Henry A. Haffke has done a remarkable job in writing a book that is long overdue. An analysis not only of the remarkable Gee Bee aircraft, but of the even more remarkable people who were associated with building and flying those powerful airplanes which literally zoomed their way into aviation history. In the past few decades we have seen articles dealing with the Granville Brothers and their great associates — Howell Miller, Bob Hall, Jimmy Doolittle, Lowell Bayles and all the rest — but there has been a need for a book which could place all of these legendary figures in perspective.
This companion piece to our earlier look at Howell Miller's MAC-1 focuses on the engineer behind the legend: a man whose quiet genius shaped some of the most extraordinary racing aircraft ever built, and whose career traced the full arc of golden-age aviation from the roaring pylon circuits of Cleveland to the radar-equipped fighters of World War II.
Springfield: The Granville Brothers and Their World
The story of the Gee Bee racers is inseparable from the story of five brothers from Springfield, Massachusetts. Zantford "Granny" Granville was the driving force — the leader, the promoter, the man whose infectious enthusiasm attracted pilots, backers, and talent from across the country. Around him worked his brothers Thomas, Robert, Edward, and Mark, each contributing to a small operation that somehow produced aircraft that could outrun anything built by the great manufacturers of the day.
The Granvilles were not formally trained engineers. What they possessed instead was an intuitive understanding of what made airplanes fast, combined with a willingness to push well beyond the conservative boundaries that governed production aircraft design. Their shop in Springfield was modest. Their ambitions were not.
The first Gee Bee to make history was the Model Z, nicknamed the "City of Springfield." At the 1931 Cleveland National Air Races, the Model Z won five races and, most memorably, carried Lowell Bayles to victory in the Thompson Trophy at 236.239 mph. The Gee Bee had arrived.
The triumph was followed almost immediately by tragedy. On December 5, 1931, Bayles was attempting to set a new land speed record when a wing snapped off the Model Z. The crash was caught on newsreel — one of the first racing fatalities recorded on film — and it set the tone for the Gee Bee's enduring reputation as a beautiful killer.
Bob Hall and the Wind Tunnel Work
Bob Hall served as the Granvilles' first Chief Engineer, and his contributions to the early Gee Bee designs were substantial. Hall brought a level of analytical rigor to the operation that complemented Granny's intuitive approach, and he conducted critical wind tunnel work with Professor Alexander Klemin at New York University — one of the few academic aerodynamics programs in the country at the time capable of this kind of validation work.
Hall eventually resigned from the Granville operation and went on to build his own distinctive aircraft — the gull-wing Hall Bulldog racer — demonstrating that his talents extended well beyond the Gee Bee program. His departure, however, left a gap at the top of the engineering organization that the Granvilles needed to fill quickly. The R-1 and R-2 Super Sportsters were already being designed.
Howell "Pete" Miller: The Engineer Behind the Super Sportsters
Into this role stepped Howell "Pete" Miller, one of the most gifted and least celebrated aeronautical engineers of his generation. Miller brought not only technical skill but a systematic approach to aircraft design that the Granville operation had sometimes lacked. Where Hall had laid important foundations, Miller would oversee the creation of the aircraft that defined the Gee Bee legend.
The Gee Bee Super Sportsters — the R-1 (#7) and the R-2 (#11) — were the product of Miller's engineering combined with the Granvilles' racing instincts. The aircraft's famous teardrop fuselage, stubby and rotund, was not an accident of aesthetics. It was a deliberate aerodynamic solution, developed by Miller and confirmed in wind tunnel tests conducted with Professor Klemin at NYU. The shape minimized frontal area while maximizing internal volume for the enormous radial engines — a solution that looked bizarre but worked.
The cockpit was positioned unusually far aft, another deliberate design choice. In pylon racing, where tight turns around fixed pylons determined victory, the pilot needed maximum forward and lateral visibility. A rear cockpit position, while it made the center of gravity management more complex, gave the pilot the sightlines he needed to cut the turns as tightly as possible.
Doolittle, Records, and Disaster
The R-1's finest hour came at the 1932 National Air Races, when Jimmy Doolittle drove it to victory in the Thompson Trophy at an astonishing 252.686 mph. Doolittle then pushed the aircraft further, setting a world landplane speed record of 296.287 mph. These were not merely racing records — they were among the fastest speeds any human being had ever traveled on the planet.
The R-2, however, began accumulating a dark roster of incidents and fatalities that no amount of performance could offset. The aircraft killed Lee Gehlbach. It killed Florence Klingensmith. It fatally injured Russell Boardman, who suffered a fractured spine and died from complications.
Then came the most preventable death of all. Cecil Allen purchased the damaged, unrepaired R-2 and renamed it the "Spirit of Right." Miller — who knew the aircraft's characteristics intimately — warned Allen in the most direct possible terms: never fill the rear fuel tank. Doing so would shift the center of gravity so far aft that the aircraft would become uncontrollable. Allen apparently thought he knew better. In 1935, he filled the tank. The Gee Bee killed him too.
Granny Granville's Death and the End of an Era
The Granville Brothers operation was already in serious financial difficulty when Zantford "Granny" Granville was killed in an air crash near Spartanburg, South Carolina on February 12, 1934. He was just 32 years old. His death effectively ended the Granville Brothers as a going concern, though the name and the legend persisted.
Miller, characteristically, did not simply walk away. He and engineer Don DeLackner formed a consulting firm and continued to work on advanced aircraft design — taking with them the expertise that had shaped the Super Sportsters.
The Q.E.D. and the Road to Australia
Before the Granville operation collapsed entirely, Miller contributed to one more remarkable aircraft: the Q.E.D. (R-6H), designed for the 1934 MacRobertson England-to-Australia race. Painted in its distinctive "Lucky Strike Green," the Q.E.D. was entered by Lee Gehlbach in the 1934 Bendix Trophy race, but suffered mechanical problems before it could demonstrate its potential in the transcontinental contest.
The Q.E.D. then passed through a series of remarkable hands. Jacqueline Cochran and Wesley Smith flew it as far as Bucharest before retiring. The aircraft was eventually sold to Francisco "Pancho" Sarabia, the Mexican aviator known as the "Mexican Lindbergh," who renamed it the "Conquistador del Cielo." Sarabia set a record on a flight from Mexico City to New York — and then was killed at Washington D.C. when a rag was sucked into the carburetor intake immediately after takeoff. The Conquistador del Cielo plunged into the Potomac River.
The HM-1 "Time Flies": Miller's Masterpiece
By the mid-1930s, Miller had established himself as one of the country's most capable independent aircraft designers. His masterpiece was the HM-1, which he named "Time Flies" and built for racing legend Frank Hawks. Miller served as president of the New England Aircraft Company, with Hawks as vice president. Design work began on June 12, 1936.
The HM-1 was everything the Gee Bee had been and more: an all-metal construction powered by a 900-horsepower Twin Wasp engine, featuring what was then the fastest retractable canopy mechanism in existence. It was sleek, elegant, and genuinely fast — the product of a mature engineering intelligence working at the top of its form.
Miller always regretted that the HM-1 was not given a chance to show its full potential as a military aircraft. The timing was almost right — the Army was beginning to take seriously the idea of high-speed pursuit aircraft — but the HM-1 never received the official attention it deserved.
The MAC-1: Last Chance
When Frank Hawks was killed in an air crash, Miller formed the Miller Aircraft Corporation in 1938. The HM-2 became the MAC-1 — a modified version of Time Flies adapted for potential military use. The MAC-1 featured two seats, .50-caliber machine guns, a sliding canopy, a striking color scheme of military blue fuselage and orange wings, and all the performance advantages of its predecessor.
It was never given the chance to prove its potential. The MAC-1 fell into the gap between pre-war indifference and wartime standardization — a victim of timing rather than capability. Miller's career serves as a reminder of how much talent existed outside the major manufacturers, and how rarely that talent was given the resources to demonstrate what it could achieve.
Vindication: The Gee Bee Was Never a Killer
For decades, the Gee Bee Super Sportsters carried a reputation as unforgiving widow-makers — aircraft so dangerous that only a pilot of Doolittle's exceptional skill could survive them. The death toll seemed to support this view. But the deaths, examined carefully, tell a different story: Allen who ignored Miller's explicit warning about the fuel tank; Klingensmith who encountered a structural failure in competition; Gehlbach who pushed the aircraft beyond its limits.
The definitive vindication came from Delmar Benjamin, who flew a meticulously accurate replica of the R-1/R-2 beginning on December 23, 1991. Benjamin's flights proved that the Gee Bee was not a pilot killer at all — it was a superbly aerobatic aircraft that rewarded precise, informed handling and punished ignorance of its specific characteristics. Miller had understood this from the beginning. The aircraft was as honest as its designer.
The Gee Bee Super Sportsters were the products of an extraordinary convergence: the Granvilles' racing instincts, Bob Hall's analytical foundations, and above all Howell "Pete" Miller's engineering genius. They were fast, beautiful, and demanding — exactly the kind of aircraft that the golden age of air racing deserved.