The Gee Bee Super Sportster and the Flying Barrel That Jimmy Doolittle Rode to Three Hundred Miles an Hour

The Gee Bee Super Sportster was a radical American air racer of the early 1930s, built by the five Granville brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts, by wrapping the smallest possible airframe around the biggest possible engine. In 1932, Jimmy Doolittle flew the Gee Bee R-1 to win the Thompson Trophy and set a world landplane speed record of 296 miles per hour. For decades it was branded a widow-maker - but the airplane was less a flawed design than a masterpiece built about thirty years before the knowledge to fly it safely existed.

Who Built the Gee Bee?

The Gee Bee came out of a small shop in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the late 1920s. Five brothers named Granville - Zantford (known as “Granny”), Thomas, Robert, Mark, and Edward - started a company called Granville Brothers Aircraft.

They were farm boys, mostly. Granny had a genius for machinery, but there was not one lick of formal engineering training among the whole lot of them.

Because “Granville Brothers” was too long to paint on the side of an airplane, they used the initials: G.B. - Gee Bee. The name sounds friendly and homemade, and that’s exactly what these airplanes were. Homemade, in the truest sense.

Why Was the Gee Bee Shaped Like a Barrel?

In the golden age of aviation, there was real money and real glory in going fast. The National Air Races in Cleveland drew tens of thousands of spectators to watch airplanes tear around a closed course marked by pylons, low and loud, wingtip to the ground in the turns. The Thompson Trophy was the big prize, and winning it made a pilot famous coast to coast.

The Granvilles wanted that trophy, but they were a tiny outfit up against the biggest names in aviation. So they made a decision that was either brilliant or insane - and honestly, it was probably both. Instead of building a normal airplane and trying to make it a little faster, they would build the smallest possible airframe they could wrap around the biggest possible engine they could find.

That engine was a Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial, a great barrel of a powerplant putting out around 800 horsepower. Around it they built the tiniest airplane that would still hold the engine, a tank of fuel, and one very brave man. The results were the Gee Bee Model Z and then the airplane most people picture when they hear the name: the Model R Super Sportster.

Most airplanes are a compromise - a wing big enough to be gentle, a fuselage long enough to be stable, a tail with enough leverage to keep everything pointed the right way. The Granvilles threw all of that out.

What Was It Like to Fly?

The fuselage was fat up front, all engine and enormous round cowling, then tapered back to almost nothing - like a teardrop coming off a windshield. The wings were stubby little things, barely there. And the cockpit sat way, way back, almost on top of the tail, because that was the only place left once the engine and fuel filled everything else.

So the pilot sat behind a mountain of cowling. Taxiing on the ground, you could not see a thing straight ahead. You were essentially flying a howling engine with a man strapped to the caboose. The pilots of the day had names for how it looked: the flying silo, the flying barrel.

Why Did the Gee Bee Get a Deadly Reputation?

There’s a dark thread running through the Gee Bee story, and you can’t understand these airplanes without it.

In 1931, a pilot named Lowell Bayles flew a Gee Bee Model Z to victory in the Thompson Trophy. Springfield went wild - their little airplane, built by five brothers with no engineering degrees, had beaten the world. Then, just a few weeks later, chasing a world speed record, Bayles was killed when the airplane came apart in flight.

That became the pattern that followed the Gee Bee name like a shadow: fast, beautiful, and unforgiving.

It would be easy, almost a hundred years later, to call those men reckless and say they should have known better. But nobody knew better - that was the whole point of the golden age. There was no NACA report telling you how a short-coupled fuselage would behave, and no wind tunnel time for a five-brother shop in Massachusetts. The knowledge that lets a modern Cessna 172 practically fly itself was written in the 1930s and 1940s, much of it by men who found out the hard way at 300 miles an hour, with nobody to warn them. These pilots weren’t fools. They were pioneers standing at the very edge of what anyone understood - and the Gee Bee stood a step past even that.

How Did Jimmy Doolittle Reach 296 mph?

That brings us to 1932 and the one man whose name is welded to this airplane forever: Jimmy Doolittle.

Most people today know Doolittle from the war - the 1942 raid on Tokyo, sixteen bombers off the deck of a carrier. But in 1932 he was not yet a war hero. He was arguably the finest, most scientific pilot alive. Doolittle held a doctorate in aeronautics from MIT and was one of the first men to prove you could fly an airplane blind, on instruments alone, and come out the other side. He flew with his brain as much as his hands.

So when Doolittle climbed into the Gee Bee R-1 at Cleveland, the most dangerous racing airplane in the world was matched with the most capable racing pilot in the world.

He didn’t just win - he tamed the beast. Doolittle flew the pylons in that snarling little barrel and beat the field to win the Thompson Trophy. Then he took the Gee Bee over a measured course and set a world speed record for landplanes: 296 miles per hour.

Let that number sit. 296 mph, in 1932, in an airplane with wings the size of a picnic table, built in a shop by five brothers, with a man riding backward on top of the tail. There were fighter planes in military service that couldn’t touch that speed.

Doolittle later said that in that airplane, he never made a mistake - because he knew the first mistake in the Gee Bee would almost certainly be his last. He respected it, he was clear-eyed about exactly what he was strapped into, and then he walked away from air racing, because he understood better than anyone that his luck had a limit. That wasn’t cowardice. That was the wisdom of a man who could do the math.

Was the Gee Bee Really Unflyable?

For decades, the conventional wisdom was simple: the Gee Bee was a flawed, murderous design that never should have been built - a monument to the recklessness of the golden age. The name became almost a curse. A cautionary tale. A cool-looking mistake in the history books.

Then, in the early 1990s, a man named Delmar Benjamin looked at that cursed, impossible airplane and saw a challenge instead of a widow-maker.

Working with a craftsman named Steve Wolf, Benjamin built a flying replica of the Gee Bee R-2 - not a static museum piece behind velvet ropes, but a real, flying, breathing Gee Bee. The airplane experts had spent sixty years calling unflyable.

And Benjamin didn’t gingerly fly it around the pattern. He flew it in airshows, performing aerobatics - loops, rolls, hammerheads, the works. He took the airplane that killed some of the best pilots of the golden age and danced with it in front of crowds, year after year, and brought it home every single time.

In doing that, he taught us something the golden age never got the chance to learn. The Gee Bee was not a murderer. It was a masterpiece that arrived about thirty years before the knowledge to fly it safely existed. It demanded a pilot who understood energy and the airplane’s rhythm, who never got lazy and never got behind it. The men who died in it were killed less by a flaw in the metal than by a gap in what all of aviation understood at the time. Benjamin had sixty more years of hard-won knowledge to draw on - and with it, the impossible airplane became, in his hands, a thing of pure joy.

Key Takeaways

• The Gee Bee was built by the five Granville brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts, who wrapped the smallest possible airframe around a ~800-horsepower Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine.
• Jimmy Doolittle flew the Gee Bee R-1 to win the 1932 Thompson Trophy and set a world landplane speed record of 296 mph.
• The airplane earned a deadly reputation early: Lowell Bayles won the 1931 Thompson Trophy in a Model Z, then died weeks later when it broke apart chasing a speed record.
• Its danger owed more to a gap in 1930s aeronautical knowledge than to a fundamental design flaw.
• In the early 1990s, Delmar Benjamin and Steve Wolf built a flying Gee Bee R-2 replica and flew it aerobatically for years, proving the “unflyable” airplane could be mastered.