Clyde Upside-Down Pangborn, the Gates Flying Circus, and the Fifty-Cent Ride That Sold America on Flying

In the 1920s, a traveling air show called the Gates Flying Circus put roughly one million Americans in the air for the first time, often charging as little as a nickel per ride. Its biggest star was Clyde “Upside-Down” Pangborn, a stunt pilot whose cold, calculated skill later carried him across the Pacific. Together, promoter Ivan Gates and Pangborn turned surplus war biplanes into the machines that convinced a nation to trust aviation.

Where Barnstorming Came From

When the Great War ended in 1918, the United States found itself with far too many training airplanes. The star of that surplus was the Curtiss JN-4, universally known as the “Jenny” - a machine of wood, wire, and fabric powered by a 90-horsepower Curtiss OX-5 engine that leaked oil constantly.

The government had no further use for these aircraft and sold them off cheap. Crated, brand-new Jennys went for a few hundred dollars - about the price of a good used car. For some young men, one Jenny became an entire career.

At the same time, thousands of pilots trained by the Army had returned home to find no jobs flying. There were no meaningful airlines and, crucially, no regulations. This was before the Air Commerce Act of 1926 - no license to earn, no medical exam to fail, and no federal inspector on the ramp. If you could afford a Jenny and survive your first month, you were a professional aviator.

So these pilots went barnstorming.

What Barnstorming Actually Looked Like

The term “barnstorming” borrowed from theater, where touring actors once performed in rural barns. The aviators’ routine rarely changed: find a town, buzz Main Street low enough to rattle windows, then land in a farmer’s field at the edge of town. Within minutes, half the county would walk out to see the airplane.

Then the pilots sold rides - usually a dollar, sometimes five in a larger town. For rural Americans who had never traveled faster than a trotting horse, a few minutes a thousand feet above their own barn was often the single most extraordinary experience of their lives. Grown men frequently wept.

Who Built the Gates Flying Circus

Promoter Ivan Gates understood something his competitors missed. Around 1922, he assembled what became the largest barnstorming outfit in the country: the Gates Flying Circus. This was not a single airplane but a fleet - a caravan of Jennys and Standards rolling town to town with mechanics, parachute jumpers, and a payroll to meet.

Gates’s most radical move was pricing. While everyone else charged a dollar or more, Gates cut his fares aggressively, advertising rides for a dollar and, for special promotions, dropping them to a nickel. He bet on volume - and won. Over its lifetime, the Gates outfit claimed to have carried roughly one million passengers, more than the young commercial airlines would carry for years. Gates didn’t just entertain America; he persuaded it to trust an airplane.

Who Was Clyde “Upside-Down” Pangborn?

Cheap rides drew the crowd, but a star kept them there - and the Gates Flying Circus had the best. Clyde Pangborn was a Washington State native, born near the Idaho line, who worked the mines and timber before the Army taught him to fly. He was a natural, but what set him apart was his nerve - cold, patient, and mathematical.

He earned the nickname “Upside-Down Pangborn” by flying his Jenny inverted far longer than a wood-and-fabric trainer had any business staying inverted, oil pouring back and the engine coughing on a carburetor never designed to run that way. But that wasn’t the trick that made his name.

The Midair Airplane Change

Pangborn’s signature act was the midair change. Two airplanes flew tight formation a few thousand feet above the crowd. A wing-walker climbed out of one cockpit into a hundred-mile-an-hour wind, worked his way to the wingtip - usually with no usable parachute - and waited as the second airplane slid in above and lowered a rope ladder. The wing-walker grabbed the ladder and let go of one airplane to dangle beneath another.

The real feat belonged to the pilots. Holding formation steady enough for a person to step between two aircraft in open air left no margin for error. One gust or one rough-running engine could kill a friend in front of thousands of spectators. Pangborn’s crew performed it repeatedly, along with wing-walkers strolling to the tips, jumpers hanging by a leather bit clenched in their teeth, and plane-to-plane transfers at the edge of dusk.

The Skill Beneath the Spectacle

The old accounts tell a story - with details that vary between tellings - of a transfer that went wrong. A wing-walker got out onto the wing, but the pickup failed and the ladder stayed out of reach. Now a man was stranded on the wing of an airplane running low on fuel, and Pangborn could not land normally with a body hanging off the lift strut.

So he nursed the airplane down, flying it as gently as possible, bleeding off altitude and speed until he could set it on the grass in a way that kept his man alive. That was the true skill beneath the showmanship: judgment. Pangborn knew exactly how much that old Jenny had left to give and never asked for one ounce more.

That judgment separated the survivors from the casualties. Barnstormers died in numbers that would ground all of aviation today - structural failures, stalls that spun into the ground, and engines that quit over unforgiving terrain. The pilots who lasted did so because they were students of the machine, knowing their Jenny down to the last turnbuckle and reading the sound of the wires to judge their airspeed. The airplane was always talking to them, and the great ones never stopped listening.

Why the Barnstorming Era Ended

Ironically, the very idea the barnstormers sold - that flying was safe enough for anyone to try for a nickel - matured and put them out of business. In 1926, the Air Commerce Act brought federal oversight. Pilots flying for hire now needed licenses, aircraft needed certificates, and rules governed how low and how close to people you could fly. A war-surplus Jenny with thousands of hard hours on its airframe could not pass inspection.

Those rules were right, and they saved lives. Much of aviation’s modern safety regulation was written the hard way - one funeral at a time - and many of those losses came from the very fields where the flying circuses performed.

The Gates Flying Circus flew its final shows around 1929, just as the stock market collapsed. The great traveling circuses folded, and their pilots scattered - to the young airlines, the airmail routes, Hollywood, and flight instruction.

What Happened to Clyde Pangborn Next

Pangborn was far from finished. In 1931, two years after the circus wound down, he and partner Hugh Herndon flew a Bellanca named Miss Veedol on the first nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean - from Japan to Washington State, more than 4,000 miles of open water in a single-engine airplane.

To extend the range, Pangborn rigged the landing gear to drop away after takeoff, shedding drag and committing himself to a belly landing on the far side. He did exactly that, sliding the airplane in on its fuselage in a field not far from where he grew up - the same cold, patient nerve that had carried a wing-walker safely down over a county fair, applied to a far larger stage.

Why the Barnstormers Still Matter

We remember the era for its stunts - the wing-walking, the loops, the nickel rides. But barnstorming was really a finishing school: a brutal, wide-open training ground that forged the pilots who would fly the mail through mountains at night, launch the airlines, and train the aircrews of the coming war. For about a decade, this traveling circus was the main event in American aviation, not a sideshow.

Every pilot who taxis out to a grass strip on a still morning is flying in their prop wash. If you’d like to learn more, seek out the historical accounts of Ivan Gates and his flying circus, and dig into Clyde Pangborn’s life and the Miss Veedol Pacific crossing - the Smithsonian and a number of aviation historians have kept those records alive.

Key Takeaways

• The Gates Flying Circus, founded around 1922 by promoter Ivan Gates, was the largest barnstorming outfit in America and claimed to have carried roughly one million passengers.
• Cheap surplus Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” biplanes, sold off after 1918 for a few hundred dollars, made the barnstorming era possible.
• Star pilot Clyde “Upside-Down” Pangborn built his reputation on inverted flight and daring midair airplane transfers, but his real gift was disciplined judgment.
• The Air Commerce Act of 1926 introduced licensing and inspections that ended the barnstorming era; the Gates circus flew its last shows around 1929.
• In 1931, Pangborn and Hugh Herndon made the first nonstop transpacific flight in the Miss Veedol, covering over 4,000 miles and landing gear-up in Washington State.