history of the real Laird

The airplane above is a full-size replica of the 1931 Laird “Super Solution” racer, winner of the 1931 Bendix Trophy race, piloted by Jimmy Doolittle. Original picture below left.

To right pilot Jimmy Doolittle and designer Mattie Laird reunited at the 1981 EAA Convention in Oshkosh, WI at the for the occasion.

The 1930s were the Golden Age of Air Racing, when air races were more popular, and drew larger crowds, than baseball. E.M. “Mattie” Laird was an experienced airplane designer whose Laird “Solution” won the 1930 Thompson Trophy Race. Two Laird “Speedwings” also performed well in the 1930 Chicago National Air Races. In mid-1931, the Cleveland Speed Foundation asked Laird to build a new airplane to challenge the Travel Air “Mystery Ship,” which was burning up race courses around the country. The “Super Solution” was based heavily on the Solution and other earlier Laird designs, but it looked like an entirely new airplane. With the Cleveland Air Races scheduled for Labor Day, work began on the racer in July of 1931 and it was test-flown about six weeks later on 22 August. It needed very few changes or refinements before Laird delivered it to his race pilot, Jimmy Doolittle. The Foundation’s goal was to enter the Super Solution in the Los Angeles to Cleveland Bendix Trophy Race and then, a few days later, run it in the 100-mile closed-course Thompson Trophy Race in Cleveland Ohio.

Laird provided two different engines for the Super Solution. For the cross-country Bendix Race, where steady power at high altitudes would be the key, the airplane would use a direct-drive engine. For the closed-course Thompson Race, a 3:2 geared-drive engine would give the best flat-out power. Both engines were highly modified versions of the Pratt & Whitney “Wasp Junior” nine-cylinder radial. Off the shelf, the Wasp Jr. was rated at 375 hp. With high-compression pistons and “doped” fuel, both modified engines produced well over 500 hp.

Sponsored by Vincent Bendix and the Bendix Corporation, the cross-country Bendix Trophy Race was meant to encourage transcontinental air travel. It was an open-class dash from Los Angeles to Cleveland with a bonus prize for the airplane that could continue from Cleveland to Newark, NJ and win a truly transcontinental race.

Doolittle and the Super Solution won the Bendix Race handily with an elapsed time of 9 hours, 10 minutes, and 21 seconds, and an average speed of 223 miles per hour—well ahead of the closest competitor.

After just a few minutes on the ground in Cleveland, Doolittle headed for Newark to complete the full transcontinental flight. His elapsed time from Burbank, CA to Newark, NJ (2,882 miles) was 11 hours, 16 minutes, and 10 seconds, at an average speed of 217 miles per hour. Doolittle and Super Solution beat the 1930 transcontinental record set by the Travel Air Mystery Ship, by 1 hour, 8 minutes.

Less than 30 minutes after landing, Doolittle flew the Super Solution back to Cleveland for an engine change and the Thompson Trophy Race at the Cleveland National Air Races.

The Thompson Trophy Race was a 100-mile pylon race for airplanes with engines of unlimited displacement. Planes had to reach 175 mph in time trials to qualify for the race.

With the geared engine installed, the Super Solution roared through the time trial at 260 mph, on partial throttle, but proved to be almost uncontrollable. The torque and vibration of the geared engine induced wing warping and aileron reversal at speeds above 250. The direct drive engine was reinstalled and Doolittle flew a new pre-race time trial at a scorching 272 mph. As the Thompson race began, Super Solution took a commanding lead, but by the second lap the engine, which had already flown the Bendix race, was ailing badly. Doolittle lost the lead in the third lap to Lowell Bayles in the Granville brothers’ Gee Bee Z racer. With gauges above redline, Doolittle landed the Super Solution after the seventh lap to avoid a complete engine failure. An engine teardown revealed a scuffed piston, possibly caused by a particle of foreign matter. Even with its sick engine, the Super Solution had averaged 228 mph over the seven laps.

After an engine overhaul at the Pratt & Whitney plant in Hartford, CT, Doolittle flew the Super Solution to Ottawa, Canada for another cross-country record attempt—from Ottawa, to Washington, DC, to Mexico City, Mexico. His elapsed time on 20 October 1931 was 12 hours, 36 minutes, a record that stood for many years.

In the summer of 1932, Doolittle and a new sponsor, Shell Oil Company, set out to modify the Super Solution to provide better forward visibility and to strengthen the wing rigging so the cooler-running geared engine could be used without warping the wings. Other modifications included a controllable-pitch propeller and retractable landing gear.

The new Super Solution, looked very little like its 1931 namesake, and it was plagued with problems, including severe rudder and elevator flutter. With the date of the Thompson Trophy Race fast approaching, the Granville brothers asked Doolittle to fly their Gee Bee R-1 racer. He accepted and won the 1932 Thompson Trophy in the R-1.

Shell Oil put the Super Solution in storage where it sat for years, ignored or cannibalized for parts. It may have passed through several owners before its fuselage was donated to the Smithsonian in 1948 by the Swallow Aircraft Company of Wichita, KS.

The Gee Bee R2 in which Jimmy Doolittle won the Thompson Trophy in 1932, with a record speed of 296 miles per hour (474kph). Doolittle then quit racing, claiming the Gee Bee was too dangerous to fly. (Later analysis showed that the odd weight distribution made it virtually impossible to control the plane once it went into any sort of roll.)

The 1931 Thompson competition saw the unveiling of one of the most unusual aircraft ever to fly: the Gee Bee. The name stood for the Granville Brothers, a small airplane manufacturer in Springfield, Massachusetts. The designer, Bob Hall, had no experience designing racing planes, and the final design looked like a bad drafting mistake—as if someone had forgotten to draw in the back half of the aircraft. Amazingly, the Gee Bee flown by Lowell Bayles beat Jimmy Doolittle flying a Laird Super- Solution and took the Thompson home. Doolittle was impressed, and the next year he flew a Gee Bee and won the Thompson. The experience must have been a harrowing one, though, because not only did Doolittle never again fly a Gee Bee, but he also became a staunch opponent of air racing and testified before Congress to have it banned. In truth, the Gee Bee was configured as it was because it housed an enormous Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine. The plane was notoriously unstable and structurally fickle; every Gee Bee ever built crashed sooner or later. This also seems to be true with remote control model aircraft.

Bayles, the 1931 Thompson winner, crashed after the competition trying to set a land speed record in the aircraft (which is how Doolittle got to fly the plane in the first place). And in 1934, Zantford “Granny” Granville died when a Gee Bee he was flying to a customer crashed. That’s when Edward Granville discontinued the line. In 1931, a fourth major race, the Bendix Trophy, joined the Schneider, Pulitzer, and Thompson as the prestige races of the period.

The Bendix was no more than the cross-country race to the Nationals that was held informally every year. The big winners of the Bendix included Benny Howard, who won it and the Thompson in 1935, his banner year; Jimmy Doolittle; and Roscoe Turner, ever the showman, winning it flying with his pet lion cub.

Roscoe Turner accepting his third Thompson Trophy in 1939. Though he became a showman and a flamboyant businessman, the Thompson victories attested to his great skill as an aviator

The Bendix was taken very seriously because it was a race that related directly to the desire to use aviation to traverse the vast distances of the United States. It encouraged cross-country speed flights by non-contestants that extended the capabilities of long-distance flight. Frank Hawks and the Lindbergh's established cross-country records in the early 1930s, the latter proving in their Lockheed Sirius that airplanes could fly best high over storms in the rarefied atmosphere above fifteen thousand feet (4,57kn). All these records were to fall, however, when a brash young movie producer named Howard Hughes, flying an open-cockpit Northrop Gamma mail plane (which he had personally enhanced by installing a powerful Wasp engine), established records on an almost yearly basis in the early to mid-1930s, culminating in his January 1937 flight from Los Angeles to Newark in seven hours, twenty-eight minutes, and twenty-five seconds.

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