Mister Mulligan Airshows

Mister Mulligan took it all in '35!

The Golden Age of Aviation was a time when the world’s attention was captivated by the excitement of Charles Lindburgh’s flight to Paris. Passenger aircraft had three motors and traveled only 90 miles per hour and military aircraft struggled to break the 200-mph barrier. Air racing became the breeding ground for a whole new level of aviation technology. Each year competitors showed up with improved versions of what they flew the year before – a great example of entrepreneurial competition and innovation which became a very important part of promoting air travel and advancing aircraft research and development.
 
Up until 1935, Air Racers were dangerous radical single seat aircraft with horrible visibility and marginal flying characteristics. Benny Howard built three of these racers -- "Pete", "Mike", and "Ike" (DGA 3, 4 and 5). The racers were flown by Benny and a handful of other talented pilot friends such as Harold Neumann and Gordon Israel – each racer winning enough money to finance building the next.

A high school dropout from Texas who started working at the Curtiss Aircraft plant in Dallas in 1922 when he was 19 years old, Benny Howard also became a brilliant self-taught aeronautical engineer.
 
Howard, always moving from one better flying job to another, ended up with a job at United Airlines that prohibited him from flying pylon races. So he turned his attention to the cross-country Bendix race. Impressed with the speed and aerodynamic characteristics of Harold Neumann's Monocoupe, Howard envisioned a four-place airplane that could carry more fuel and fly at higher altitudes not just to win the Bendix race but also have potential in the commercial market.
 
Thus, the Howard DGA6 was born. Ben Howard and his good friend and fellow racer Gordon Israel, also a genius in aircraft design, built the Howard DGA6 along with Eddie Fisher, the hands-on engineer, in Kansas City hoping to fly it in the 1934 Bendix race.

Sadly, Ben Howard's friend Harold Neumann and his co-pilot became so hypoxic flying over the Rocky Mountains while ferrying it to the west coast for the ‘34 race, they lost control of the airplane and made a forced landing that kept it from flying that year.

However, Benny Howard and Israel went on to win the Bendix race in 1935 in the rebuilt “Mister Mulligan” flying cross-country from Burbank to Cleveland with only one fuel stop edging out Roscoe Turner by a mere 23 seconds at the finish. Benny never planned for Mulligan to race at Cleveland, but he and Harold Neumann decided to try it. Neumann flew “Mulligan” in the Thompson Trophy race and won making “Mister Mulligan” the first airplane to win both the Bendix and Thompson Trophies in the same year. And Benny was able to use the winnings from that race to launch the Howard Aircraft Manufacturing Company.

Sadly, the original "Mister Mulligan" shed a prop blade during the 1936 Bendix Race. The airplane was destroyed and Benny and his wife Maxine were badly injured.