The Gee Bee Super Sportster and the most dangerous racing airplane ever built

The Gee Bee Model R Super Sportster, built by the Granville Brothers in Springfield, Massachusetts, remains the most infamous racing airplane of the golden age of air racing. Designed with a single obsession—speed—it won the 1932 Thompson Trophy in the hands of Jimmy Doolittle at 252.686 mph, set a world landplane speed record of 294 mph, and ultimately killed or severely injured nearly every pilot who attempted to master it.

What Was Air Racing Like in the Early 1930s?

Air racing in the late 1920s and early 1930s was America’s premier spectator sport. A quarter of a million fans packed the grandstands at the Cleveland National Air Races to watch pilots push hand-built machines past 300 mph around low-level pylon courses. The Thompson Trophy—a closed-course, knife-edge sprint—was the marquee event, and its winners became household names alongside movie stars.

The airplanes were designed by small shops with slide rules, ambition, and limited wind tunnel time. Pilots like Roscoe Turner and Jimmy Doolittle flew machines that were engineered right up to the bleeding edge of what 1930s aerodynamics could deliver.

Who Were the Granville Brothers?

Five brothers—Zantford, Thomas, Robert, Mark, and Edward Granville—founded the company that would become synonymous with speed and danger. They set up operations first in an old dance hall, then in a former shoe factory on Page Boulevard in Springfield. The company name came straight from their surname: Granville Brothers — Gee Bee.

They started modestly with the Model A Sportster, a conventional biplane. Through 1930 and 1931, they built a series of progressively faster, more radical racers. But the airplane that made the name Gee Bee immortal—and infamous—was the Model R Super Sportster.

What Made the Gee Bee So Fast—and So Deadly?

The Model R was designed around a single principle: speed at the expense of everything else. Stability, visibility, and forgiveness were afterthoughts.

The fuselage was essentially a barrel—round, short, and fat—barely long enough to contain a massive Pratt & Whitney R-1340 Wasp radial engine producing over 700 horsepower. The pilot was crammed into a tiny cockpit set all the way back near the tail. Total wingspan was just 25 feet, and the airplane measured roughly 17.5 feet nose to tail. Fully loaded, it weighed just under 3,000 pounds.

From the side, it looked like a bumblebee that had swallowed a basketball—an enormous round cowling tapering to almost nothing at the tail.

The rearward cockpit position, combined with the short fuselage and tiny tail surfaces, gave the airplane almost no directional stability. The center of gravity sat at the very edge of the acceptable range, sometimes beyond it. The short coupling between wing and tail meant corrections had to be instantaneous and precise. Any yaw, any asymmetric condition, any moment of inattention, and the airplane would swap ends faster than a pilot could react.

How Did Jimmy Doolittle Tame the Gee Bee?

Doolittle was arguably the only pilot alive with the skills and aeronautical knowledge to extract the Gee Bee’s potential while surviving the experience. He had already won the Schneider Trophy, completed the first successful blind instrument flight using only a gyroscopic artificial horizon and directional gyro, and earned a doctorate in aeronautical science from MIT. He understood the physics of what he was sitting in.

On September 5, 1932, at the Cleveland National Air Races, Doolittle pushed the R-1 to a qualifying speed of 296 mph, then averaged 252.686 mph around the pylons to win the Thompson Trophy. He also set a new world landplane speed record of 294 mph—in an airplane built in a shoe factory.

After the race, Doolittle walked away and never flew the Gee Bee again. He later called it the most dangerous airplane he had ever flown. This was a man who would go on to lead the Tokyo Raid, command the Eighth Air Force over Europe, and fly virtually every aircraft in the American inventory. When Doolittle says an airplane scared him, the assessment carries weight.

What Happened to the Gee Bee Pilots?

The Gee Bee’s kill list is grimly thorough.

Russell Boardman, a well-known long-distance pilot, crashed the R-1 on takeoff during a race at Indianapolis in July 1933. He was severely injured and died weeks later. The R-1 was destroyed.

In December 1933, Cecil Allen was flying the R-2 on a transcontinental speed record attempt when the airplane entered a steep dive near Benton, California, and hit the desert floor. Allen was killed instantly. The R-2 was obliterated.

Both Super Sportsters destroyed. Both pilots dead.

The lethality extended beyond the R models. The Model Y Senior Sportster crashed in 1931. The Model Z, which Lowell Bayles had flown to win the 1931 Thompson Trophy at 236 mph, killed Bayles just weeks later when a fuel cap came loose during a speed record attempt at Detroit. The airplane cartwheeled at over 300 mph.

By 1934, the Granville Brothers Aircraft company was bankrupt. The factory was shuttered. Five brothers who had built the fastest airplane in the world had succeeded beyond imagination—and paid for it with the lives of the men who flew their machines.

Was the Gee Bee Really as Unstable as the Legend Suggests?

Modern aerodynamic analysis and computer simulations suggest the airplane, while certainly demanding, may not have been the uncontrollable death trap that mythology has made it. Researchers at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and in the homebuilt community have argued that several crashes resulted from mechanical failures, fuel system problems, or pilot error rather than inherent aerodynamic instability.

The most compelling evidence came from Delmar Benjamin, a pilot and engineer who built a full-scale flying replica of the R-2 in the 1990s and flew it successfully at airshows for years. Benjamin proved the airplane could be flown safely by someone who understood it completely.

But the fundamental truth remains: the Gee Bee was designed to win races, not to be forgiving. It demanded perfection from its pilot, and in the high-stakes, low-budget world of 1930s air racing, perfection was not always available. The margins were razor thin, the speeds were extraordinary for the era, and the consequences of a mistake were absolute.

Why Does the Gee Bee Still Matter?

The Gee Bee Super Sportster sits at the exact intersection of genius and hubris that defines the golden age of air racing. Five brothers in a shoe factory built an airplane faster than anything else in the sky—and the sky took it back, every time.

The Cleveland grandstands are gone. The Thompson Trophy race ended after World War II. But the Gee Bee endures in aviation memory as the ultimate expression of what happens when speed is pursued without compromise—a machine so fast it could only be flown by the best, and even then, only barely.

Key Takeaways

The Gee Bee Model R Super Sportster was built by the five Granville Brothers in a Springfield, Massachusetts shoe factory, powered by a 700+ hp Pratt & Whitney R-1340 Wasp engine.
Jimmy Doolittle won the 1932 Thompson Trophy at 252.686 mph and set a world landplane speed record of 294 mph in the R-1—then never flew it again, calling it the most dangerous airplane he’d ever flown.
Both R-model Super Sportsters were destroyed in fatal crashes within two years of their construction, along with the Model Z and other Granville designs.
Modern analysis suggests the Gee Bee’s reputation may be partly mythologized, with mechanical failures and pilot error contributing to crashes alongside the airplane’s genuinely demanding flight characteristics.
The Granville Brothers went bankrupt by 1934, but the Gee Bee remains the most iconic and cautionary artifact of golden age air racing.

Sources: Robert Hirsch’s research on the Granville Brothers, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum archives, and the flying replica work of Delmar Benjamin.