Clyde Pangborn, the Gates Flying Circus, and the First Nonstop Crossing of the Pacific

In October 1931, Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon Jr. landed a Bellanca monoplane gear-up in a wheat-country pasture near Wenatchee, Washington - more than 40 hours after departing a remote beach in Japan. It was the first nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean. The man who made it happen had spent the previous decade flying inverted at fifty feet over county fairgrounds, and that background was not incidental to his success.

How Post-War Surplus Created the Barnstorming Era

When the Armistice ended World War I in November 1918, the U.S. Army Air Service held thousands of trained pilots and thousands of surplus aircraft it no longer needed. The airplane they sold off in bulk was the Curtiss JN-4 Jenny - a two-seat, wire-braced biplane powered by the Curtiss OX-5 engine, a water-cooled V-8 producing roughly 90 horsepower on a good day.

The price made it accessible to almost anyone. In 1919, a new, crated Jenny cost $300. A used one could be had for $50. Young men who had learned to fly in wartime came home to find their skills unwanted at the grain elevator or the hardware store. So they bought Jennies and went looking for crowds.

They landed in fields, pastures, and fairgrounds. They offered rides for $1 to $2 a passenger. And as the crowd gathered at dusk, they flew - loops over the fairground, rolls, dives aimed at the grandstands, sustained inverted passes close enough to read the pilot’s expression. By the early 1920s, the barnstorming circuit had spread across the country. Hundreds of pilots, Midwest summers, the smell of castor oil and fresh-cut alfalfa, crowds of people who had never seen what an airplane could do.

Who Was Clyde Pangborn?

Clyde Pangborn was born in 1894 in Bridgeport, Washington - wheat farms, high desert, and big sky in the Columbia River country of the state’s eastern reaches. He entered flight training around 1917, and after the war he found his way onto the barnstorming circuit.

He had something the circuit demanded: a feel for the machine, an instinct for where the airplane was going before it got there, an ability to fly right at the edge of what was possible without crossing over.

He began flying sustained inverted flight at low altitude - not a quick roll and recovery, but controlled, prolonged inverted passes close to the ground. The OX-5 engine’s oil system was not designed for extended inverted operation. If it quit at fifty feet while the aircraft was upside down, there was no recovery. Pangborn did it anyway, in front of crowds who had no idea how many simultaneous failure modes they were watching him manage.

He became known as Upside-Down Pangborn. He wore the nickname with quiet satisfaction.

What Made the Gates Flying Circus Different

In 1922, a promoter named Ivan Gates recognized that individual barnstormers were drawing crowds but operating unpredictably. His idea was to organize it - a traveling air circus with scheduled appearances, a trained advance team, proven performers, and the discipline of a real business.

The Gates Flying Circus became one of the most famous aviation outfits of the 1920s. At its peak it employed dozens of people: pilots, wing walkers, parachute jumpers, mechanics, and advance men who would arrive in a town weeks ahead of the show to plaster posters, negotiate with fair committees, and work the local press. By the time the aircraft arrived, the crowd was already there.

The performers were genuinely extraordinary - wing walkers transferring between aircraft in flight, parachutists opening at spectacularly low altitudes, and Pangborn flying inverted at fifty feet, making controlled flight in an adverse attitude look like a personal preference.

The Air Commerce Act and the End of the Wild Era

The Air Commerce Act of 1926 gave the federal government authority to certificate pilots, register aircraft, and establish operational rules. The barnstorming era that had functioned on a handshake and fifty dollars began giving way to a regulated industry. Standards tightened. The Jennies were wearing out.

Crowds that had been stunned by a loop in 1920 were harder to impress by 1927, the year Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis and aviation became front-page news worldwide. By the late 1920s, Pangborn was a veteran of hundreds of performances and was looking for the next thing.

The next thing was the Pacific Ocean.

The Challenge of a Nonstop Pacific Crossing

After Lindbergh’s Atlantic success, aviation turned to the last great barriers. A nonstop crossing from Japan to the North American continent - roughly 4,400 miles of open ocean - had never been done. There were no alternate airports. No diversion fields. You made it or you didn’t.

Pangborn partnered with Hugh Herndon Jr., an experienced pilot with the financial resources to mount a serious attempt. They acquired a Bellanca Pacemaker - a high-wing monoplane with a Wright Whirlwind radial engine, sturdy and reliable, one of the finest long-range aircraft of its era. They named it Miss Veedol after the motor oil company that helped sponsor the flight.

The fundamental problem was range. The distances pushed the Bellanca to the absolute outer edge of what she could manage fully loaded. The aircraft’s fixed landing gear - heavy struts and wheels hanging beneath the fuselage - created aerodynamic drag that over four thousand miles cost range they could not afford to give up.

The Solution: Drop the Wheels Over the Ocean

Their plan was radical. After takeoff, Pangborn would physically climb out of the cockpit onto the struts and manually jettison the landing gear into the ocean. The Bellanca would be cleaner and faster for the remainder of the crossing. On arrival, they would belly-land.

It was a plan that ended, by deliberate design, with a controlled crash.

They flew to Japan to depart eastbound - a Japanese newspaper had offered prize money for the first successful nonstop Pacific crossing in either direction, and Japan-to-America made the distances more manageable than the reverse.

Detained in Japan

Japanese authorities detained both men for several weeks on accusations related to photography of restricted military installations near Mount Fuji during an earlier flight. The dispute dragged through the summer of 1931. When they were finally released and cleared to depart, there was a condition: they could not use a commercial airport.

They found their own ground - a stretch of beach at Sabishiro, on the northeastern coast of Japan’s main island. Remote, flat, and barely long enough for a heavily loaded aircraft to get airborne.

October 4, 1931: The Departure

In the pre-dawn darkness of October 4, 1931, Pangborn and Herndon loaded Miss Veedol with every gallon she could carry. The Bellanca was heavier than her design parameters suggested was wise. The Wright Whirlwind was turning. The beach stretched out in front of them.

The takeoff roll was slow. The sand was firm but the aircraft held the ground longer than they wanted. Then she flew. They climbed out over the coast and turned east. The North Pacific spread to every horizon.

Hours into the flight, over open water with no land visible in any direction, Pangborn climbed out onto the struts. Herndon held Miss Veedol as steady as possible. The propeller was turning. The wind was fierce. The Pacific was a long way below.

Pangborn worked his way to the undercarriage and operated the manual release. The landing gear fell into the Pacific.

There was nothing to do now but fly.

The 40-Hour Crossing

They took turns at the controls through the long night and day, navigating by compass and the instincts built from years of flying over territory that didn’t always offer a runway when you needed one. The Whirlwind kept turning - steady, reliable - the kind of engine a barnstormer learns to read by sound and vibration rather than instruments.

More than 40 hours after leaving Sabishiro Beach, with the fuel gauges reading the last of what they’d started with, Pangborn put Miss Veedol down gear-up in a pasture near Wenatchee, Washington.

Wenatchee. Columbia River country. High desert and wheat farms and big sky - the same landscape he’d grown up in, not far from Bridgeport. He had crossed the Pacific and landed within sight of home.

The belly landing tore up the underside of the aircraft. Both men walked away. They had just completed the first nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean.

What the Barnstorming Years Built

The connection between Pangborn’s fairground years and his Pacific flight is direct. Barnstorming in the early 1920s was the most demanding flight training environment ever created - precisely because it was entirely unforgiving. You flew low, on marginal equipment, with no backup and no easy diversion. You learned your aircraft’s limits from the inside because there was no other way to learn them.

That environment produced pilots who could hold a compass heading for more than 40 hours over open ocean, who could climb out onto the struts of a loaded aircraft and stay calm, who understood that precise calculation and cold nerve were not opposites of risk-taking - they were the only things that made real risk-taking survivable.

Pangborn spent World War II ferrying aircraft to Allied forces across the Atlantic in all weather conditions. He died in 1958. History has been quieter about him than he deserves - Lindbergh has the monuments; Pangborn has a regional airport in central Washington named in his honor: Pangborn Memorial Airport, Wenatchee.

It’s the right tribute for a man who dropped his landing gear into the Pacific because he needed to make it the rest of the way home.

Key Takeaways

• Clyde Pangborn earned the nickname “Upside-Down Pangborn” barnstorming in the early 1920s, performing sustained inverted flight at low altitude with equipment not designed to support it.
• The Gates Flying Circus, founded by Ivan Gates in 1922, transformed chaotic individual barnstorming into a disciplined traveling operation - one of the most famous aviation outfits of the decade.
• To maximize range on the Pacific crossing, Pangborn and Herndon deliberately jettisoned the landing gear over the ocean mid-flight and committed to a belly landing on arrival.
• On October 4, 1931, they departed Sabishiro Beach, Japan, and landed more than 40 hours later near Wenatchee, Washington, completing the first nonstop transpacific flight.
• The skills that made the Pacific crossing possible - engine intuition, dead-reckoning precision, composure under extreme pressure - were forged directly during Pangborn’s barnstorming years in conditions that offered no margin for error.