Clyde Pangborn, Miss Veedol, and the First Nonstop Flight Across the Pacific, the Belly Landing in Wenatchee Nineteen Thirty-One

On October 5, 1931, barnstormer Clyde Pangborn and co-pilot Hugh Herndon flew a red Bellanca named Miss Veedol from Japan to Washington State, completing the first nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean. The roughly 41-hour, 4,500-plus-mile crossing ended with a deliberate belly landing in Wenatchee, Washington - made possible only because Pangborn climbed out onto the wing in mid-flight, over open ocean at night, to free jammed landing-gear struts that would otherwise have killed them on touchdown.

Who Was Clyde Pangborn?

Clyde Pangborn was not a society flier. He was a barnstormer - a gypsy pilot who worked the Gates Flying Circus in the 1920s. By his own count, he carried roughly 120,000 passengers on their first airplane rides and never injured a single one.

He was also a wing-walker and stunt pilot, known for flying inverted low over the crowd. That earned him the nickname “Upside-Down Pangborn.” He was more at home out on a wing strut in the slipstream than most people are in their own kitchens - a detail that would matter enormously over the Pacific.

By 1931, the Great Depression had gutted barnstorming. People no longer had spare money for joyrides, and Pangborn needed a big payday.

The Prize No One Had Claimed

Aviation’s Golden Age, the years between the two world wars, still had one great blank space on the map: the Pacific. After Charles Lindbergh flew New York to Paris in 1927, pilots everywhere hunted for the next unclaimed “first.”

The Pacific dwarfed the Atlantic. The northern route from Japan to the American mainland ran more than 4,500 miles of open water with no islands to land on and no ships waiting to help. Men had died trying to cross it.

A Japanese newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, had put up a $25,000 prize for the first crew to fly nonstop from Japan to North America. By the fall of 1931, that prize was still unclaimed.

How They Ended Up in Japan

Pangborn teamed up with Hugh Herndon, a younger pilot from a wealthy family. Herndon provided the money; Pangborn provided the flying. Together they bought a Bellanca Skyrocket - a long-winged single-engine monoplane - painted it bright red, and named it Miss Veedol after the motor oil company that helped sponsor them. Up front sat a Wright Whirlwind air-cooled radial, the same type of engine that had carried Lindbergh across the Atlantic.

The Pacific was never the original plan. The two men had set out to break an around-the-world speed record, and that attempt fell apart. They were arrested in Japan on suspicion of spying after Herndon photographed Japanese territory, and it cost them a fortune and about seven weeks to win their release.

Stranded, broke, and with the round-the-world record gone, Pangborn looked across the water toward home and set his sights on the Pacific prize.

Turning Miss Veedol Into a Flying Fuel Tank

To carry enough fuel for the crossing, the crew stripped Miss Veedol of every spare pound and filled her with so much gas that she weighed nearly twice a normal Bellanca. Getting her airborne would be an act of faith.

No ordinary runway was long enough for that takeoff roll, so they chose a long stretch of hard sand at Sabishiro Beach in northern Japan. Local villagers leveled the sand, carried buckets, and built a wooden ramp to give the overloaded plane a slight downhill start.

The most daring piece of engineering was the landing gear. Those big fixed wheels created drag, and on a flight this long, drag meant lost fuel - the difference between reaching America and going down in the ocean. Pangborn ran the numbers and concluded he could not make it while dragging the gear the whole way.

So he rigged the aircraft to drop its own landing gear in flight. Once safely over the water, he would pull a release and let the main gear fall into the sea for less weight and less drag. That decision meant one thing: he was planning, before he ever left the ground, to land on the plane’s belly at journey’s end, with no way to reconsider.

The Wing Walk That Saved the Flight

Miss Veedol used up every foot of Sabishiro Beach and staggered into the air at the last possible moment. Pangborn pointed her east toward a coastline he could not see, thousands of miles away.

Once clear of the coast, he pulled the release to drop the gear - but it did not fall clean. Two steel struts stayed jammed against the belly of the aircraft, stuck out at an angle. Pangborn knew exactly what that meant: on a belly landing, those stubs would dig into the ground, catch, and cartwheel the plane into a fireball.

So he handed the controls to Herndon and climbed out into the open air - thousands of feet over the Pacific, in the dark, in a roughly 100-mph slipstream, with no useful parachute and nothing but ocean below.

Bracing against the wind, he wrestled the jammed steel loose with his bare hands until it broke free. Then he climbed to the other side and did it again. Two trips out onto the wing, in the middle of the night, over the widest ocean on Earth, to save a landing that was still a full day away.

A Brutal Crossing and a Perfect Belly Landing

The flight was long and punishing. The crew fought sleep, cold, and a cockpit that reeked of fuel and hot oil. At one point Herndon dozed while transferring fuel between tanks, the engine starved and went quiet, and Pangborn had to fight to restart it in the air. They battled ice and climbed high to clear weather, clawing east across the top of the Pacific hour after hour while the Whirlwind never quit.

After crossing the ocean, they reached Wenatchee, Washington - apple country, and near where Pangborn’s mother lived. With no wheels beneath the aircraft, there was no going around and no second attempt.

Pangborn picked a flat field in East Wenatchee, held the plane off, and greased the stripped, empty-tanked Bellanca onto her aluminum belly. She slid to a stop in a cloud of dust. She did not flip and she did not burn - because of those two trips onto the wing, no strut caught the ground.

The final numbers: about 41 hours in the air and more than 4,500 miles, from Japan to Washington State, the first nonstop crossing of the Pacific in history.

Why History Nearly Forgot Him

Lindbergh’s Atlantic flight made him the most famous man on the planet. Pangborn crossed an ocean more than twice as wide, on a harder route, and had to walk out onto the wing to do it - yet most people today have never heard his name.

He collected the $25,000 prize, split it with Herndon, and lost most of it to the Depression. He kept flying, later ferrying bombers across the Atlantic during World War II.

His story survives thanks largely to the people of Wenatchee, who still treasure Miss Veedol, and to the aviation historians who kept the Pacific flight in the record books. The Golden Age was golden not because the aircraft were beautiful, but because the map still had blank spaces, and people were willing to risk their lives to fill them in.

Key Takeaways

• Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon made the first nonstop transpacific flight in the Bellanca Miss Veedol, landing October 5, 1931.
• The route ran more than 4,500 miles from Sabishiro Beach, Japan, to East Wenatchee, Washington, in roughly 41 hours.
• Pangborn dropped the landing gear in flight to reduce drag, planning a belly landing from the very start.
• When two gear struts jammed, he climbed out onto the wing twice over the open Pacific at night to knock them free, preventing a fatal crash on landing.
• The flight claimed the $25,000 Asahi Shimbun prize, yet Pangborn remains far less remembered than Atlantic pioneer Charles Lindbergh.