เหล็กเสริม: Last flight of "Redhead"

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 ...