The Gates Flying Circus, Clyde Pangborn, and the Barnstormer Who Flew Nonstop Across the Pacific in Nineteen Thirty-One

Clyde Pangborn flew from Japan to Washington State on October 4, 1931, completing 4,558 miles in 41 hours and 13 minutes - the first nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean. What made it possible wasn’t just the right airplane. It was a decade spent flying to the edge of what humans and hardware could survive, in front of crowds at county fairs across America.

What Was the Gates Flying Circus?

Ivan Gates founded the Gates Flying Circus around 1921. He wasn’t a pilot. He was a promoter who understood crowds, spectacle, and the one thing aviation offered that no circus act could fake: the genuine, unscripted possibility of death.

At its peak, the Circus ran multiple crews across different regions simultaneously, hitting county fairs, state fairs, and any flat field they could negotiate use of. The acts included wing walkers, parachutists who free-fell long enough to make crowds murmur, and aerobatics performed at altitudes that left almost no margin for error.

Over its operational years, the Gates Flying Circus performed for an estimated two to three million Americans.

Where Did the Barnstormers Come From?

When the Armistice ended World War I in November 1918, the Army Air Service had roughly 16,000 pilots. Within two years, it had fewer than 1,000. The rest were civilians again, with no career path and a skill set that was nearly worthless in peacetime unless they invented one.

The Army sold off surplus Curtiss Jennies for almost nothing - sometimes $50 or less. Any pilot with a little cash and a lot of nerve could become a one-man air show.

Clyde Pangborn was born in Bridgeport, Washington, in 1894. He learned to fly during the war, and when it ended, he was one of those men standing in a surplus yard trying to figure out what came next. He bought a Jenny and started performing.

What Made Pangborn Different From Other Barnstormers?

Pangborn earned the nickname “Upside Down Pangborn” by staying inverted longer and lower than anyone thought those airplanes could tolerate. He performed outside loops - the negative-G maneuver that starves a gravity-fed carburetor and migrates the oil - in aging biplanes at low altitude, in front of paying crowds.

He also wing-walked. He climbed out of the cockpit, stood on the lower wing in sixty-to-seventy-mile-per-hour slipstream, with perhaps one handhold on a strut and a cow pasture five hundred feet below.

Other pilots called it feel - an ability to read an airplane through his hands and the seat of his pants that went beyond technique into something closer to instinct. He became the chief pilot of the Gates Flying Circus, and what he was doing in the air was at the actual edge of what the hardware and the physics could support.

How Did Barnstormers Actually Make Money?

The stunts were the advertisement. The money was in the rides.

Five dollars bought a seat in the front cockpit of a Jenny for a farmer who had never been more than ten feet off the ground. For rural Americans in the early 1920s, that was real money - and they paid it. The aerial spectacles drew the crowd; the passenger flights paid the fuel bills.

The daily life of a Circus crew was punishing. They arrived at fairgrounds the evening before, negotiated with local promoters, walked fields for rocks and soft spots, slept where they could, and were performing by mid-morning. Maintenance was improvised with whatever parts could be sourced from the previous town.

Why Did Barnstorming End?

The Air Commerce Act of 1926 brought federal regulation to civil aviation for the first time. Aircraft had to be certified. Pilots had to be licensed. The era of loading a Jenny into a barn and flying to the next county with no paperwork was closing.

Pangborn moved with it. He got his certificates and kept flying. And he started thinking about the Pacific Ocean.

How Did Pangborn Plan the Pacific Crossing?

In 1931, Pangborn and wealthy amateur aviator Hugh Herndon Jr. set out to fly around the world for a speed record in a Bellanca CH-300 Pacemaker named the Miss Veedol, after a motor oil brand. They made an unscheduled landing in the Soviet Union - not a country that welcomed unannounced American aircraft in 1931 - were detained, had their equipment searched, and lost enough time that the round-the-world record attempt was finished.

They were stranded in Japan with a capable airplane. America was roughly 4,500 miles away across open ocean. No one had ever flown it nonstop. Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic four years earlier. The Pacific was the last great over-water crossing.

Why Did Pangborn Drop the Landing Gear Over the Ocean?

The Bellanca’s high-lift wing was known for carrying serious fuel loads relative to airframe weight. But the fuel requirements for a Pacific crossing were still severe. Every pound of hardware that wasn’t fuel was weight they couldn’t afford.

Pangborn’s solution was to take off with full fuel, get established over the ocean, and then drop the landing gear permanently into the sea. Not retract it - drop it. The weight savings and drag reduction meaningfully changed the fuel equation on a forty-hour crossing.

After takeoff from Sabishiro Beach on the northern coast of Japan, Pangborn climbed out of the cockpit, onto the fuselage, and manually released the landing gear struts. He watched them fall into the Pacific. At that point, there was no returning to Japan.

What Happened During the 41-Hour Crossing?

The next 41 hours and 13 minutes included turbulence, stretches of overcast with no horizon reference, and hours in the night when the only orientation came from the instrument panel. The kind of flying that strips the romance out of aviation and replaces it with something more fundamental.

The engine ran.

They crossed the date line, flew through the night and into the morning, and the Cascade Mountains of Washington State appeared through the haze. Pangborn brought the Miss Veedol around on a long final approach for a field near Wenatchee, Washington, and put her down on her belly in the grass.

Both men walked away.

Why Isn’t Pangborn More Famous?

The crossing was covered by newspapers. There was a crowd at the field, handshaking, and a prize from Japan for completing the Pacific flight. But there was no ticker-tape parade in New York.

Part of it is the story’s shape. Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic alone and landed in Paris in front of a hundred thousand people at night - a clean, cinematic ending. Pangborn belly-landed in a wheat field in eastern Washington with his co-pilot and a local crowd. The ending didn’t photograph as well.

Pangborn kept flying through World War II, ferrying aircraft for the British and working as a test pilot. He died in Seattle in 1958, at age 63. His name is on the wall at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

The Miss Veedol was scrapped not long after the crossing.

Why the Barnstorming Era Matters to Aviation History

Aviation writers of the 1920s sometimes dismissed the barnstormers, worried that watching a biplane fail in an outside loop might give the public a poor impression of serious aviation. Early airline promoters shared the concern.

They missed the point.

The barnstormers were the ones who made the public fall in love with flying. The children who watched Jennies clear the tree line at county fairs grew up to support aviation programs, vote for airport funding, and send their own children to flight school. No promotional campaign could do what Clyde Pangborn did by climbing out of that cockpit at five hundred feet and standing on the wing.

The skills that got Pangborn across the Pacific - reading an engine through sound alone, holding composure when panic would be the most natural response, improvising solutions on the fly with no margin for error - were the skills built in those barnstorming years. When he was over the Pacific at two in the morning with no landing gear and no easy alternatives, he was flying the same way he had always flown.

Key Takeaways

• The Gates Flying Circus (founded ~1921) performed for an estimated 2–3 million Americans, making it one of the most significant public introductions to aviation in U.S. history.
• Clyde Pangborn earned the nickname “Upside Down Pangborn” performing outside loops and extended inverted flight in 1920s biplanes with no inverted oil systems.
• On October 4, 1931, Pangborn and Hugh Herndon Jr. departed Sabishiro Beach, Japan, in the Bellanca CH-300 Pacemaker Miss Veedol for a nonstop Pacific crossing.
• To improve range, Pangborn dropped the landing gear into the ocean mid-flight, then belly-landed the airplane near Wenatchee, Washington, after 41 hours and 13 minutes and 4,558 miles.
• The barnstorming era produced pilots whose skills - improvised problem-solving, equipment knowledge, and composure under pressure - proved directly transferable to the long-distance record flights of the 1930s.