Clyde Pangborn, the Miss Veedol, and the First Nonstop Transpacific Flight That Ended With No Gear and a Belly Landing in Washington Apple Country

Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon Jr. completed the first nonstop transpacific flight on October 5, 1931, landing their Bellanca monoplane Miss Veedol at Fancher Field in Wenatchee, Washington after 41 hours and 13 minutes in the air. The flight covered roughly 4,500 miles from Sabishiro Beach on the northern tip of Japan’s Honshu island - without landing gear, which Pangborn had deliberately jettisoned over the Pacific to save weight. Ninety-five years later, the great circle route they flew is one of the busiest air corridors on earth.

Who Was Clyde Pangborn?

Pangborn learned to fly during World War I but never made it overseas before the armistice. Like many pilots of his generation, he came home with a license and little else, and went where the flying work was.

He joined the Gates Flying Circus, one of the most prominent traveling air shows of the 1920s. The Circus worked the whole country - landing in harvested cornfields and cow pastures, charging a dollar for admission and another for a ride. Pangborn flew the standard act and the stunts: wing-walking, automobile-to-airplane transfers at altitude, controlled spins pulled low enough to stop a crowd’s breathing.

That kind of flying taught things no classroom could. You learned energy management at the edges of the envelope. You learned to stay ahead of the airplane, not react to it. Pangborn developed something rarer still: the ability to think two steps ahead while an immediate problem was still developing. It’s what kept him alive through barnstorming and eventually brought him to the attention of people with money and ambition.

How the Transpacific Attempt Came Together

Hugh Herndon Jr. was the son of a wealthy New York family - a pilot of reasonable skill, genuine ambition, and enough financing to chase records alongside Lindbergh’s name. He had the money. Pangborn had the ability. The arrangement was familiar in the record-chasing world of the early 1930s.

They acquired a Bellanca CH-300 Pacemaker - a high-wing monoplane powered by a Wright J-Six-Nine Whirlwind engine producing 300 horsepower. The Whirlwind had already proven itself across the Atlantic. They named the airplane the Miss Veedol, after a motor oil brand backing part of the venture.

Their original plan was to break the around-the-world speed record: west from New York, across the Atlantic, through Europe and the Soviet Union, into Asia, then home across the Pacific. Japan was the planned turning point - and where everything went wrong.

The Japanese Detention That Changed Everything

Japan in 1931 was a country already moving toward the Manchuria invasion that would come before the year was out. When Pangborn and Herndon flew along the Japanese coast, the authorities concluded they were photographing restricted military installations. Whether it was a genuine misunderstanding or something more, the military resolved the ambiguity against the Americans.

They were detained, questioned formally, and charged. The American Embassy worked diplomatic channels for weeks. In the end, fines totaling approximately $1,000 were paid and the men were released with their passports returned. But the weeks in custody had killed the around-the-world attempt and consumed most of their operating budget.

Herndon wanted to go home. Pangborn looked at the Asahi Shimbun prize and started doing arithmetic.

The $25,000 Prize and Why the Pacific Was Different

Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper had offered $25,000 for the first nonstop flight from Japan to the continental United States. The prize remained unclaimed because the challenge was genuinely hard. Lindbergh’s 1927 New York-to-Paris crossing covered roughly 3,600 miles in about 33 hours. A nonstop from Japan to Washington State via the great circle route was more than 4,500 miles and over 40 hours - all over open ocean, on single-engine reliability. The failure modes were final. There is no gliding to safety in the middle of the Pacific.

But the Bellanca could carry the fuel. Barely. And barely could be engineered into enough.

The Engineering Solution: Jettisoning the Landing Gear

Extra fuel tanks were fabricated in Japan and installed in the fuselage. Everything non-essential was stripped out - seats, equipment, anything without a purpose for the crossing itself.

Then Pangborn identified the weight that made the fuel math actually work: the landing gear. Wheels, struts, and steel bracing represent several hundred pounds of structure needed only for takeoff and landing - dead weight for 41 hours over the Pacific and dead drag besides. Jettisoning the gear after departure would improve the range margin for the entire flight.

The trade was obvious: no landing gear at the destination. A belly landing on arrival, wherever that turned out to be.

Pangborn built the release mechanism himself, by hand, in Japan, using local materials. He tested it on the ground. He studied the Bellanca’s fuselage construction and calculated what the belly could handle in a controlled landing on soft grass. He selected Wenatchee, Washington - apple country, a farming community east of the Cascades with a flat grass field called Fancher Field. He rehearsed the belly-landing technique until he could run through it without thinking.

The Takeoff from Sabishiro Beach

There was no airport at Sabishiro Beach on the northern tip of Honshu. There was a beach - a stretch of hard-packed tidal flat. Local villagers came out to help smooth the surface and keep onlookers clear of the airplane during final preparations.

On the morning of October 4, 1931 (Japanese local time), Pangborn and Herndon climbed in, ran up the Whirlwind, and began their roll. The Miss Veedol was the heaviest she had ever been. She rolled a long way down that beach before the tail came up, and longer still before the wheels finally broke free of the packed sand.

When they were far enough out over the Pacific and high enough to have some margin, Pangborn reached down and pulled the release cable. The landing gear fell away into the ocean. The finality of that act was complete: Wenatchee, Washington or the Pacific - those were the only two outcomes available.

Forty-One Hours of Dead Reckoning

The route followed the great circle arc northeast, then east - up toward the Aleutian chain before curving back down toward the Pacific Northwest. The North Pacific in early October offered cloud, early headwinds that cut into the fuel margin, and sustained cold in an unheated cockpit. Both men wore every layer they had for most of 40 hours.

Navigation was dead reckoning in its purest form. No radio beacons over open ocean. Magnetic compass, watch, and the calculations Pangborn had worked out before departure. He adjusted headings as actual winds differed from the forecast, and monitored fuel consumption against his expected burn rate - catching a deviation early enough in the flight to correct it. That’s the mark of careful preparation, not luck.

Somewhere past the Aleutians, deep in the night portion of the flight, Herndon picked up American radio signals on the aircraft receiver. Faint at first, then stronger as they drew nearer to the coast. Both men knew then that the math was going to come out right.

They raised the North American coast near Vancouver Island in the early morning hours of October 5. Slightly north of their planned track. Pangborn turned south, followed the Washington coast, and crossed the Cascades as dawn light caught the volcanic summits of the Pacific Northwest range. Ahead lay the broad Columbia River basin and, in the valley below the eastern slope of the mountains, Wenatchee.

The Belly Landing at Fancher Field

Several thousand people had gathered at Fancher Field before dawn, standing at the edge of a grass strip in the October cold. Wenatchee had been listening to radio reports tracking the flight for hours.

When the Miss Veedol appeared overhead, Pangborn flew two slow circles above the field - reading the surface, checking the wind, looking at the grass for anything that might complicate the approach. Then he set up a long, shallow final. He came across the boundary fence low and slow, the Whirlwind at reduced power, and pulled the nose up just enough to keep the propeller clear of the ground on contact. He let the airspeed bleed down. He held the attitude.

The fuselage touched the grass. The Miss Veedol slid forward on her belly. The nose dropped, the propeller struck the ground, and the Whirlwind stopped. The airplane skidded to a halt, intact, four thousand five hundred miles from Japan. Both men climbed out on their own and stood in a field surrounded by thousands of people who’d been awake since before dawn to witness it.

Elapsed time: 41 hours and 13 minutes. First nonstop transpacific flight in the history of aviation.

What Happened After

The Asahi Shimbun paid the $25,000 prize. The debts from the Japan incident were cleared with some left over. The Miss Veedol was repaired, fitted with new landing gear, and flew again - but she did not survive to become a museum piece. She was eventually scrapped. There is no airworthy Miss Veedol in a hangar today the way the Spirit of St. Louis sits in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Pangborn kept flying. Before the United States entered World War II, he ferried aircraft to England under Lend-Lease, then flew formally with the Allied forces. He built a standing reputation as one of the finest instrument pilots of his generation. He died in 1958, at age 63.

Hugh Herndon Jr. died the same year, two months earlier. Both men gone in the same calendar year, neither receiving the lasting public recognition that the most famous names of the Lindbergh era accumulated. The first to do the famous thing is the famous one. Everyone who follows - even to a harder destination under worse conditions - is the next one.

Why This Flight Still Matters to Aviation

The great circle route from Japan over the North Pacific to the American Northwest is now among the busiest air corridors on earth. Hundreds of airliners track that same arc every day, carrying passengers in pressurized comfort at altitudes Pangborn never reached, guided by satellite navigation he would have considered impossible.

Every flight from Seattle to Tokyo, every routing from Los Angeles to Seoul, follows the basic path that a barnstormer worked out in a beach hotel in Japan while waiting for legal trouble to clear - then proved with a hand-fabricated release mechanism and a belly landing on a grass strip in apple country.

There is a monument in Wenatchee. The city remembers.

Key Takeaways

Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon Jr. completed the first nonstop transpacific flight on October 5, 1931, covering approximately 4,500 miles from Sabishiro Beach, Japan to Wenatchee, Washington in 41 hours and 13 minutes.
Pangborn deliberately jettisoned the Miss Veedol’s landing gear over the Pacific after takeoff to save hundreds of pounds of dead weight, committing both men to a belly landing on arrival - which he had studied, calculated, and rehearsed entirely in advance.
The flight was made possible by the Asahi Shimbun’s $25,000 prize for the first nonstop Japan-to-U.S. crossing; the original around-the-world attempt had been derailed by a weeks-long Japanese military detention and accompanying fines.
Navigation relied entirely on dead reckoning - magnetic compass, watch, and pre-calculated headings adjusted in flight for actual wind conditions. There were no radio beacons over the open Pacific.
Neither Pangborn nor Herndon received public recognition on par with Lindbergh; the Miss Veedol itself was eventually scrapped and does not survive. The great circle route they pioneered now carries hundreds of transpacific flights daily.

Sources: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum archives; Wenatchee Valley Museum records; contemporary reporting from the Asahi Shimbun and the Wenatchee Daily World.