Benny Howard, Mister Mulligan, and the Damn Good Airplane That Won Both the Bendix and the Thompson in Nineteen Thirty-Five

In 1935, an unlikely airplane called Mister Mulligan became the only aircraft in history to win both the Bendix Trophy and the Thompson Trophy in the same year - a feat never matched before or since. Designed by working line pilot Benny Howard and engineer Gordon Israel, it was a tall four-seat cabin monoplane that beat every purpose-built factory racer in America at two completely opposite kinds of racing. A year later, a failed propeller blade destroyed the airplane and cost Howard a leg.

Who Was Benny Howard?

Benny Howard was not a wealthy man and not a factory. He flew the line for United Air Lines, hauling passengers and mail for a paycheck, and he built airplanes in his spare time with whatever he could scrape together.

He’d been building small racers since the 1920s, during what’s now called the Golden Age of aviation - an era when nobody had yet settled how fast, how high, or how far an airplane could go. Howard named every airplane he built “DGA,” which stood for Damn Good Airplane. Call it confidence or a sense of humor; it was probably both.

What Were the Bendix and Thompson Trophies?

American air racing in the 1930s was defined by two events that demanded two completely different airplanes.

The Bendix Trophy was a transcontinental dash. Pilots took off out west, usually from Los Angeles, and flew flat out across the entire country to Cleveland, Ohio, racing the clock, the weather, and the mountains. It rewarded an airplane that could go far, go fast, and keep going - an endurance test at full throttle.

The Thompson Trophy was the opposite animal: closed-course pylon racing. Pilots flew tight, low laps around pylons stuck in the ground, pulling hard through every turn with the crowd close enough to see their faces. It rewarded raw speed and nerve, and pilots died flying it.

The Bendix wanted a long-legged cruiser built to haul fuel across a continent. The Thompson wanted a stubby bullet that could turn on a dime. No sane designer would try to build one airplane to do both.

Why Was Mister Mulligan Different?

Benny Howard built one airplane to do both. The DGA-6, which he named Mister Mulligan, was a big, tall, high-wing cabin monoplane with room for four people. It looked like something a family would fly to the lake - and that was the whole trick of it.

Howard and Gordon Israel designed it around one idea that was years ahead of its time: fly high, and fly clean. Most racers of the day stayed low, down in the thick air where engines made good power, and muscled through the drag. Howard reasoned that if you climbed up into thin air, the airplane would slip through with far less resistance. You could trade some engine power for a lot less drag, throttle back to a setting the engine could sustain for hours, and come out ahead.

To make that work, the airplane had to be smooth - no struts hanging in the wind, no bumps to snag the air - and it had to carry enough fuel to cross the country nonstop. Mister Mulligan was big precisely because it had to swallow that much gasoline and still cut a clean line through the sky. It was an airliner’s brain in a racer’s body, and the high-and-efficient cruise Howard pioneered is essentially how airliners cross the country today - roughly fifteen years ahead of the industry.

How Did Mister Mulligan Win Both Races in 1935?

The 1935 Bendix started in the small hours of the morning in California under ugly weather - thunderstorms, rain, and low cloud strung across the mountains and plains. Several of the hot low-flying racers couldn’t make the distance or got beaten up by the weather. Mister Mulligan simply climbed over the top of much of it and settled into a long, high, efficient cruise across the dark continent.

When the times were totaled at Cleveland, Benny Howard had won the Bendix by a matter of seconds over the second-place airplane, flown by Roscoe Turner - an almost unbelievable margin after a nonstop night flight across the entire country.

A few days later at Cleveland came the Thompson - low, tight pylon laps, everything Mister Mulligan was not built to do. The tall cabin cruiser went out and turned laps against purpose-built pylon bullets, and Benny Howard won that too.

The same airplane, the same week, took both the great transcontinental endurance race and the great closed-course speed race. No airplane had ever done it before, and none has ever done it since in all the years both trophies were flown. Mister Mulligan stands alone.

What Happened to Mister Mulligan?

The airplane business has a way of collecting on its debts. The very next year - 1936 - Howard entered the Bendix again, this time with his wife Maxine “Mike” Howard in the cabin beside him.

Somewhere over New Mexico, high and fast, a propeller blade let go. A propeller spinning at speed holds tremendous force in balance; when a blade departs, that balance vanishes instantly and the vibration tries to tear the front of the airplane apart. Mister Mulligan came out of the sky and crashed in the New Mexico high desert.

Both Benny and Mike Howard survived, but Benny was badly hurt and lost a leg. The one and only Mister Mulligan - the only machine ever to win both trophies - was destroyed, scattered across the desert floor. That was the Golden Age in a single image: glory and grief riding in the same cockpit.

The Story Didn’t End in the Desert

That same 1936 Bendix race was won by Louise Thaden, the first woman to win the Bendix outright, flying straight up against the men. The race went on, and the torch was passed.

Benny Howard didn’t quit aviation either. One leg and all, he went on to a long, respected career as a test pilot and engineer, keeping his hand in for decades. The desert took his airplane and part of his body, but it did not take the man.

And you can still stand next to Mister Mulligan today. The original is gone, but a faithful, flying reproduction was built years later and is the star of the collection at the Historic Aircraft Restoration Museum near St. Louis - tall, proud, and painted just as it looked the day it won it all.

Key Takeaways

• Mister Mulligan (the Howard DGA-6) is the only airplane ever to win both the Bendix and Thompson trophies in the same year (1935).
• Designer Benny Howard was a United Air Lines line pilot who built racers on the side and named them all “Damn Good Airplane.”
• The airplane’s winning edge was a fly-high, fly-clean design philosophy - flying efficiently in thin air - that airliners adopted about 15 years later.
• In the 1936 Bendix, a propeller blade failure over New Mexico destroyed Mister Mulligan and cost Howard a leg, though he and his wife Mike survived.
• A flying reproduction of Mister Mulligan is on display at the Historic Aircraft Restoration Museum near St. Louis.