The Gee Bee Super Sportster and the most beautiful deathtrap in air racing history

The Gee Bee Super Sportster remains the most famous—and most lethal—racing airplane ever built. Designed by the Granville Brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts, it won the Thompson Trophy, set world speed records, and killed multiple pilots in a span of barely three years. It was the logical extreme of a design philosophy that sacrificed everything for speed.

Who Were the Granville Brothers?

Five brothers—Zantford, Thomas, Robert, Mark, and Edward Granville—ran a small aircraft company called Granville Brothers Aircraft (G-B, or “Gee Bee”) out of a converted dance hall in Springfield. They were not Curtiss. They were not Boeing. They were self-taught engineers and mechanics who looked at the Thompson Trophy and decided they could win it.

Their early racers, the Model X and Model Y, were competitive but not world-beaters. That changed in 1931, when pilot Lowell Bayles flew the Gee Bee Model Z to victory in the Thompson Trophy race at an average speed of 236 miles per hour. A tiny Massachusetts shop had just beaten the major manufacturers.

But Bayles died two months later in that same airplane, attempting a world speed record at Detroit. The Model Z shed a wing fillet, tumbled, and hit the ground at full speed. There was almost nothing left to recover.

What Made the R-1 Super Sportster So Fast—and So Deadly?

Most companies would have stepped back after a fatal crash. The Granville Brothers built something faster: the R-1 and R-2 Super Sportsters.

The R-1 barely looked real. A Pratt & Whitney Wasp Senior engine—nine cylinders, 800 horsepower—wrapped in the smallest possible airframe. The fuselage was essentially a barrel: round, fat, and stubby, with tiny wings and a tail that looked like an afterthought. The cockpit sat so far aft it was practically on top of the vertical stabilizer. The pilot could barely see over the enormous cowling.

The design logic was ruthlessly simple. The Granvilles understood that the fastest shape was the one with the least wetted area relative to engine size. So they made the fuselage as short and round as physically possible, stuffed in the biggest engine available, and accepted the consequences.

Those consequences were severe. Wing loading was approximately 27 pounds per square foot—astronomical for 1932. With no flaps, no slots, and no leading-edge devices, landing speed was around 100 miles per hour. The short, fat fuselage was directionally unstable at low speed, refusing to weathervane into the wind the way a longer airframe would.

Every pilot who flew a Gee Bee said the same thing: fast in a straight line, terrifying everywhere else.

How Did Jimmy Doolittle Tame the Gee Bee?

Jimmy Doolittle in 1932 was already a legend. He held a doctorate from MIT in aeronautical engineering, had made the first successful instrument-only flight in 1929, and was arguably the best and most technically sophisticated pilot in America. Shell Oil sponsored him, and they wanted a Thompson Trophy win.

Doolittle understood exactly what the R-1 was: an airplane designed by speed, for speed, with handling qualities somewhere between an afterthought and a prayer. He studied every design choice with the Granville Brothers and flew the aircraft carefully at first, learning its behavior.

On September 5, 1932, at Cleveland Municipal Airport, Doolittle strapped into the R-1 for the Thompson Trophy race—ten laps around a closed pylon course. He won at an average speed of 252.68 miles per hour and set a new world landplane speed record of 296 mph during qualifying.

Then he walked away from air racing forever.

Doolittle later admitted the Gee Bee was the most dangerous airplane he had ever flown. He called it “a handful.” From a man who would later lead the Tokyo Raid off the deck of an aircraft carrier, that assessment carries weight.

What Happened After Doolittle Left?

The R-1 went to Russell Boardman for the 1933 season. Boardman was a skilled pilot and record-setter who had flown nonstop from New York to Istanbul. The Gee Bee did not care about résumés.

During a practice flight at Indianapolis, the R-1 rolled at low altitude. Boardman crashed and died. The R-1 was destroyed.

The R-2 had its own grim history—crashed and rebuilt multiple times, with different pilots producing the same result. The airplane would get away from you in a heartbeat. One moment you were the fastest thing in the sky; the next, you were a passenger on a machine with its own ideas about trajectory.

The Granville Brothers kept building. A hybrid R-1/R-2 rebuild brought more crashes, more injuries. The company ran out of money and airplanes. In 1934, Granville Brothers Aircraft went bankrupt. Zantford Granville died that same year in a takeoff accident—not in a Gee Bee, but in another company aircraft. He was 39 years old.

Were the Gee Bees Just Badly Designed?

The easy conclusion is that these were poorly designed airplanes flown by reckless men. The reality is more nuanced.

The Granville Brothers were brilliant within the limits of what they knew. Aerodynamic theory in 1931 was primitive by modern standards. Wind tunnel testing was expensive and limited. Computational fluid dynamics was six decades away. The Granvilles designed by intuition, observation, and a willingness to push boundaries that larger companies avoided.

Modern aerodynamic analysis has identified the core problems: the Gee Bee’s center of gravity sat very close to its center of lift, and the short fuselage provided almost no yaw damping. In turbulence or during any maneuvering, the airplane would swap ends. A computer-controlled fly-by-wire system could probably fly a Gee Bee without incident. The human pilots of 1932 could not—at least, not for long.

Does a Gee Bee Still Fly Today?

Steve Wolf built a flying replica of the Gee Bee R-2 in the early 1990s. Pilot Delmar Benjamin flew it at airshows for years, performing an aerobatic routine that demonstrated exactly how improbable the aircraft looks in the air. The replica incorporated modern improvements—slightly larger tail surfaces, a bit more wing area—and it was still, by Benjamin’s own account, an airplane that demanded full attention every single second.

Key Takeaways

The Gee Bee Super Sportster was built by five self-taught brothers in a converted dance hall, and it beat every major aircraft manufacturer at the 1931 and 1932 Thompson Trophy races.
Jimmy Doolittle won the 1932 Thompson Trophy at 252.68 mph in the R-1, then permanently retired from air racing, calling it the most dangerous airplane he ever flew.
The design’s fatal flaws—a CG near the center of lift and minimal yaw damping—were beyond the aerodynamic understanding of the era and would require fly-by-wire technology to manage safely.
The Granville Brothers’ golden age lasted roughly three years (1931–1934), ending in bankruptcy, multiple pilot deaths, and Zantford Granville’s own fatal crash at age 39.
A flying replica built in the 1990s confirmed that even with modern improvements, the Gee Bee remains an extraordinarily demanding airplane to fly.