Gee Bee

Posted by Chuck at 12/1/2007 9:31 PM
Categories: uncategorized
Today was all about setting up the tree. I have to work tomorrow; I've been procrastinating since Friday and have to finally get some things done tomorrow before my trip to Texas. This will be my first time ever in Texas; I'll have my camera.



Buzz has been on my tree since The Buffalo Year, which was also the year that Richie was born, 1996.

We have the Dickens village all set up.



The train is in place around the tree too.



Train Video!

We'll get some video of the whole Christmas set up here soon.

I have a lot of favorite ornaments, but one of the top favorites is the early 1930s Gee Bee.



It's a popular plane for images and retro ads and such because it's kind of comical and cute looking with a cute name. It's chubby and blunt and the name evokes images of a lumbering bumble bee.



But looks can be deceiving, and this plane is one for which cute looks disguise a devilish, single purpose design. Gee Bee is really the phonetic spelling of GB, standing for Granville Brothers; the complete name of the plane was the Gee Bee R-1 Super Sportster

Its design embodies the idea that you can get a barn door to fly if you give it enough air speed. The whole plane was designed around the huge engine. The Gee Bee is essentially an engine with the bare minimum airplane possible to make the engine fly. The pilot and cockpit seem to be regrettable necessities in this plane.

All aircraft designs, as many of life's designs, are a series of trades. To achieve one goal you have to give up or reduce your expectations in another area.

I like the Gee Bee because it was designed to go fast at the expense of all other aircraft characteristics, most notably safety and stability. Most aircraft are inherently stable and almost fly themselves and return to strait and level, unaccelerated flight when you let go of the controls. Not so with the Gee Bee. Letting go of this plane is like stopping pedaling on a unicycle.

A lot of pilots died in Gee Bees, the tiny control surfaces and high landing speeds meant that you had to think ahead of this plane and anticipate the next stick move. The torque and prop effects had to be incredible with that huge radial engine.

For years, the designers had gotten a bad rap for designing such a dangerous plane. In the hands of a skilled pilot, most notably Jimmy Doolittle, it did just what it was supposed to do: win races. It killed the cocky and less proficient pilots, though. But even Doolittle knew he was pressing his luck flying these machines and retired from racing saying, "I have yet to hear anyone engaged in this work dying of old age." He went on a decade later to safer endeavors, like a suicide raid over Japan.

The thing is that the fighters and racers built today are not much more stable, they just have sophisticated fly-by-wire controls with a computer making thousands of decisions a second about the control surfaces, compensating for mediocre pilots.

I don't think I would ever fly a Gee Bee, but I respect those who do. A few replicas are still flying today at air shows. I enjoy piloting planes that fly low, slow, and stable. But the Gee Bee is beautiful and iconic of an era when air races took place all over the country and took people's minds off of the grinding poverty of the Depression. They also pushed the envelope of performance and kept American designers from being irreparably behind in engine and airframe design before WWII. Our head-in-the-sand policies still had us a decade behind the Germans and Japanese at the start of American involvement, but we would have been even further behind without some of these odd and dangerous machines.

That's why the Gee Bee is on our tree.



 
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