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Golden Age Race Winner with a Fine Irish Name
By Alan Smith
Benny Howard’s Mister Mulligan, 1935 winner of both Bendix amd Thompson trophies. (San Diego Air and Space Museum)As air racing’s Golden Age of the 1930s went on, the design of new racers continued to lead advancement in both military and civil aviation. In 1935, Benny Howard’s high wing monoplane Mister Mulligan was a classic example of this. With Gordon Israel as co-pilot, Howard won the cross country Bendix from the West coast to Cleveland and then with Harold Neumann as pilot, Mulligan went on to win the Thompson Trophy. The Bendix trophy was won partly because Howard and Israel used on-board oxygen for the first time and stayed above the weather. The oxygen system was another racing innovation passed on to other designers in the military and civil aviation world.
1935 was really Benny Howard’s year of triumph. Not only did Mulligan win both the Bendix and the Thompson, but Neumann also won the Greve Trophy in Howard’s little Mike racer.
Mister Mulligan: Golden Age Race Winner with a Fine Irish Name
By Alan Smith
Benny Howard’s Mister Mulligan, 1935 winner of both Bendix and Thompson trophies. (San Diego Air & Space Museum)As air racing’s Golden Age of the 1930s went on, the design of new racers continued to lead advancement in both military and civil aviation. In 1935, Benny Howard’s high wing monoplane Mister Mulligan was a classic example of this. With Gordon Israel as co-pilot, Howard won the cross country Bendix from the west coast to Cleveland and then with Harold Neumann as pilot, Mulligan went on to win the Thompson Trophy. The Bendix trophy was won partly because Howard and Israel used on-board oxygen for the first time and stayed above the weather. The oxygen system was another racing innovation passed on to other designers in the military and civil aviation world.
1935 was really Benny Howard’s year of triumph. Not only did Mulligan win both the Bendix and the Thompson, but Neumann also won the Greve Trophy in Howard’s little Mike racer.
Why, How and When the Sport of Air Racing Was Born
By Alan Smith
Ever since the industrial revolution we have found ways to race every machine of motion that we have built. We raced steam locomotives on the main line, and steamboats on the nation’s rivers. We raced bicycles, scooters, ice skates and roller skates. We race anything that can move. It wouldn’t be surprising if we raced elevators in new office towers.
Yes, the human is a very competitive animal. It was natural that, a little less than six years after Ohio bicycle builders Wilbur and Orville Wright made the world’s first powered airplane flight on December 17, 1903 that competition between pioneer pilots and their aircraft would begin, and begin it did in France in August 1909.
A Sailplane Lets You Live in the Sky in Silent Grace
By Alan Smith
Les Schweizer and his Schweizer 1-26 sailplane. (1-26 Association Photo)Believe it or not, the history of the glider is older than that of the airplane. The glider is how man started his voyages through the atmosphere more than 100 years ago. While the glider did lead to the powered airplane, it has stayed with us over the years to become a highly refined sports aircraft that provides thrilling and challenging flight to pilots around the world.
The whole thing started around 1485 when Leonardo Da Vinci came up with a complete design for an ornithopter. That device never got built for several reasons, primarily the fact that a human lacked the strength to flap large wings, but the idea of flight as a glider was born. In 1804, an Englishman, George Cayley built a monoplane glider that sort of flew, but mostly provided a controlled descent down a slope to the ground that was survivable. Then, in 1895, a German, Otto Lilienthal, came up with both biplane and monoplane gliders that really floated through the air and could turn and could land fairly gently. The pilot’s legs were the landing gear. Unfortunately some kind of structural failure caused a crash that took Lilienthal’s life in 1896.
The Three Musketeers of the Early Years of Civil Aviation
By Alan Smith
The first Beech Model 17 Staggerwing. Note the fixed landing gear. Lots of people think civil aviation was born during the First World War when the Western Allies, Britain, France and, later, the United States fought Kaiser Wilhelm’s air force for command of the skies over the western front in France and Belgium. Yes, the first seeds of growth for high performance military aircraft were sown in the bloody soil of that conflict, but the beginning of the airplane’s use for personal and business travel came from a small group of highly intelligent, ingenious entrepreneurs. These extremely individualistic men took calculated risks to develop and market their aircraft while leaning into the teeth of one of the worst economic storms in the industrial and financial history of the 
The Stearman PT-17 in postwar civilian colors. Many were converted by Stearman to cropdusters with a hopper in place of the forward cockpit and engines of twice the horsepower.world, the Great Depression.
The Battleship North Carolina's Kingfisher is a One of a Kind Aircraft Rarity
By S. Mark Rhodes
The handsome grandson of the author, Jackson Perkins surveys the deck of the Battleship North Carolina. (Papa Rhodes)In the early 1960’s, the people of North Carolina raised $330,000 (much of it from lunch money from NC school children) to buy the decommissioned USS Battleship North Carolina. The result? The birth of one of North Carolina’s most striking and iconic attractions and a great artifact of US military history. One memorable day in 1961, it chugged up the Cape Fear River and tucked into a conspicuous area across the way from downtown Wilmington, North Carolina where it’s mass and gravity dominates the landscape of this port city.