The world of aviation's aerial oddities begins, appropriately enough, with a story that cannot be understood without first telling the story of the Granville Brothers and their magnificent, murderous Gee Bee racers — because it was the Gee Bee story that gave Howell "Pete" Miller his chance, and Miller's subsequent career that produced the remarkably strange twin-engine aircraft known as the MAC-1.
The Granville Brothers and the Gee Bee
Five brothers — Zantford "Granny", Thomas, Robert, Edward, and Mark Granville — built their shop at Springfield, Massachusetts, and produced a series of racing aircraft that were, in the early 1930s, the most spectacular and most dangerous aircraft in the United States. The Gee Bee name derived simply from "Granville Brothers," and the Model Z — the "City of Springfield" — announced their intentions to the world by winning the 1931 National Air Races Thompson Trophy at 236.239 mph with pilot Lowell Bayles.
The victory lasted exactly until December 5, 1931, when Bayles died attempting the world land speed record. A wing snapped off the Model Z in front of newsreel cameras, capturing one of the most widely seen aviation fatalities of the era. The company hired Bob Hall as Chief Engineer, and Hall produced the famous Super Sportsters — the R-1 (race number 7) and R-2 (race number 11) — that became the defining images of pre-war air racing at its most extreme.
The R-1 was the aircraft that Jimmy Doolittle flew to win the 1932 Thompson Trophy at 296.287 mph, simultaneously setting the world landplane speed record. It was an achievement that belonged as much to the aircraft as to the pilot — and it was an achievement that came at a cost that eventually consumed everything. Bob Hall resigned after the 1932 season, and the Granvilles hired Howell Miller to replace him.
The Parade of Disasters
Miller inherited a company that was producing the fastest aircraft in the world and killing everyone who flew them competitively. Zantford "Granny" Granville himself died on February 12, 1934, at Spartanburg, South Carolina, at the age of 32. Russell Boardman, Florence Klingensmith, Cecil Allen, and Francisco Sarabia all died in Gee Bee crashes. The aircraft's design philosophy — prioritize speed and power over all other considerations, accept structural margins that other manufacturers considered insufficient — produced machines that rewarded perfection and punished any deviation from it with fatal immediacy.
Miller, to his credit, continued working despite the carnage. He collaborated with Don DeLackner on the International Sportster, and then on the aircraft that became the Q.E.D. (registered R-6H), a long-range racer painted in what was memorably described as "Lucky Strike Green" for the 1934 MacRobertson Race from England to Australia. The Q.E.D. experienced mechanical problems in the Bendix race that year, but subsequently carried Jacqueline Cochran and Wesley Smith on a transatlantic flight to Bucharest — demonstrating that Miller's designs, whatever their racing misfortunes, had genuine capability.
The famous speed pilot Frank Hawks then hired Miller to create the HM-1 "Time Flies" — a purpose-designed record aircraft of exceptional refinement that served Hawks well during his record-setting campaigns. Miller had found his footing as a designer of high-performance aircraft, and the HM-1 showed what he could do when given a clear specification and adequate resources.
The MAC-1: Howell Miller's Peculiar Masterpiece
After the HM-1, Miller turned to an entirely different challenge. He formed New England Aircraft Company and designed the MAC-1 — Miller Aircraft Corporation Number One — a twin-engine aircraft with a configuration that qualified it immediately as an aerial oddity of the first order.
The MAC-1 used a tandem engine arrangement in push-pull configuration — one engine in the nose pulling, one engine behind the cockpit pushing — a configuration that offered theoretical aerodynamic advantages over the conventional twin-engine arrangement with engines mounted side by side in the wings. The push-pull tandem eliminated the asymmetric yaw control problems that bedevil conventional twins when an engine fails, since both engines were on the aircraft's centerline. It also potentially offered lower frontal area and therefore lower drag than a wing-mounted twin.
The theoretical advantages were real. The practical problems proved decisive. The MAC-1 never achieved successful flight. The program ended without delivering the performance that Miller's calculations had promised, and New England Aircraft Company quietly dissolved. The MAC-1 joined the long roster of aircraft that were interesting in concept and unsuccessful in execution — a category that is, in aviation history, considerably more populated than the roster of aircraft that were both interesting and successful.
Why It Matters
The MAC-1 and the career of Howell Miller illustrate something important about the aviation industry in the 1930s: the extraordinary tolerance for technical risk that characterized the period. Miller had watched colleagues die in aircraft he helped design. He had seen companies fail around him repeatedly. He continued to design, continued to take chances on configurations that the mainstream industry ignored, and produced a body of work that included at least one genuinely excellent aircraft (the HM-1) and one genuinely fascinating failure (the MAC-1).
The aerial oddities series exists to examine exactly these kinds of aircraft — the ones that pushed against the boundaries of conventional practice, that asked questions the mainstream wasn't asking, and that occasionally discovered answers no one expected. The MAC-1 asked good questions. The fact that it didn't find the right answers is part of the history too.