"The R model must be flown with silk gloves and likened to balancing a pencil at your fingers top."
--General James H. Doolittle
When Jimmy Doolittle said this quote he was one of the few pilots to have raced an R model Gee Bee and lived to tell about it. Up until him very few pilots had climbed into a Gee Bee and successfully completed their flights.
Flying the Gee Bee R-1 in the 1932 Thompson Trophy Race, Doolittle flew a very wide track around the course, putting less strain on the aircraft and letting the stubby little airplanes speed give him an easy victory. In fact, Doolittle's qualifying time for the 1932 Thompson was over 15 miles per hour faster then his nearest competitor and in the race he lapped all but one competitor.
The Granville Brothers only built 24 aircraft. Of these 24 probably the most famous were the Z Model Super Sportster and the R-1 and R-2 Models. The R-1 flew into history winning the 1932 Thompson Trophy Race and the the R-2 would go on to compete in the Bendix cross country races of the time with a best finish of 4th.
Although almost identical there are differences between the R-1 and R-2. The R-1 has a different engine cowl and underneath that cowl houses a Pratt and Whitney Wasp that was capable of producing 770 horsepower. Another difference is that the R-1 has smaller fuel tanks than the R-2. The R-1 was built for closed circuit races, very much like what you would find if you attended the National Championship Air Races held every September in Reno, Nevada. The R-2 had the bigger fuel tanks to compete in cross country races like the Bendix Trophy races of the time. The R-2 also had a smaller Pratt and Whitney 535 horsepower engine for better economy.
Unfortunately, none of the "R" model Gee Bee's survived their time as racers. All of them were wrecked and many times the pilot were not able to survive the accidents. Because of their accident history the myth that these airplanes were killers began and they took on an almost great white shark aura.
Many people always wondered if the Gee Bee was really a man killer. Debate after debate would go on on whether or not it was the machine or the pilots that flew them were the fault. Luckily for us there was a pilot in the early 90's who wanted to find out.
Pilot Delmar Benjamin and builder Steve Wolf in the early 1990's set out to build an exact replica of the Gee Bee R-2. They built their R-2 using original plans and with the mentallity of getting the R-2 to exact 1930's standards so there would be no "cheating" of their Gee Bee experience.
On December 23rd, 1991 Delmar Benjamin put the throttle forward on the replica R-2 and took off from the Creswell, Oregon airport. The first flight took less than 30 minutes but within that 30 minutes Delmar Benjamin had shown the aviation world that an "R" model Gee Bee was in fact controllable. Knife edge flight, rolls, inverted flight and slow flight were all explored in those first 30 minutes and all the while Delmar managed to bring her down in one piece.
Thereafter the Benjamin/Wolf Gee Bee R-2 replica hit the airshow circuit, flying airshows such as Oshkosh, Cleveland and even turning a few laps at the National Championship Air Races held every year in Reno, Nevada. You may think that performing an airshow routine with a Gee Bee is challenging but to Delmar Benjamin the hardest part of flying the R-2 was the landing due to the obstructed view out the front and the high approach speeds.
The Benjamin/Wolf Gee Bee R-2 replica is now retired but thanks to Virtavia we can now jump into the infamous Gee Bee "R" models. In this review I hope I can give you some insight on this product and give you a fair opinion of this model.
There is one installation for the two separate models and the installations are very easy and there is no hair pulling involved thanks to an auto install program. Payware aircraft installations these days are getting so easy that issues during installations are almost unheard of and this is no exception.
The outside model is stunning to say the least. All of the little nuances are there of the Gee Bee R-1 and R-2 models. I was even surprised when I looked out to the wingtips in the R-2 and saw the red and green navigation lights. This is something I never noticed in pictures from the 30's but yes, the original Gee Bee R-2 had navigational lights on the wingtips. That attention to detail makes these models very agreeable.
An easy way to tell the two models apart besides the navigational lights (the R-1 didn't have any nav lights) is the fact that the R-1 has a much bigger cowl and is not as aerodynamic looking as the R-2. Virtavia has captured this difference and really gives you a good scale of how much bigger of an engine the R-1 had than the R-2.
The paint is good with very few flaws if any at all. One thing I wish these two models had is a little exhaust stain on the fuselage behind the cowl. These aircraft were racers and were run hard with speed as the main goal and in all the pictures I have seen there is quite a bit of dark exhaust staining on the red paint. Regardless, this is a very small detail missing in a very superb visual model.
The insides of the Virtavia Gee Bee models follow in the same line as the exterior model, everything is spot on. The originals were built for speed so the panels are very rudimentary, you wont even find a radio stack in either of them, there is a simple hand held radio for you though!
The gauges are very nicely crafted with a nice level of reflection if the sun hits them just right and they are some of the easiest to read and clear gauges I have seen in any payware model period. This is definitely something Virtavia has a handle on!
The sound in these "R" models is acceptable in duplicating the roar of a Pratt and Whitney radial chugging along. You can certainly sense the power in those engines as you bring the power up in the Gee Bee you are flying.
All the other miscallaneous sounds are there and clear. Virtavia did a very acceptable job in recording these sounds in my opinion. It must have been a tough job trying to get the sounds right in an airplane that is 99.9 percent inaccessible.
The R-1 and R-2 both relatively fly the same in FSX. There is not much variation in handling because they are both basically the same airfoil. The big difference between the two is obviously the difference in the power plants which causes more torque and a lot more acceleration in the R-1 model than the R-2. With the right amount of fuel you can expect to achieve over 4,000 feet per minute climb right out of take off!
It is not hard to realize that taxiing these airplanes is extremely challenging using the virtual cockpit, much like how Delmar Benjamin described taxiing the replica R-2. "S" turns are a must when taxiing or sooner of later you will run into something!
Take off is manageable with a slow introduction of power and enough right rudder to keep her on the centerline. There are two things that are nice about the tail coming up on the take off roll. The first is the fact that she is about to fly and secondly you can see out the front again!
One thing you will notice is that the R-1 takes hardly any time at all getting up to 120 mph which is where you are going to want to start pulling back to get her up in the air. The R-2 is no slouch in itself but remember that the R-1 has almost 200 more horsepower than the R-2.
Once airborne you will find that the controls are nice and responsive. Rolling the aircraft is done with ease and inverted flight requires little forward stick pressure. The one thing I tried to duplicate with Virtavia's Gee Bee is the knife edge climb that Delmar Benjamin did in the replica R-2. I couldn't get the R-1 or the R-2 to climb in the knife edge flight attitude and this is more than likely due to the limitations of FSX.
Something that is very important is the fact that you must pay absolute attention to how much "G" load you put on in a turn. Turn too tight and the Gee Bee will stall out and then you will really have your hands full! This is due to the high wing loading of the Gee Bee. A Pitts S2B has a wing loading of 12 lbs per foot whereas the Gee Bee R-2 has 40 lbs per foot. Each foot in the wing area of the R-2 is having to lift more weight thus making the Gee Bee easier to stall in a turn. It also doesn't help that the wings on the Gee Bee are very slim and not at all beefy which is good for speed but not for maneuverability!
Slow flight is uneventful and with stalls I expected the nose to drop like I had gone off a cliff but instead I found it gently mushes with the nose level with the right amount of rudder. If you want to get the wings flying again just lower the nose and add power, just like as if you were flying the default Cessna 172.
Unlike Delmar Benjamin's replica Gee Bee you can fly Virtavia's Gee Bee hands off provided you have it trimmed correctly. Delmar Benjamin stated that if you took your hands off the controls of the replica the nose would start hunting from side to side and eventually it would probably end up destroying itself. I would have liked to have seen more challenging flight dynamics but again maybe Virtavia ran into one of the unfortunate limitations of FSX.
Landing is challenging because I found that you are almost doing a carrier approach all the way to almost short final. You want to come in on a shallow turn and end the turn just short of the runway threshold. The view out the sides of the canopy is crucial because out front all you see is the long nose of the Gee Bee. You should also be no slower than 120 mph coming over the fence and touching down at about 100 mph. Once the tail comes down be prepared to be moving the rudder constantly until you get slowed down to a slow jog. Taxi back to your parking spot and shut down like you would with any other piston powered aircraft.
In my opinon the Virtavia Gee Bee is very well done. The exterior and interior models are extremely accurate and well detailed. The sound set is very good and captures the mystique of a Pratt and Whitney radial engine giving all it has. The flight dynamics have a few flaws such as the stalling and cruise charateristics but these in my opinion might be due to limitations in FSX.
I hope I've shed some light on this exciting product from Virtavia. My hat is off to them for attempting to model one of the most infamous and dangerous airplanes to ever take to the sky. This certainly took quite a bit of guts to attempt this and I believe they have pulled it off very nicely and anyone who purchases the Virtavia Gee Bee models will not be dissapointed.
Bill Beseler
naa551wb@aol.com
Learn More Here
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