft
Granville Brothers Aircraft Company was founded in 1925 and began manufacturing aircraft in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1929. After airplanes became a proven commodity during World War I, hundreds of small airlines sprang up all over the country. Just as the automobile industry was wide open in the early 1900s, you could become an airplane manufacturer if you were an engineer and manufacturer with the money to start a business. The result was a major advance in aircraft technology and a large number of dead pilots who ended up operating aircraft controls using construction techniques and materials that were not yet fully understood by engineers. Advanced aerodynamics and aeronautical studies were in their infancy, and few people had actually mastered one, let alone both.
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Despite the fact that they founded their company at perhaps the worst possible time in American history, the brothers managed to find success with their first design, which was a two-level and unimaginatively named "Model A". The men sold and built nine of them, more than a third of the 24 planes the company built before the 1933 financial crash. Of these 24 aircraft, historical records exist to prove that 16 aircraft were involved in an accident. While that sounds awful, we're not sure how this story stacks up for other small manufacturers at this time. Many companies only produced one plane that crashed and put them out of business. Maybe 16 out of 24 in the late 1920s/early 1930s shouldn't be considered so bad.
In the 1930s, their company was in deep trouble due to the Great Depression, so the Granville brothers looked for a way to make money to keep their operations afloat. Air racing was all the rage in the late 1920s and 1930s, and the Thompson Trophy race in Cleveland, Ohio was one of the richest. The men thought that if they could build a plane to win the event, the prize money and fame that would come with winning would help their business back to health. By the way, Thompson Products, the race sponsor, later became known as TRW.
With this thought in mind, they began work on a class of aircraft they called "Super Sportsmen". The first of these was built to race in the Thompson Trophy series in 1931 and was called the Model Z. This aircraft won the race with Lowell Bayles and powered by a 535 hp Pratt and Whitney radial engine was capable of cruising at 267 mph. the greater the speed of the event. The pilot and crew collected a whopping $7,500 in prize money and the future looked very bright.
With the plane just a few miles per hour short of the land-based aircraft speed record (seaplanes were held to a different standard), the Granville brothers added a 750 hp Pratt and Whitney Wasp Senior engine, hoping to break the record at once. and for everyone. Lowell Bayles was back in control to pace Michigan. In one test, Bayles was descending from 1,000 feet in the measured speed zone when the plane suddenly pitched up, sheared off one of the wings, and rolled to the ground, throwing Bayles about 300 feet from where he crashed. the scene. It was later determined that the front gas cap had been severed, smashed through the windshield, and either killed Bayles instantly or knocked him out cold, causing a sudden pull and crash.
Geebee Z Model
Whether it was the era, the Granville brothers' mindset, or just how things worked, Bayles' death didn't slow them down much. Yes, it hurt their already shaky reputation when another pilot was killed in one of their planes, but it also created another problem. The 1932 Thompson Trophy race was only a few months away, and the planes that entered the race were simply reduced to ashes and the man who flew them was buried. Solutions? Build another with more power, speed and potentially less control than the others before it. There was no shortage of daredevils who lined up to fly these planes, and no shortage of designers who wanted to misplace them. This is the mathematics of innovation, and as ugly as it looks on paper, the results of these often bloodless equations have created all the wonderful advances in our ability to drive, fly, explore, and even leave the bonds of this planet. The times when the courage and skill of one side meets the brilliance and skill of the other is magic. Such was the case with the Gee Bee R1.
The brains behind the R1's success resided in the head of a young, wet-behind-the-ears engineer, Howell Miller, nicknamed Pete. He had just graduated from college and was eager to apply some of his ideas and touches to a high-performance aircraft. Judging by the financial condition of his brother's company, we assume that Miller was willing to work cheap.
Not content with building just one aircraft in six months, the team decided to build two. One for the shorter Thompson Cup race and one for the longer Bendix Cup race later this year. Their first call was to Pratt and Whitney, who loaned them two engines, one of which was their new supercharged R-1340 radial that made north of 800 hp. Why was it the first call? Because the plane is built around the engine. Used materials? Wire, wood, pipes and fabric.
Now you can begin to understand why we call this plane a hot rod. Look at the side profile. The huge nine-cylinder radial engine makes up about a third of the car's length. The pilot sits as far away as humanly possible while still inside the fuselage. How the hell did they come up with this weird but bad design? In the wind tunnel of course.
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Miller and his brothers built a pair of mahogany models and spent three days working on them in a New York University wind tunnel. Miller came up with the idea of a water-shaped body that would be wide at the front and narrow at the back. The wings were very small and from what I read would make the plane very difficult to control due to the speed. It twitched and unpredictable ... what it was. Miller determined the seating position, and he reasoned that a pilot sitting far from the plane would have a better view of the floating pylons he needed to rotate during takeoff. It also created a situation that made landing the plane very difficult and one pilot made 13 landing attempts. This thing was basically an airborne t-bucket. All engines and not much else. Like the t-bucket, it took someone with extraordinary stones to actually complete it. Fortunately for the Granville brothers and Pete Miller, such a man did exist.
His name was Jimmy Doolittle and by 1932 he had established himself as one of the world's greatest living pilots. He was trained as a pilot during the First World War, and it was clear from the start that Doolittle was gifted with special skills to fly an aircraft. After the war, he remained with the military, flying surveillance missions over the Mexican border. He rose to lieutenant and later attended various training schools in the early 1920s before leaving the service to return and finish college. In 1922, he made the first transcontinental flight, traveling for 21 hours straight with only one refueling stop.
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