Gordon Israel and the Redhead

Gordon Israel had gained a great deal of racing experience while helping Benny Howard design and build his stable of winning racing aircraft. Utilizing this experience, Gordon decided to create his own aircraft which, like the majority of the smaller racers, would be powered by a supercharged Menasco C6S of 544 cubic inches. The Menascos could be temperamental engines but they had an extremely low frontal area and could be "tweaked" to pump out a lot more horsepower albeit with a downturn in reliability.

Gordon's comments on the Redhead:
"Neither Benny nor myself had any formal college training, I graduated from high school but Benny did not. I took some advanced math courses at Washington University night school. A lot of times I've regretted not taking more, because every once in a while you run into a problem where if you had some smarts you could work it out. It comes harder without having a formal education but if I can't finally grind it out I have some friends that can."

"There was a theoretical background for airplane design in those days and we ran a pretty thorough stress analysis on PETE, the first little airplane we built. It was a 9g limit airplane. You just didn't worry about the structure when you were flying it, and the same thing was true of the REDHEAD with the 6 cylinder Menasco. I've still got the original hand written stress calculations I made on it, and although we didn't have full facilities, those, airplanes weren't built by guess and by God. The structures at that time were simple to analyze, welded steel truss fuselages, and using a graphic method you could run a complete stress analysis in very little time.

"The biggest problem I had, in stress analysis on the REDHEAD was the fancy butterfly shaped wing with varying spar depths, where figuring the bending moments was a chore. There was an English gal named Barbara Goff, who was a highly theoretical type on stress analysis, and she had developed this graphical method for resolution of shears and moments in tapered spars. I don't know how many sheets of paper I wound up wasting before I finally got the scale on it down to keep me from going, not only off the board, but complete out of the room."'
"There were a lot of airplanes in that era that came unglued structurally but the last thing we had to worry about in our planes was the structure."

"You've seen so many people hurt beyond a doctor's repair due to structural failures and there were a lot of them in the thirties. People would find an angel, go out and buy a lot of stuff and start building an airplane, with very little consideration for the structure. It backfired on a lot of guys. Poor old Lee Miles, was one. An excellent pilot, he had his plane just come apart on him."

"I'll tell you when you had a six cylinder supercharged Menasco in your plane you had enough problems keeping it going without having to worry about the structure."

Redhead Construction

The fuselage was built from welded steel tubing to give an exceptionally strong and fairly light structure. Around the basic tube fuselage, Gordon added wooden stringers and formers to give the unit its desired shape. The aircraft's large turtledeck was constructed from molded plywood and it also served to cover a small rollover structure located directly behind the pilot's head. The top portion of the fuselage in front and around the cockpit was covered in formed aluminum sheet as was the fuselage tail cone.

From the firewall forward, the Menasco was fitted to a tubular engine mount and then wrapped in a tightfitting aluminum cowl with extensive louvering on the left side while the six exhaust ports protruded from the lower right cowl. Cooling air was supplied via a duct in the hammered aluminum nose bowl. The Menasco was connected to a fixedpitch metal twoblade propeller. Oddly, there was a lack of a streamlining spinner over the blunt propeller hub. The completed fuselage was 18.5 feet long.

The wings also were of standard construction and were built up around sturdy laminated spruce spars with wood ribs. The entire unit was then covered in plywood, sanded down, and then covered in fabric. This undoubtedly created a very strong unit but the designer must have wanted a bit more safety because he added two sets of bracing wires, the top wires were anchored in the fuselage while the lower wires connected to the landing gear. From the landing gear, a single bracing wire extended into the cowl and was fixed to the motor mount. The completed wing spanned 21.5 feet.

His best pylon speed was 173.98 mph. However, the mechanics worked wonders on the Menasco and Gordon was able to place third in the Shell Speed Dash at 221.746 mph.

In 1934 at Omaha Gordon won the 50 mile freeforall but damaged the Redhead on landing. It never raced again.