Transport: Bendix & Thompson

“Everything’s lovely,” grinned Benny Howard, as attendants retanked his speedy little white monoplane Mister Mulligan at Wichita, Kan. one morning last week. With his pretty wife Maxine at his side, his sleek, self-designed plane functioning perfectly, Pilot Howard had reason to be pleased. Competing in the famed Bendix Transcontinental Race from New-York’s Floyd Bennett Field to Los Angeles for the opening of the 1936 National Air Races. he already had a commanding lead.

Because of three spectacular withdrawals, his competitors were less formidable than they were in last year’s Bendix Race when Pilot Howard flew Mister Mulligan to victory only 24 seconds ahead of Colonel Roscoe Turner. Fortnight ago, Colonel Turner cracked up on the way East for the race, was hospitalized with minor hurts. Flyer S. J. Wittman also had to quit on the way East when his plane caught fire at Cheyenne. Major Alexander P. de Seversky, designer of the world’s fastest pursuit ship, was refused permission by the Army to fly it in the Bendix Race. This left Defender Howard with only six planes to beat to Los Angeles.

Elimination did not stop when the race began. Gar Wrood’s Northrop Gamma, with Pilot Joe Jacobsen alone aboard, lost a wing as it was streaking across Kansas. Thrown free, Pilot Jacobsen was knocked unconscious, came to just in time to pull his ripcord, float safely to earth as his plane caught fire, exploded.

Meantime, Favorite Howard took off from Wichita, was speeding over a Navajo reservation in New Mexico when Mister Mulligan’s gas line broke. Out of control, the little white plane plummeted to the ground. Drawn by the crash, a number of Navajos ran up, edged uneasily about, not daring to approach the crumpled wreck-for superstitious reasons. After four hours one of them went for white rescuers. They found Maxine Howard with both legs broken, her husband with fractures of both legs, an arm and a brain concussion. Hospitalized, she soon gained strength while he lay close to death, deliriously babbling: “How is my plane?”

That afternoon a crowd of 15,000 watched the five surviving planes drop in. First flyer to finish was Brooklyn’s William G. Warner in a Standard Vultee. But the race was won neither by Pilot Warner nor by Pilot Louis Brewer, the only other male left in the race. For the first time in six years the Bendix Race went to a woman— Louise McPhetridge Thaden. Flying with Co-Pilot Blanche Xoyes in a Beechcraft high-wing biplane. Pilot Thaden started several hours after Warner and Brewer, shot across the U. S. in 14 hr. 54 min. 49 sec., beating by 3 hr. 30 min. the women’s East-West record set by Laura Ingalls last year (TIME, July 15, 1935). Miss Ingalls, ahead of her old record, came in second in a Lockheed Orion.

To Pilots Thaden & Noyes the $7,000 prize money was far less gratifying than the pleasure of beating the men. Among the first ten U. S. women to earn transport licenses, they have for years been front-line fighters in aviation’s ”battle of the sexes.” A fuzzy-haired blonde of 30, Mrs. Thaden has been flying since 1927, has held the women’s speed, altitude and endurance records, is the mother of a 6-year-old son. She and Flyer Noyes both work regularly as air-marking pilots for the Department of Commerce (TIME, Aug. 24). Short, brunette Mrs. Noyes is better known as the only pilot ever to fly John D. Rockefeller Sr. In the National Air Races, men contestants have always patronized women, in 1934 ousted them altogether. Smilingly observed Pilots Thaden and Noyes last week when they found they had won one of the two most important events of the Races: “Well, that’s a surprise! We expected to be the cow’s tail.”

The Bendix finish was not the first thrill for the crowd. It had already seen a parachute jumper bashed to death in front of the stands, watched the 34 private planes in the annual Ruth Chatterton air derby buzz in from Cleveland led by San Francisco’s rich Sportsman Frank Spreckels, who won by an elaborate score based on flying efficiency, not speed. The cross-country junkets over, the Races settled into the usual four-day shindig of stunting, formation flying “pylon polishing” before the final grand event—the Thompson Trophy Race, No. 1 U. S. closed-course speed test.

A 150-mile sprint around a ten-mile triangle, it is the only rival in popularity to the Bendix Race, which it last week paralleled in results almost completely. With the best U. S. pilots out because of their accidents in the Bendix, the Thompson was left to a parcel of minor U. S. racers, one foreign ace—France’s huge, 31-year-old Michel Detroyat. Close friend of Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, whom he was instrumental in rescuing from Le Bourget crowds after the New York-Paris flight in 1927, Detroyat is France’s best stunt flyer, has twice almost killed himself in crashes. Last week, flying a tiny blue Caudron-Renault in which he set the world’s onetime land-plane speed record of 312 m.p.h., he walked off with the preliminary Greve Trophy Race. This victory made Detroyat the overwhelming favorite, though no foreign flyer hadwever i won the Thompson Trophy before. This thought did not bother the burly Frenchman. Without the slightest trouble, he drummed into the lead, won the $9,500 first-prize money with a new world’s closed-course speed record for land planes of 264 m.p.h.

This easy victory evoked a chorus of criticism from U. S. pilots, who credited a rumor that the French Government had spent $1,000,000 in developing Detroyat’s speedster. “It just isn’t fair,” snapped Roscoe Turner, whose injuries kept him from competing, “for a foreign government to trim a bunch of little guys who build airplanes in their backyard.”