Ivan Gates, the Gates Flying Circus, and the Man Who Turned Barnstorming Into a Brand

Ivan Gates was not a pilot. That fact is central to understanding how he built the most recognized name in American barnstorming. While thousands of WWI veterans were buying surplus Curtiss JN-4 biplanes and flying solo from field to field, Gates saw something they didn’t: a franchise waiting to be organized.

The Surplus Aircraft Economy That Made Barnstorming Possible

When World War I ended in 1918, the War Department faced a disposal problem. Thousands of Curtiss JN-4 trainers - universally called the “Jenny” - sat on Army fields across the country, unwanted and depreciating. The government sold them off for as little as $200 to $300 each.

At the same time, tens of thousands of trained military pilots returned home to find no aviation industry waiting for them. Airlines barely existed. Military budgets were being cut. A Curtiss Jenny at $200 and an open countryside were the obvious answer.

The barnstorming formula was simple: find a long enough field, land with or without permission, put out word that rides were available for a dollar, and wait. The crowd always showed up - because in 1920 and 1921, an airplane overhead was still an event capable of stopping a town square cold.

Ivan Gates and the Business of Organized Spectacle

Gates came from theatrical promotion. Before aviation, he had worked in booking and touring ventures and understood how circuses moved from town to town while building durable brand recognition. When he turned his attention to barnstorming around 1920, he diagnosed the problem immediately: every operator was thinking small.

He began recruiting pilots and performers, adding aircraft, and building the organizational infrastructure that individual barnstormers lacked. By the mid-1920s, the Gates Flying Circus was the most recognized name in American barnstorming. A handbill on a fence post in Iowa or Indiana bearing the Gates name signaled a professional show - multiple aircraft, coordinated acts, a structured program with a beginning, middle, and end.

Gates deployed advance scouts ahead of the main troupe. Arriving several days before the circus, they secured a suitable field, plastered handbills wherever they would stick, and worked local newspapers for coverage. Aviation shows were reliable copy. Editors wanted the stories and readers wanted every word.

Clyde “Upside Down” Pangborn: The Act That Made Headlines

The centerpiece performer of the Gates operation was Clyde Pangborn, one of the genuinely underrecognized figures in American aviation history. He earned the name “Upside Down Pangborn” through sustained inverted flight in a Jenny - not a brief roll through the inverted position, but extended flight, upside down, at low altitude, with a crowd watching from the field below.

This was not straightforward. The Jenny’s fuel system was gravity-fed. Inverted, the engine starved and quit. Pangborn learned to time his inversions precisely - accounting for throttle behavior, aircraft momentum, and exactly how long he had before the engine quit and what it would do when it caught again. He developed this knowledge through repetition and a finely calibrated personal relationship with acceptable risk.

He also performed deliberate flat spins. In a biplane of the 1920s, a flat spin was not generally considered recoverable: the aircraft enters rotation around the vertical axis, the nose rises, speed bleeds away, and the whole machine descends in a slow, maple-seed rotation. Pangborn would enter one intentionally, hold it for the crowd, and pull out. Contemporary newspapers described it as watching a man die and then wave from the casket.

Pangborn later secured his place in aviation history in 1931, when he and Hugh Herndon completed the first nonstop transpacific flight, from Sabishiro Beach, Japan to Wenatchee, Washington.

Wing Walking: The Act That Defined the Era

Wing walking was the second pillar of the barnstorming show, and Gates built it into a genuine spectacle. A performer would exit the cockpit in flight, work along the bracing wires and spruce struts, and stand upright on the upper wing while the pilot flew below them.

The standard act escalated from there. Wing walkers did handstands on the wing. Some dangled from bars mounted beneath the landing gear. Some performed aircraft-to-aircraft transfers - stepping from one Jenny to another while both aircraft flew in loose formation.

Lillian Boyer became one of the most accomplished wing walkers of the era, performing for various barnstorming outfits including periods connected to the Gates operation. Her signature act included automobile-to-airplane transfers: grabbing a rope ladder lowered from a low-flying Jenny while a car raced across the field below her. She performed without a safety harness - the harnesses of the era were unreliable enough that many performers concluded freedom of movement was worth more than a tether that might catch on the wrong fitting and kill them just as easily as a fall.

Out on the wing at cruising speed, a performer took the full slipstream. The aircraft vibrated through every wire and strut. The ground was 150 feet below. The pilot was invisible behind a cockpit windscreen, trying to hold altitude, airspeed, and position while watching the performer out of the corner of an eye. The act depended entirely on trust built through ground rehearsal and executed in conditions where neither person could speak.

Parachute Jumps and the Arithmetic of Risk

Parachute acts were the third crowd staple. Jumpers would climb to 3,000 to 5,000 feet and step off into the sky above the crowd. The parachutes of the 1920s were not the reliable equipment in use today. Ripcords were mechanical and sometimes stuck. Field packing under variable conditions was the norm. Materials aged and became brittle.

Performers who made their living from parachute jumps understood that the actuarial table for their work was not favorable. Some died from malfunctions; some misjudged altitude over unfamiliar terrain. The crowds were not entirely unaware of this. The beauty of flight and its danger are not separate qualities - they are the same object seen from different angles. Part of the draw was the possibility that something might go terribly wrong.

How Gates Scaled the Business

The economics of the Gates operation were more sophisticated than the carnival image suggests. Gates ran multiple troupe units simultaneously: while the main circus performed in one state, a second unit worked towns two states over, and a third might be running county fairs in a third region. The key was to move before novelty wore off, while building enough brand consistency that audiences were glad to see the circus return the following summer.

The ticket structure was deliberate. Ground admission was kept cheap - sometimes free. The real revenue was in rides: $1 for five minutes in the air, more for the premium experience of flying with a named performer. The ride operation ran with the efficiency of a midway. Passenger pilots were trained separately from performance pilots and coached specifically to make the flight exciting without being genuinely alarming - enough bank and altitude for the passenger to go home with a story, not enough to require assistance exiting the cockpit.

That balance between thrilling and terrifying is an art. You want the pulse rate up and a smile with some awe mixed into it. You do not want anyone needing help getting out.

The Curtiss Jenny: Right Airplane for the Wrong Reasons

The Curtiss JN-4 was not anyone’s favorite airplane on pure performance terms. Its OX-5 engine produced 90 horsepower, performed reliably in decent weather and was a nightmare in cold. The aircraft climbed slowly, flew slowly, and its control feel was described variously as mushy and vague depending on rigging condition and cable age. Top speed was approximately 75 miles per hour on a favorable day.

None of that mattered for barnstorming purposes. The Jenny was cheap and everywhere. Those two facts outweighed everything else.

Its low speed was actually an asset for both the passenger business and the show. A slower aircraft is less alarming to a first-time flier. A low pass at 50 miles per hour let audiences on the ground follow every maneuver from beginning to end, see the wing walker clearly, and track the aircraft through each turn. The show read clearly from the ground. In exhibition flying, that visibility is everything.

The Air Commerce Act of 1926 and the End of Barnstorming

By the middle of the decade, barnstorming had reached its high point, and the forces that would end it were already in motion. As audiences expected more each season, the acts escalated. The risks escalated with them. More performers were dying. More aircraft were crashing at shows.

The Air Commerce Act of 1926 was the federal government’s first serious attempt to regulate civilian aviation. It required aircraft to be certified for airworthiness, required pilots to hold licenses, and gave the Commerce Department authority over how exhibition flying could be conducted. For the informally organized barnstormers who had operated on courage and improvisation, certification requirements were frequently the end of the business. Some operators couldn’t afford the process. Some couldn’t pass the written examinations.

Simultaneously, the novelty of aviation had substantially diminished. The country had watched Charles Lindbergh cross the Atlantic. It had read about transpacific flights. The idea of human flight was no longer a miracle requiring a fairground visit to fully believe - it was a fact. And a fact does not generate the same crowd as a miracle.

Then came 1929. The crash and the Depression that followed made the dollar for an airplane ride a dollar a family might need elsewhere. The touring circuits shrank. The Gates Flying Circus wound down around 1930. Ivan Gates moved on. Clyde Pangborn chased records. The wing walkers found other work or retired into the ordinary world.

The Legacy: From Fairgrounds to Modern Flight Lines

The barnstorming era did not disappear. It transformed.

The American air show tradition - the warbird passes, the aerobatic sequences, the flight line barriers, the announcer describing maneuvers to a crowd - traces directly to the county fairgrounds of 1922 where Ivan Gates was counting the day’s receipts and Pangborn was climbing into a Jenny for the afternoon show.

The deeper legacy is harder to measure. The children who stood in those fields watching a wing walker stand in 60-mile-per-hour wind, who felt the propwash of a low pass, who smelled castor oil in the exhaust and heard an OX-5 at full throttle - some of them went home unable to let it go. Some scraped together money for flight lessons. Some are the reason a trained pilot force existed when the next war came. Some flew on weekends for the rest of their lives because they had seen what was possible.

The Gates Flying Circus made aviation a lived reality for a generation of Americans who would otherwise have known it only from newspaper photographs. That is not a small thing to leave behind.

Key Takeaways

Ivan Gates built the most recognized barnstorming brand in America without ever learning to fly, applying theatrical promotion experience to an unorganized industry of solo pilots
Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” biplanes, sold off by the War Department from 1918 onward for as little as $200–$300, were the hardware foundation of the entire barnstorming era
Clyde “Upside Down” Pangborn - Gates’s star performer - flew sustained inverted flight and deliberate flat spins in an aircraft with a gravity-fed fuel system, later completing the first nonstop transpacific flight in 1931
The Air Commerce Act of 1926, combined with the erosion of aviation’s novelty after Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing, ended the barnstorming era; the Gates Flying Circus closed around 1930
The American air show tradition descends directly from the traveling circuses of the 1920s, and the barnstorming generation seeded the pilot workforce that would serve in World War II