Ivan Gates, Clyde Pangborn, and the Gates Flying Circus, the Barnstorming Outfit That Sold a Million Dollar Rides at a Dollar a Head

The Gates Flying Circus, organized by promoter Ivan Gates around 1922, was the largest and most successful barnstorming outfit in America, famous for selling airplane rides to ordinary people for as little as one dollar. Its chief pilot, Clyde Pangborn, became a legend for inverted flying and midair plane changes - skills that later carried him and Hugh Herndon across the Pacific on the first nonstop flight from Japan to the United States in 1931. More than any other outfit, the Circus introduced everyday Americans to flight, claiming to have carried close to a million passengers without a fatality.

Where Did Barnstorming Come From?

When World War I ended in 1918, the U.S. government was left with thousands of surplus training airplanes it no longer needed. The most common was the Curtiss JN-4, universally known as the “Jenny” - a two-seat biplane of wood, fabric, and wire, powered by a 90-horsepower OX-5 engine that leaked oil constantly.

The Army had piles of them, many still crated and never flown. After the war they were sold off cheaply - a Jenny could be had for a few hundred dollars, sometimes less.

That created a perfect storm: thousands of young men who had learned to fly in the service, cheap airplanes available by the boxcar, and a nation full of people who had never seen an airplane up close.

Those pilots discovered they could scrape together a living by flying out over the countryside, landing in any town with a flat pasture, and selling rides. Working alone or in pairs, they slept under the wing, ate what local farmers offered, and moved on. They were called barnstormers - a name possibly borrowed from traveling stage actors who “took a town by storm,” or from the habit of buzzing barns to draw a crowd.

What Made the Gates Flying Circus Different?

Most barnstormers worked alone and lived hand to mouth. Ivan Gates thought bigger. He wasn’t much of a pilot himself - he was a promoter and businessman who looked at the ragged individual flyers and saw the potential for an organized show and a brand.

Starting in 1922, Gates assembled a full traveling operation: a fleet of airplanes, a team of pilots, wing-walkers, parachute jumpers, mechanics, and an advance man who papered each town with handbills before the show arrived.

His real genius was pricing. Most barnstormers charged five dollars a ride - real money in 1922 - so crowds came to watch but rarely flew. Gates cut the price to one dollar, and when crowds were thick enough, sometimes lower. He lost money on nearly every individual ride and made a fortune on volume.

Word spread that the Circus was hauling regular people into the sky for a buck, and they came from three counties over. Over the years the outfit claimed to have carried close to a million passengers without a single fatality. That figure deserves some skepticism - old barnstormers could stretch a story - but even conservative accounts are staggering. This was the outfit that, more than any other, put ordinary Americans in an airplane for the first time.

Who Was Clyde Pangborn?

Clyde Pangborn was born in 1895 in Washington state. He came to flying through the Army during the war, where he learned to instruct. When the war ended, he partnered with Ivan Gates and became the Circus’s chief pilot - the man crowds paid to see.

Pangborn flew without a parachute, without meaningful safety harnesses, and without second chances. He would roll a Jenny onto its back and fly inverted, hanging in the straps while the OX-5 engine coughed because it couldn’t feed fuel upside down. He did it so often that newspapers gave him a nickname: “Upside-Down Pangborn.”

What Was the Midair Plane Change?

Pangborn’s signature stunt was the midair plane change. The Circus would put two airplanes into close formation, wingtip to wingtip, over a crowd of thousands in bumpy afternoon air. A performer would then climb out of one cockpit, walk into a hundred-mile-an-hour wind blast, and transfer to the other airplane - hand over hand, from a rope ladder, a wing skid, or in some cases straight off the landing gear.

There was no net and no parachute. Two pilots simply had to hold formation steady enough that a human being could crawl from one flying machine to another with a thousand feet of open air underneath.

Pangborn didn’t just fly those changes - he designed and drilled them. He understood exactly how the airplane’s balance would shift when 170 pounds of wing-walker slid out to the tip, and he fed in rudder and eased the stick to hold the aircraft steady while another man’s life hung off his wing. The Circus performed these stunts day after day, town after town, all summer long, for years - landing in unfamiliar fields, navigating by following railroad tracks (what the old pilots called “flying the iron compass”), and, for the most part, living to do it again.

Why Did the Barnstorming Era End?

The same freedom that made barnstorming magical also made it deadly. There were no rules: a man could buy a surplus Jenny, teach himself to fly, and start hauling passengers within a week. No one inspected the aircraft, licensed the pilot, or restricted low-level stunts over crowds. That freedom produced Clyde Pangborn - and a great many funerals, especially among imitators who lacked the skill of the greats.

In 1926, Congress passed the Air Commerce Act. Over the following years the Department of Commerce - the agency whose duties eventually passed to today’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) - began licensing pilots, certifying aircraft, and regulating how low and how close to crowds pilots could fly.

Those rules were the right thing to do, and they let aviation grow into airlines and instrument flying. But they also quietly ended the flying circus. You could no longer perform midair plane changes over a crowd or sell dollar rides in an uninspected airplane, and the aging Jennys were wearing out. By the early 1930s, the great flying circuses were mostly gone. The Gates Flying Circus wound down, and Ivan Gates fell on hard times during the Depression, meeting a sad end.

How Did Clyde Pangborn Fly Across the Pacific?

Pangborn had one more chapter - and it’s why his barnstorming skills mattered far beyond the sideshow. In 1931, a newspaper in his home state of Washington offered a $25,000 prize for the first nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean, from Japan to the United States. No one had done it; the airplanes of the day barely had the range.

Pangborn teamed with Hugh Herndon and flew a Bellanca monoplane named Miss Veedol. To carry enough fuel, the aircraft was so heavy it could barely stagger off a beach in Japan. The landing gear created drag they couldn’t afford, so Pangborn planned to jettison the gear after takeoff and belly-land on the far side with no wheels.

They dropped the gear, but some of the struts jammed and wouldn’t release - enough drag and hazard to doom the flight and possibly the crew. So Pangborn did what he knew how to do: out over the open Pacific, in the cold and at altitude, he handed the controls to Herndon, climbed out onto the wing strut, and wrestled the jammed struts free with his bare hands - exactly as he had done a thousand times over Midwestern cornfields, except now there was nothing beneath him but the biggest ocean on the planet.

They flew roughly 40 hours across the entire Pacific and came down gear-up, sliding on the belly, in a field near Wenatchee, Washington - completing the first nonstop transpacific flight in history.

The wing-walking, the plane changes, the inverted flying that serious people dismissed as carnival tricks were precisely the skills that got Pangborn across the Pacific. The barnstorming era wasn’t just a sideshow - it was a school, and it graduated the pilots who carried aviation into everything that came after.

Key Takeaways

• The Gates Flying Circus, founded by promoter Ivan Gates around 1922, was the most successful barnstorming outfit in America, built on one-dollar rides and high volume.
• Barnstorming was made possible by cheap surplus Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” biplanes sold off after World War I ended in 1918.
• The Circus claimed to have carried close to a million passengers without a fatality, introducing countless Americans to flight for the first time.
• Chief pilot Clyde Pangborn (born 1895, Washington) earned the nickname “Upside-Down Pangborn” and pioneered the dangerous midair plane change.
• The Air Commerce Act of 1926 and subsequent federal regulation ended the barnstorming era by the early 1930s.
• In 1931, Pangborn and Hugh Herndon flew the Bellanca Miss Veedol on the first nonstop flight across the Pacific, landing gear-up near Wenatchee, Washington, after Pangborn climbed onto the wing mid-flight to free jammed landing-gear struts.