Clyde Pangborn, the Miss Veedol, and the Jettisoned Gear That Made the First Nonstop Pacific Crossing Possible

On October 4–5, 1931, Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon Jr. completed the first nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean - approximately 4,500 miles from Sabishiro Beach, Japan to a field near Wenatchee, Washington in 41 hours and 13 minutes. To make the fuel load work, Pangborn deliberately jettisoned the aircraft’s landing gear into the Pacific shortly after takeoff, then executed a planned belly landing at the destination.

Why the Pacific Resisted the Golden Age

The golden age of aviation - roughly 1927 through the late 1930s - was driven by prize money. William Randolph Hearst had been offering $25,000 for the first nonstop flight from Japan to the United States, the same figure Raymond Orteig had put up for New York-to-Paris, which Charles Lindbergh won in 1927. Nobody had collected the Pacific prize.

The reason was distance. The Atlantic at its narrowest - Newfoundland to Ireland - spans roughly 2,100 miles. The Pacific, from the northeast coast of Japan to the American Pacific Northwest, is more than twice that: 4,500 miles of open ocean with no emergency airfields, no reliable shipping lanes, and Gulf of Alaska weather systems that developed without warning. Multiple pilots had looked at the Pacific problem and quietly put it back down. The fuel calculations didn’t work for most aircraft and engine combinations available in the early 1930s.

The Men Behind the Attempt

Clyde Pangborn was 40 years old in 1931, with a flying career dating back to roughly 1917. He spent years barnstorming with the Gates Flying Circus - one of the traveling operations working county fairs across the Midwest, doing aerobatics and selling fifty-cent rides. The barnstorming circuit had a reputation as a carnival, but for the pilots who survived it, it was the most demanding practical flight education the 1920s offered.

The margins were small, the aircraft marginal, and weather was no excuse not to fly. You fixed the airplane in a farm field with what you had. The pilots who came through with their skills and their lives intact held abilities no other training environment could produce. Pangborn came out of it excellent - and also with a finely calibrated sense of when plans go wrong, having been arrested for a bootlegging incident involving an international border and a small aircraft, serving time for it.

Hugh Herndon Jr. was 29, from a moneyed New York family. He had become a pilot out of genuine passion and wanted what wealth sometimes enables: a place in the record books. He was skilled enough to be a useful partner and wealthy enough to fund an expedition Pangborn couldn’t have bankrolled alone.

The Miss Veedol and the Record That Got Away

In 1931 the two men flew the Miss Veedol - a Bellanca CH-400 Skyrocket - eastbound from New York on a world circumnavigation attempt. The CH-400 was a high-wing monoplane powered by a 400-horsepower Wright radial engine, built on Giuseppe Bellanca’s core philosophy: carry heavy loads efficiently over long distances. She could haul fuel the way the mission demanded.

They flew east across the Atlantic, through Europe, across the Soviet Union, into China, and into Japan. In Japan, things fell apart. The Japanese military had been watching a foreign aircraft equipped with cameras overflying sensitive areas. When Pangborn and Herndon landed, the authorities were waiting. There was an arrest, a diplomatic process, a fine, and time in custody while the American consulate worked.

While they waited, Wiley Post and Harold Gatty flew around the world and claimed the circumnavigation record.

Pangborn and Herndon were left in Japan with a functioning aircraft and no prize. But the Hearst money was still on the table.

The Engineering Decision: Jettison the Gear

Pangborn ran the fuel numbers and found the crossing was possible - barely - but not with fixed landing gear hanging in the airstream for forty-plus hours.

The CH-400 had non-retractable gear. Wheels, legs, and struts producing drag for every minute of a 4,500-mile flight. Over a short hop that’s a minor inefficiency. Over the full Pacific, it was the difference between reaching the American coast and falling short.

His solution: have a release mechanism - a cable - installed on the landing gear. Pull it after departure, drop the wheels into the Pacific, and fly the rest of the crossing clean. The fuel savings would make the numbers work.

The landing at the other end would be on the belly of the aircraft.

Pangborn reinforced the nose area for impact, worked out where the propeller would be at touchdown, and planned his engine shutdown sequence to stop the blade horizontal before contact with the ground. He analyzed the full geometry of what a belly landing in a CH-400 would do to the structure and the people inside. He concluded that if executed precisely, it was survivable.

This was not recklessness. It was engineering in the manner of 1931, where the engineer and the test pilot were the same man, and the test was the actual mission.

October 4, 1931: The Departure

Sabishiro Beach sits in Aomori Prefecture at the far northeast of Honshu, facing the North Pacific. In October it is iron-gray and cold.

They loaded the Miss Veedol until her wheels sank into the sand. At just past 6 a.m. Japan time on October 4, Pangborn pushed the throttle forward on the Wright radial and the Bellanca began her roll. She used most of that beach before the nose came up, but it came up.

The gear went into the Pacific not long after departure. Pangborn pulled the cable and felt it go. The door was closed - no alternate destination, no divert option, no reachable emergency field anywhere on the route. Only the Pacific and 4,500 miles of it between that beach and home.

Forty-One Hours Over Open Water

Navigation was dead reckoning: magnetic compass, airspeed indicator, clock, and elapsed time. A bubble sextant for celestial observation when the sky cooperated - over the North Pacific in October, it cooperated intermittently. Radio direction finding equipment could sometimes acquire shore stations and sometimes returned only static.

They flew the great circle route, arcing north toward the Aleutian chain before bending south and east toward Washington. The weather didn’t consult the flight plan. Fronts moved through. Cloud built without announcement. There were stretches when the only available reference was the compass, the feel of the aircraft, and what Pangborn’s hands were telling him about what the air was doing.

The middle of the Pacific at night is a particular kind of isolated. Nothing below. No ship traffic. Herndon working navigation, Pangborn on the controls, the Wright engine turning over in front of them - the only constant in a world of dark water and uncertain sky.

The Belly Landing in Wenatchee

Washington State came up on the morning of October 5. The coast, then the Cascades, then the Columbia Plateau on the eastern side - broad, flat agricultural land, open after harvest.

Wenatchee sits in the center of that basin. Pangborn chose a field in Chelan County and began his approach.

Before touchdown, he killed the engine and let the propeller windmill to a horizontal position where it would not contact the ground. A spinning propeller on a belly landing is shrapnel. He stopped it first.

The Miss Veedol touched on her belly and slid across that October field and stopped. Both men climbed out.

41 hours and 13 minutes from Sabishiro Beach, Japan, to a farm field in the apple country of Eastern Washington. The first nonstop transpacific flight. The $25,000 Hearst prize was collected.

What the Crossing Actually Meant

The aftermath was quieter than the achievement deserved. Herndon had his record and receded from public life. Pangborn went back to flying - ferrying bombers across the Atlantic for Britain when the war came, then transport operations for the Army Air Forces. He died in New York in 1958 at 67, not wealthy, not famous in proportion to what he had done.

The Miss Veedol was eventually scrapped. No airworthy example survives.

But the line of consequence runs forward from that October morning. Four years after the landing at Wenatchee, in 1935, Pan American Airways launched the China Clipper service - flying boats island-hopping across the Pacific to Manila on a scheduled basis. By 1935 the Pacific was a route, not an obstacle. What Pangborn demonstrated with a Bellanca, a jettison cable, and 41 hours of dead reckoning was part of the foundation under everything that followed.

The golden age produced records because it produced people willing to calculate a margin carefully and then perform within it precisely. The reckless ones didn’t survive long enough to be in the record books. The ones still worth discussing nearly a century later were the ones who did the math, believed the math, and went and flew it.

Dropping your landing gear into the Pacific and belly-landing after 41 hours over open water is not the act of someone who failed to think it through. It is the act of someone who thought it through completely, found the calculation sound, and executed.

Aviation historians Terry Gwynn-Jones and Carroll V. Glines documented the Pacific crossings of the golden age in detail. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum archives hold the primary records for the Miss Veedol crossing.

Key Takeaways

Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon Jr. completed the first nonstop transpacific flight on October 4–5, 1931, covering approximately 4,500 miles in 41 hours and 13 minutes
Pangborn deliberately jettisoned the Bellanca CH-400’s landing gear into the Pacific shortly after departure - the only way to reduce drag enough for the fuel load to reach the American coast
He executed a planned belly landing in a Chelan County field near Wenatchee, Washington, having reinforced the nose structure and stopped the propeller to horizontal before touchdown
The $25,000 Hearst prize for the first nonstop Japan-to-U.S. flight - uncollected for years because the 4,500-mile Pacific span defeated most fuel calculations - was paid in full
The crossing laid direct conceptual groundwork for Pan American’s 1935 China Clipper service, the first scheduled transpacific passenger flights