Benny Howard, Mister Mulligan, and the Homebuilt Racer That Won Both the Bendix and the Thompson in a Single Year

In 1935, a homebuilt racer called Mister Mulligan won both the Bendix Trophy and the Thompson Trophy in the same year - the only airplane ever to accomplish that feat. Its builder, Benny Howard, wasn’t a factory or a wealthy backer; he was a working pilot who built the airplane on borrowed money in a rented corner of a hangar. His radical idea was that a race plane didn’t have to be a stripped-down bullet - it could be a fast, efficient cabin monoplane that carried enough fuel to outlast the competition.

The Two Trophies That Defined American Air Racing

In the golden age of air racing, two prizes mattered above all others, and they rewarded completely opposite kinds of airplanes.

The Bendix Trophy was a cross-country race, typically launching from Los Angeles and running clear across the continent to Cleveland, Ohio. It was a test of speed over distance - a battle against the clock, the mountains, the deserts, and the weather. Winning it demanded efficiency: range, a big fuel load, and an airplane that could cruise fast for hours without drinking itself dry.

The Thompson Trophy was the exact opposite. It was a closed-course pylon race, flown low and fast in front of the grandstands at the Cleveland National Air Races. Airplanes screamed around a course marked by pylons, wingtip to wingtip, turning left as hard as the airframe would allow. It demanded a knife fighter: short, brutal, all engine and not much airplane wrapped around it.

Conventional wisdom held that no single airplane could win both. Asking one machine to take the marathon and the sprint was like asking a distance runner to also win the 100-meter dash. Different builds. Different everything.

Who Was Benny Howard?

Benjamin Odel Howard was not rich, and he was not a factory. He had flown the mail and flown for the airlines, and he understood airplanes not from a drafting table but from thousands of hours in the seat - feeling what a machine does when the air turns rough and the fuel runs low.

Howard asked a question everyone told him was foolish: why can’t the fast airplane and the far airplane be the same airplane? Instead of seeing a racer as a smaller, meaner fighter, he saw a cabin monoplane - a real airplane with room inside, a big fuel tank, comfortable seats, and a windshield you could see out of. At its heart, his racer was a fast little airliner.

He called his designs the DGA, which stood for “Damned Good Airplane.” He built a whole line of them, each named DGA followed by a number. The one that made history was the DGA-6 - though almost nobody calls it that. Everyone knows it by the name Howard painted on the side: Mister Mulligan.

What Made Mister Mulligan Different

Mister Mulligan was a high-wing cabin monoplane powered by a big Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engine turning a large propeller. But its defining feature was a radical design philosophy for the era: it was built to cruise fast, high, and efficient, up where the air is thin, the engine breathes easy, and the airframe slips through the sky with less drag.

Most racers of the day flew low, down in the thick air where engines made power but drag ate them alive. Howard went the other direction, building an airplane meant to climb up on top of the weather and reel in the miles on a big fuel load.

And it was clean in the way an artist means the word. A smooth cowling wrapped tight around the radial, wheel pants, and a cabin faired seamlessly into the fuselage. Everywhere Howard could shave a knot of drag, he shaved it.

He built the airplane with a partner, a talented engineer named Gordon Israel, working nights on a shoestring during the depths of the Great Depression, around 1934 and 1935. Money was tight for everyone and tighter still for two pilots building a race plane in a rented shed. They nearly didn’t finish in time - but they did.

How a Homebuilt Beat the Factories

At the 1935 Bendix, Mister Mulligan lined up in the pre-dawn California dark among the sleek factory bullets. It looked more like something you’d charter to fly a businessman to Kansas City than a continental racer.

But that was the point. The other racers had to stop for fuel - little airplanes can’t carry much gas. Mister Mulligan, with its big cabin and big tank, could fly the whole route to Cleveland nonstop, flat out and high up where the miles came easy.

The finish came down to the wire. Over more than 2,000 miles, Mister Mulligan won the Bendix by a margin of minutes, beating a Northrop Gamma flown by the legendary Roscoe Turner. The homebuilt had beaten the factories.

Most builders would have gone home happy. But both trophies were up for grabs at the same Cleveland meeting, so Howard also entered Mister Mulligan in the Thompson - the pylon knife fight everyone swore his big cabin cruiser had no business flying.

Against the purpose-built pylon racers designed for nothing but turning left in a hurry, Mister Mulligan won that race too.

The long race and the short race. The marathon and the sprint. One airplane, one year, both trophies - a feat never repeated before or since. Howard proved it could be done not with more money or a bigger factory, but with a better idea: that speed, range, and comfort didn’t have to be enemies.

The Legacy - and the Crash

Mister Mulligan wasn’t just a trophy winner; it was a preview of things to come. Designers took its clean, fast, comfortable cabin-monoplane concept to heart, and the fast cabin singles that later let families climb in and actually go somewhere owe a real debt to Howard’s thinking. Its design DNA runs through much of modern general aviation.

The story has a hard chapter, too. In 1936, Howard and his wife took Mister Mulligan back to defend the Bendix title. Somewhere over the desert, at speed, the airplane threw a propeller blade. The resulting vibration from an unbalanced radial engine is violent enough to tear an airplane apart. Howard got it down in the New Mexico desert; he and his wife were both badly hurt but survived. The airplane never flew again in that form.

But the idea outlived the machine - and in a sense, so did the airplane. A full-scale reproduction of Mister Mulligan flies today, faithful to Howard’s lines, appearing at fly-ins where people can walk up to it on the grass and understand how this shape changed things.

Howard was doing in 1935 - a regular person building something extraordinary with skill, grit, and a rented corner of a hangar - exactly what the EAA, founded later by Paul Poberezny, would come to celebrate. Every scratch-built and kit airplane on a modern flightline is flying in his slipstream, whether the builder knows it or not.

Key Takeaways

• Mister Mulligan (officially the Howard DGA-6) is the only airplane ever to win both the Bendix and Thompson trophies in the same year - 1935.
• Builder Benny Howard was a working pilot, not a factory; he built the airplane on borrowed money with engineer Gordon Israel during the Great Depression.
• Its winning edge was a radical idea: a fast, high-cruising cabin monoplane with enough fuel to fly the Bendix nonstop while rivals stopped to refuel.
• It won the Bendix by just minutes over Roscoe Turner’s Northrop Gamma across more than 2,000 miles.
• In 1936 the airplane threw a propeller blade and crashed in New Mexico; Howard and his wife survived, and a flying full-scale reproduction keeps the design alive today.