Clyde Pangborn, the Gates Flying Circus, and the Forty-One Hours Over the Pacific That the Barnstorming Era Made Possible

Clyde Pangborn completed the first non-stop flight from Japan to the continental United States on October 5, 1931, covering 4,558 miles in 41 hours and 13 minutes. What made the crossing possible wasn’t just the airplane or the fuel load - it was a decade of barnstorming that had trained Pangborn to work on aircraft structures in flight as naturally as most men worked at a desk.

Who Was Clyde Pangborn?

Pangborn was born in 1894 in Bridgeport, Washington, a small town on the Columbia River. He learned to fly during World War I and emerged with a pilot certificate into the same postwar vacuum that swallowed hundreds of other young men: no airlines, barely any airmail routes, and a surplus government market flooded with JN-4 Jenny biplanes selling for as little as fifty dollars.

The gap between public curiosity about aviation and public access to it was enormous. That gap was the barnstorming era’s entire business model.

How the Gates Flying Circus Worked

Ivan Gates was not a pilot. He was a promoter - equally comfortable selling farm equipment or circus tickets - and he built what became the largest barnstorming operation in the country by treating it like a proper business.

Gates would book a town weeks in advance, negotiate with local farmers for a level field, paper storefronts within a twenty-mile radius with handbills, and arrive with a crew and two or three aircraft on a Tuesday. Shows ran Thursday through Sunday. Monday they packed and moved to the next county.

The show had a deliberate escalation. It opened with passes and basic aerobatics to calibrate the crowd’s eye to scale. Then someone climbed out of the cockpit in flight. Then someone hung off the undercarriage while the aircraft flew inverted. Then the parachute jump. Finally, passenger rides - three to five dollars depending on the year - wedged into the front cockpit of a Jenny for ten minutes over your own neighborhood. On a strong weekend, the Gates Flying Circus could carry two hundred paying passengers. That was serious revenue in the early 1920s.

Pangborn joined the operation around 1921 and became its headliner. Crowds knew him as Upside-Down Pangborn.

What “Inverted Flight” Actually Meant on a Jenny

The nickname wasn’t flattery - it described a genuine technical achievement. The Jennies and Standards of that era ran on gravity-fed engines. Invert the aircraft and oil pressure drops, fuel feed fails, and the engine quits in roughly thirty seconds.

Pangborn mapped those margins precisely and flew in that window so smoothly that spectators couldn’t see the calibration. He also performed wing walks - not the rigged, modern-aerobatic version, but the original: exit the cockpit in flight, no safety line in the early years, and travel along the wing surface to the tip, or down to the axle to hang by hand in inverted flight, or step mid-air from one aircraft to another while both flew in close formation.

He flew through the open doors of barns for newsreel cameras. He performed at state fairs before crowds of ten thousand. He broke bones. He walked away from crack-ups that should have been fatal. He got back in the cockpit.

The courage barnstorming demanded was not the reflex kind - over in seconds. It was the deliberate, premeditated decision to go out and do the dangerous thing again and again, in front of people who had paid to watch the near-miss. Keeping the almost from becoming the actual was the craft. Pangborn was one of its best practitioners.

The End of the Barnstorming Era

The Air Commerce Act of 1926 brought federal licensing and airworthiness standards into aviation for the first time. You could no longer buy a fifty-dollar Jenny and start carrying passengers from a cow pasture.

Charles Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing in 1927 changed public perception as much as any regulation. Aviation started feeling like an industry with a future rather than a circus act. Audiences drifted. The airlines were forming. Airmail routes expanded. The flying circus era closed.

Many barnstormers washed out or drifted into early airline jobs. Pangborn went looking for something larger.

The Around-the-World Attempt and the Japanese Arrest

In 1931, Pangborn and Hugh Herndon set out to fly around the world in a Bellanca CH-300 Pacemaker - a high-wing monoplane with a large radial engine and genuine long-range capability.

The attempt stalled in Japan. Japanese authorities arrested both men on suspicion of photographing military installations from the air. Whether the photography was intentional, accidental, or occurred at all was never conclusively established. They were held for several weeks, fined roughly one thousand dollars, and released on condition they leave Japan immediately and not return.

Pangborn looked at the situation: he had a long-range aircraft, he was in Japan, and there was an uncollected $25,000 prize from the Asahi Shimbun newspaper for the first non-stop flight from Japan to the continental United States.

He told Herndon they were going for it.

The Transpacific Crossing

On October 5, 1931, they took off from Sabishiro Beach, north of Tokyo, at first light. The Bellanca was loaded so heavily with fuel it used every foot of beach to get airborne. They flew northeast, out over the water, climbing into thin air above the Pacific.

The flight plan depended on a modification: the main landing gear had been rigged to jettison in flight. The gear was heavy, and dropping it after takeoff would extend range by several hundred miles. The tradeoff was a belly landing on arrival. Shortly after takeoff, the jettison mechanism failed. The struts stayed attached, dragging, burning fuel they couldn’t spare.

Somewhere over the North Pacific, hours into the flight, Pangborn opened the cockpit door and climbed out.

He worked his way along the wing of a heavily loaded aircraft, alone, at altitude, in cold air over open ocean, to the gear mounting. He spent approximately forty minutes in the slipstream, manually freeing struts and disconnecting attachments one by one. Then he worked back along the wing and climbed into the cockpit. Herndon flew straight and level and tried not to do anything sudden.

The crossing took 41 hours and 13 minutes. They descended over the mountains of central Washington and belly-landed on a field at Wenatchee in front of a crowd that had been tracking the story on the wire services since Japan. The Bellanca was damaged. Both men walked away.

No one had ever flown non-stop from Japan to the United States before.

Why the Landing Gear Fix Wasn’t Luck

What Pangborn did over the Pacific wasn’t improvised heroism. It was applied barnstorming.

Working a mechanical problem with cold hands in a screaming slipstream requires fine motor control, spatial awareness of your position relative to a moving aircraft, and the ability to work methodically while the alternative is panic. Those are body skills, built over years of hanging off airplane structures in flight - learning how wind loads shift as your position changes, how much you can move before disturbing the aircraft’s trim, how to function in that environment the way a craftsman functions with familiar materials.

The barnstorming years had turned Pangborn’s body into a precision instrument for exactly this kind of work. The county fair crowd that watched him hang off a Jenny axle in 1923 had no idea they were watching someone train.

What Happened After Wenatchee

Pangborn and Herndon won the Asahi Shimbun prize. After legal expenses, aircraft repair costs, and travel, neither kept much of it. Pangborn gave his share to Herndon, who had contributed personal funds and was further in the hole. Pangborn walked away from the first transpacific non-stop flight with the distinction of having done it and very little else.

The Bellanca CH-300 Pacemaker, christened Miss Veedol, is in the collection of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. There is a photograph of it on the ground at Wenatchee - belly-landed, gear gone - with Pangborn standing next to it.

What the Barnstorming Era Built

The flying circuses of the early 1920s did something that no government program or industrial development could have done as efficiently: they brought aviation to the county fair, the muddy field, the ten-dollar ride. They put the machine in front of people who would never otherwise have looked up.

Some of those people became mechanics. Some became designers, instructors, or pilots. Some simply carried the memory for the rest of their lives. And a few of them - the ones with the particular combination of nerve, precision, and cold-handed stubbornness - discovered they were very good at the hard parts.

Key Takeaways

Clyde Pangborn was the star performer of the Gates Flying Circus in the early 1920s, known specifically for sustained inverted flight and wing walking without safety lines.
The barnstorming era ended largely due to the Air Commerce Act of 1926 and the cultural shift following Lindbergh’s 1927 Atlantic crossing.
On October 5, 1931, Pangborn and Hugh Herndon completed the first non-stop transpacific flight, covering 4,558 miles from Japan to Wenatchee, Washington in 41 hours and 13 minutes.
The flight was saved when Pangborn climbed out onto the wing mid-flight over the Pacific and manually jettisoned a stuck landing gear strut - a task only possible because of years of barnstorming experience.
The aircraft, Miss Veedol, is now at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Pangborn gave away most of his prize money and kept the record.