They were, by almost any measure, the most spectacular racing aircraft America ever produced. Squat, barrel-chested, painted in brilliant red and white, the Granville Brothers' Gee Bee racers dominated the early 1930s air racing scene with a combination of raw speed and visceral menace that has never quite been replicated. To the crowds at Cleveland, they were the most exciting machines in the sky. To the pilots who flew them — even the best in the world — they were aircraft that demanded total mastery, for even a moment's inattention could be fatal.
More than ninety years on, the Gee Bees remain among the most controversial aircraft in American aviation history, and the debate about whether they were inspired masterpieces or engineered death traps shows no sign of cooling. Having studied them, written about them, and watched replicas flown by supremely gifted pilots, I find myself firmly in the first camp. The Gee Bees were not killer planes. They were racing machines built for one purpose — to go faster than anything else in the sky — and they achieved that purpose magnificently. What killed some of the men who flew them was not the aircraft's design but the gap between what the planes demanded and what certain pilots could deliver.
Five Brothers and a Dance Hall
The story begins, as so many great American aviation stories do, with ambition and ingenuity operating on a shoestring. Zantford "Granny" Granville, the eldest of five brothers from New Hampshire, started working as an auto mechanic in the early 1920s. By 1925 he was trading engine repairs for flight lessons and quickly acquired his pilot's license. Together with his brothers — Thomas, Robert, Mark, and Edward — he founded Granville Brothers Aircraft, initially nothing more than an aircraft repair shop in Springfield, Massachusetts.
The Granvilles soon expanded into an abandoned dance hall on the outskirts of town, financed by a loan from the Tait brothers of Springfield. It was a quintessentially American enterprise: five young men with more nerve than capital, turning a former ballroom into an aircraft factory through sheer force of will.
In 1929, they built their first original aircraft — the Model A, a two-seat biplane, the first in a line they called "Sportsters." They advertised their machines as "the fastest and most maneuverable licensed airplane for its horsepower in the United States." It was a bold claim, but not an empty one. The Granvilles were genuinely talented engineers who experimented with advanced aerodynamic theories — they were working with wind tunnels before most private aircraft manufacturers had even considered the idea.
The Great Depression, however, was rapidly drying up the market for private sport aircraft. If Granville Brothers Aircraft was to survive, it needed prize money. And for prize money, it needed racers.
Into the Air Races: The Model X and Model Y
The Granvilles' first foray into competition came with the Model X monoplane, entered in the 1930 Cirrus Engine Company's All American Flying Derby — the world's longest air race at the time, a 5,500-mile circuit from Michigan to Texas to California and back. Lowell Bayles, a well-known airman who preferred to fly barefoot so he could feel the rudder pedals more precisely, flew the Model X to a creditable second-place finish. It was enough to convince the Granvilles they were on the right track.
The Model Y Senior Sportster followed — originally conceived as a private aircraft but quickly proving its mettle on the racing circuit as well. When the Depression killed the commercial market entirely, the Granvilles committed fully to racing. They had no choice, and they had the talent to make it work.
Contemporaries easily recognized the Gee Bees by their unusual proportions. Unlike most aircraft of the period, the Gee Bees' wingspans were noticeably wider than the length of their fuselages — a configuration that gave them a distinctive, almost comical appearance at rest. As one observer memorably noted, they resembled "a section of sewer pipe which had sprouted stubby wings." In the air at racing speed, nobody was laughing.
The Model Z: 1931 and the First Thompson Trophy
In 1931, the Granvilles produced their first full-fledged purpose-built racer: the Model Z. Bob Hall, a skilled pilot and one of Granville Brothers' most promising engineers, co-designed the aircraft specifically to win the Thompson Trophy at the National Air Races in Cleveland — the most prestigious closed-circuit pylon race in America.
The Model Z exceeded every expectation. At the 1931 National Air Races, Gee Bees won five first-place trophies. On September 1, Bayles flew the Model Z to win the Thompson Trophy — a 100-mile closed-circuit race around a pyloned course — averaging more than 236.24 mph in 25 minutes and 23 seconds. Maude Tait, daughter of one of the original Tait brothers who had lent the Granvilles their start-up money, won the Cleveland Pneumatic Aero Trophy Race for Women in a Model Y. It was a triumphant day for Springfield.
But triumph was followed swiftly by tragedy. Later in 1931, Bayles made several attempts to set an absolute speed record in the Model Z. On December 1, he averaged 281.75 mph, exceeding the existing record of 278.4 mph — but international rules required him to surpass it by more than 4.97 mph to receive official credit. Then, on December 5, while making another attempt, Bayles's plane pitched up sharply and its right wing folded. The aircraft spun inverted and crashed. Bayles died on impact. Post-accident investigation determined that a loosened gas cap had flown back and struck him unconscious. He was awarded the speed record posthumously on January 14, 1932. The Granvilles' triumphant year ended in grief — and in the newspaper headlines that would begin attaching the word "killer" to their aircraft.
The R-1 and R-2: Engineering Masterpieces
Bayles's death did not deter the Granvilles. Within a year they had produced two of the most technically sophisticated racing aircraft ever built. Zantford partnered with Howell "Pete" Miller, a young aeronautical engineer, to design the R-1 and R-2 Super Sportsters for the 1932 race season.
The design philosophy was radical in its simplicity: build the smallest possible airframe around the most powerful available engine, minimize drag above all else, and accept whatever handling compromises that entailed. Wind-tunnel testing with scale models was performed before construction — something rarely done with racing aircraft at the time. The result was a machine of genuine engineering sophistication, stress-analyzed for 12 positive G's on the wings, landing gear, and fuselage — figures that would not embarrass a modern fighter.
The R-1 was purpose-built for the Thompson Trophy pylon race. It mounted a Pratt & Whitney R-1340 Wasp engine upgraded to deliver 730 horsepower. The R-2, designed for the Bendix transcontinental trophy race, featured a smaller R-985 engine and increased fuel capacity for the long cross-country run. Both engines were on loan from Pratt & Whitney, then a relatively young manufacturer eager to prove itself in competition.
The aircraft incorporated genuinely innovative features: a fully adjustable horizontal stabilizer, counterbalanced ailerons to dampen flutter, and controllable-pitch metal propellers. Zantford's signature teardrop-shaped fuselage minimized frontal area while cleanly enclosing the bulk of the radial engine. They were, as Pete Miller would later insist to his dying day, thoroughly engineered airplanes from the ground up.
Cleveland 1932: Doolittle and the Record Books
The 1932 National Air Races in Cleveland became the Gee Bee's defining moment. Before a crowd of 60,000 spectators, Jimmy Doolittle — already famous, already brilliant, not yet the legend he would become after Tokyo — climbed into the R-1 and proceeded to give a masterclass in what the aircraft could do in the right hands.
"It flew like a bullet." — Jimmy Doolittle on the Gee Bee R-1
Doolittle not only won the Thompson Trophy on September 5, 1932, he lapped all but one of his competitors, averaging 252.67 mph around the pylon course. He then set a new FAI world landplane speed record of 294–296 mph in the Shell Speed Dash. It was a performance of such complete authority that even the skeptics were silenced — temporarily.
Meanwhile, Lee Gehlbach raced the R-2 from Burbank, California to Cleveland in the Bendix Transcontinental Race. Hampered by an engine oil leak, he managed only a fourth-place finish — disappointing, but enough to secure some prize money and confirm the aircraft's fundamental soundness over a long-distance route.
Doolittle and Gehlbach agreed on the R models' character: they were fast, they were demanding, and they were not aircraft for anyone less than completely accomplished at the controls. The tiny wings necessitated unusually high approach and landing speeds. The aircraft had a pronounced tendency to snap-roll — one wing stalling before the other — at high angles of attack near stall speed, a situation most often encountered during takeoff and landing. Pilots could not relax at the controls for a single instant. For Doolittle, this was manageable. For lesser pilots, it would prove fatal.
1933: The Year Everything Went Wrong
Emboldened by their 1932 success — two consecutive Thompson Trophy victories with the Model Z and R-1 — the Granvilles prepared ambitiously for 1933. The R-1's Wasp engine was replaced by the more powerful Pratt & Whitney Hornet, capable of pushing the racer past 300 mph. A larger fuel tank was added, making it a Bendix contender as well. The R-2 received the R-1's old Wasp plus a new wing fitted with flaps — a genuine innovation for the Super Sportster series, aimed at reducing the dangerously high landing speeds that had always been the aircraft's Achilles heel.
What followed was a cascade of disasters. On July 1 during the Bendix Race, the R-2 sustained damage on landing in Indianapolis and was forced to retire. The same day, Russell Boardman departed Indianapolis in the heavily fuel-laden R-1. The aircraft was hauled into the air before it was ready, rolled inverted at low altitude, and crashed. Boardman was pulled from the wreckage alive but died from his injuries. In August, Jimmy Haizlip crashed the R-2 while demonstrating a flaps-up short-field landing — the aircraft snap-rolled just before touchdown, caught a wingtip, and cartwheeled down the field. Haizlip walked away, a testament to the rugged construction of the aircraft, but the R-2 was destroyed.
In September, Florence Klingensmith, a 25-year-old female pilot of considerable skill, died during the Phillips Trophy Free-For-All Race in Chicago when her Model Y struck a tree during what appeared to be a structural failure.
By the end of 1933, Granville Brothers Aircraft was bankrupt — not primarily because of the accidents but because the company had not won enough prize money to sustain operations. The crashes provided newspapers with headlines, but the underlying cause of the company's death was financial, not aeronautical.
The Long Tail and the Final Crash
Characteristically, the Granvilles refused to quit. They combined salvaged parts from the wrecked R-1 and R-2 to create the R-1/R-2 Long Tail — a promising hybrid that showed excellent speed in early testing. This machine was then wrecked when its pilot landed on a wet grass strip and slid off into a drainage ditch.
The Long Tail was then sold to pilot Cecil Allen, who rebuilt it for the 1935 Bendix Race. Pete Miller wrote to Allen explicitly warning him never to fill the rear fuel tank — doing so would move the center of gravity dangerously aft and make the aircraft uncontrollable. Allen ignored the warning. He departed Burbank in the morning fog with all tanks full, wallowed off the runway, and crashed in a field just beyond. He was killed instantly. Remarkably, despite the full fuel load, there was no fire. The aircraft was never rebuilt.
The final tragedy came in February 1934, before the bankruptcy was even complete. Zantford Granville himself was ferrying one of the last Sportsters to a customer when he attempted to land in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Spotting a construction crew in the landing area, he tried to abort and go around — and the engine failed at the worst possible moment. Zantford died en route to the hospital. The eldest brother, the one who had started it all with an auto mechanic's license and a dream, was gone at 33.
Were They Killer Planes?
The newspapers said yes, and the reputation has proved remarkably durable. But the evidence, examined carefully, tells a different story.
The Gee Bees were, as Dick Gilcreast of the New England Air Museum correctly observed, "thoroughly engineered airplanes." They were not carelessly built deathtraps. They were purpose-designed racing machines that operated at the absolute edge of what 1930s aeronautical technology could achieve, and they required pilots of commensurate skill. Doolittle flew the R-1 to a world record and a Thompson Trophy without incident. Gehlbach flew the R-2 across a continent. In the right hands, these aircraft performed exactly as designed.
What the Gee Bees could not forgive was mediocrity or inattention. Their tiny wings demanded high speeds at all phases of flight. Their snap-roll tendency at high angles of attack was a genuine aerodynamic characteristic that every pilot was briefed on — and that most of the fatal accidents involved in some form. The aircraft were unforgiving. So was every other racing aircraft of the era. The Gee Bees simply happened to be faster than most, which meant the consequences of pilot error were more immediate and less survivable.
Starting in 1984, Gilcreast and a volunteer team at the New England Air Museum spent nine years building a faithful R-1 reproduction from original Granville family plans, with Pete Miller himself serving as project adviser. In the 1990s, Delmar Benjamin flew an R-2 replica to airshows around the world, performing knife-edge passes and inverted flight routines that had previously been considered impossible in the stubby racer. Benjamin confirmed Doolittle's assessment — the aircraft was unstable in yaw and pitch, prone to snap-rolling near stall — but in the hands of a master pilot, it was not only manageable but genuinely extraordinary. Benjamin became the most experienced Model R pilot in history, and almost singlehandedly dispelled the myths that had gathered around the Gee Bees for six decades.
The Legacy
No original R-1 or R-2 survives. Both were destroyed in the crashes that bookended their brief careers. But reproductions stand today at the New England Air Museum and the San Diego Air & Space Museum, where they remain among the most popular exhibits on display. Visitors are drawn not by controversy but by the aircraft's unmistakable visual drama — that stubby, purposeful, red-and-white form that announced, before you even heard the engine, that this machine was built for one thing only.
The Granville Brothers built 22 Gee Bees in total. They won the Thompson Trophy twice. They set a world landplane speed record. They attracted some of the finest pilots America produced in the interwar years, and those pilots flew them — successfully — to some of the most spectacular performances in air racing history.
That is the Gee Bee story. Not a story of hubris and disaster, though there was plenty of both. A story of five brothers from New Hampshire who built the hottest racing aircraft of their time in a dance hall, on borrowed money, during the worst economic depression in American history — and who, for one blazing season at Cleveland in 1932, produced machines that nothing in the world could match for speed.
Model Specifications at a Glance
| Model | Year | Engine | Top Speed | Notable Achievement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model Z | 1931 | Pratt & Whitney Wasp Jr, ~535 hp | ~267 mph | 1931 Thompson Trophy (Bayles, 236.24 mph avg); 5 first-place trophies at Cleveland |
| R-1 Super Sportster | 1932 | P&W R-1340 Wasp, 730 hp (later Hornet, ~900 hp) | 296 mph | 1932 Thompson Trophy (Doolittle); FAI world landplane speed record 294–296 mph |
| R-2 Super Sportster | 1932 | P&W R-985, ~535 hp | ~267 mph | 1932 Bendix Race, 4th place (Gehlbach); designed for long-distance cross-country racing |
| R-1/R-2 Long Tail | 1933–34 | P&W Hornet, ~900 hp | Est. 300+ mph | Composite rebuild from R-1 and R-2; destroyed 1935 Bendix crash (Cecil Allen) |