The Travel Air Mystery Ship, Doug Davis, and the Secret Wichita Monoplane That Beat the Army and Navy at Cleveland in Nineteen Twenty-Nine

In the summer of 1929, a small Wichita, Kansas company called Travel Air secretly built a low-wing racing monoplane that the newspapers dubbed the Mystery Ship. That September, pilot Doug Davis flew it to victory in the unlimited free-for-all at the National Air Races in Cleveland, Ohio, beating the frontline pursuit planes of both the U.S. Army and Navy - and he did it after deliberately giving back his lead to correct a cut pylon. It was the moment a farm-state civilian company proved it could out-engineer the American military.

What Was the Travel Air Mystery Ship?

The Travel Air Mystery Ship was a purpose-built racing monoplane developed in secret in Wichita during 1929. Travel Air was best known for sturdy, open-cockpit biplanes - mail planes and sport planes - not speed machines, which made the project all the more surprising.

The company had been founded a few years earlier by three names now legendary in aviation: Walter Beech, Lloyd Stearman, and Clyde Cessna. By 1929, Stearman and Cessna had moved on to build their own companies, and Walter Beech was running the show.

Two young engineers, Herb Rawdon and Walter Burnham, pitched Beech on building a real racer - a clean, faired monoplane to take to Cleveland. Beech, who understood that winning races in September meant selling airplanes all winter, told them to build it quietly.

Why Was It Called the “Mystery Ship”?

The name came from secrecy. Rawdon and Burnham built the airplane behind closed hangar doors, largely at night after regular work hours, and kept the drawings locked away. Test flights happened early, before the field got busy.

The whole town knew Travel Air was working on something, but nobody could get a clear look at it. A reporter, unsure what else to call it, wrote it up as the Travel Air Mystery Ship - and the name stuck.

What Made the Design So Fast?

The Mystery Ship was a low-wing monoplane at a time when nearly every fast airplane was still a biplane. Its engineers attacked drag from every angle:

• A thin, wire-braced wing instead of a stacked biplane arrangement
• A smoothly faired fuselage with lumps and bumps smoothed over
• One of the new NACA cowlings wrapped around the radial engine
• Teardrop wheel fairings (wheel “pants”) over the landing gear

The NACA cowling was a breakthrough from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics - the agency that later became NASA. Engineers had just discovered that a properly shaped ring cowling around a radial engine both cut drag dramatically and cooled the engine better at the same time.

Under that cowling sat a Wright radial engine. In race trim, the Mystery Ship was doing north of 235 mph in level flight - right in line with, or slightly faster than, the frontline military pursuit planes of the day, which had the full backing of the government.

How Did Doug Davis Beat the Army and Navy?

The pilot was Doug Davis, a Georgia barnstormer turned airline pilot who knew exactly how to pull an airplane around a pylon. At the 1929 National Air Races in Cleveland, roughly 100,000 spectators filled the grandstands to watch airplanes race low around a pylon-marked closed course.

The marquee event was the free-for-all - an unlimited race that, for years, had belonged to the military and its Curtiss Hawks. A civilian was not supposed to win it.

When the gun went off, Davis pulled the Mystery Ship out front and kept pulling, leaving the Army and Navy ships behind in clean air. Then, on one turn, he cut a pylon - turning too tight and clipping the inside corner, an error that meant automatic disqualification.

Davis was winning by a wide margin and could have gambled that the judges wouldn’t catch it. Instead, he hauled the airplane around, went back, and re-rounded the pylon correctly, throwing away the lead he’d built so his win would carry no asterisk.

Then he put his head down and won anyway - cleanly. The record books put his race average at close to 194 mph, achieved even after doubling back to fix his own mistake mid-race. He beat the Army, beat the Navy, and beat them honestly.

Why Did This Race Matter for Aviation?

The victory was exactly the headline Walter Beech had bet on. The Mystery Ship landed on front pages nationwide - advertising Travel Air could never have bought - and signaled that America’s fastest airplanes might now come from small Wichita companies rather than military hangars.

The deeper lesson was technical. The clean monoplane - smooth cowling, faired gear, obsessive attention to drag - was the future. The open-cockpit biplane’s days were numbered, and the National Air Races were where the industry saw that shift happen out loud, in front of a grandstand.

How Many Mystery Ships Were Built?

Travel Air built only a handful - roughly five, depending on how you count. They were never production airplanes; they were flying billboards and record-setters.

One went to the Texas Company (Texaco), painted in company colors, and Frank Hawks flew it back and forth across the country setting transcontinental speed records, coast to coast, faster than anyone thought a single-engine airplane could go. These ships kept rewriting the record book for years after Cleveland.

What Happened to Doug Davis?

The story carries a heavy ending. Doug Davis - the man who gave back his lead to keep his win clean - was killed in 1934 at the National Air Races, the very event that made his name. Flying another airplane hard around the pylons, he lost control in a turn and went in.

Pylon racing in the golden age was glorious and brutal in equal measure. Pilots flew with wingtips down in the turns, wide open, feet from the ground, and the sport collected its debt from the best of them nearly every year. Davis flew all the way to the edge on purpose - the same code that had him double back to fix a pylon eventually cost him his life.

Can You Still See a Travel Air Mystery Ship?

Yes. A couple survive - an original and some faithful reproductions. Now and then one fires up its Wright radial and rounds a pylon at a modern airshow, letting spectators hear, for a minute or two, exactly what the Cleveland crowd heard in 1929.

Key Takeaways

• The Travel Air Mystery Ship was a secret racing monoplane built in Wichita in 1929 by engineers Herb Rawdon and Walter Burnham under Walter Beech.
• Pilot Doug Davis won the unlimited free-for-all at the 1929 Cleveland National Air Races, beating the U.S. Army and Navy at an average near 194 mph.
• Davis deliberately re-rounded a cut pylon mid-race, sacrificing his lead to win cleanly - a defining act of sportsmanship.
• The design’s NACA cowling, faired fuselage, and wheel pants pushed it past 235 mph and pointed the whole industry toward the clean monoplane.
• Only about five were built; one set transcontinental records for Texaco under Frank Hawks. Davis was killed racing at the National Air Races in 1934.