The Gates Flying Circus, Clyde Pangborn, and the Barnstorming Troupe That Sold a Million Americans Their First Airplane Ride

The Gates Flying Circus was the most successful barnstorming troupe of the 1920s, an organized fleet of biplanes and pilots that, by its own count, carried roughly one million passengers on their first-ever airplane rides. Founded in 1922 by promoter Ivan Gates, the circus succeeded by slashing the price of a ride from the going rate of five dollars down to one dollar, putting flight within reach of entire towns rather than a wealthy few. Its star pilot, Clyde “Upside-Down” Pangborn, would later make the first nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean.

Where Barnstorming Came From

When World War I ended in 1918, the U.S. government was left holding thousands of surplus training aircraft it no longer needed. The most common was the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” - a slow, forgiving, open-cockpit biplane powered by a 90-horsepower OX-5 engine simple enough for a mechanic to keep running with baling wire and stubbornness.

The Army sold these planes off for a few hundred dollars apiece. For young men who had learned to fly in the war and couldn’t imagine returning to a desk or a plow, that low price was the only door open to them. They bought the Jennies and went looking for a way to make a living.

That living was barnstorming: a pilot would fly until he found a town, circle low over Main Street to get everyone looking up, then land in a farmer’s field. He’d offer the farmer a ride to smooth things over, then sell rides to the crowd - often five dollars each, sometimes a dollar a minute - to people leaving the ground for the first time in human history. Most barnstormers worked alone or in pairs, flying into town, working the crowd for a day or two, and moving on before the money dried up.

What Made the Gates Flying Circus Different

Ivan Gates was not a pilot - he was a promoter with a gift for spectacle. Rather than drift from town to town with a single airplane, he built a full traveling organization: a fleet of aircraft, a stable of pilots, mechanics, ticket takers, and advance men who papered a town’s fences and barns with handbills a week before the show arrived.

When the Gates Flying Circus rolled into a county, it was an event on the scale of the fair or the circus coming to town - except this circus flew.

Gates’s real innovation was his pricing philosophy. While competitors charged whatever the market would bear, Gates cut the price of a ride to one dollar, and sometimes let children fly for even less. Rivals thought he’d lost his mind - you couldn’t make money at a dollar a head.

But Gates understood something they didn’t. At five dollars, one man in town would ride and the rest would watch. At one dollar, the whole town lined up. He wasn’t selling to the wealthy; he was selling to everybody. Over its years of operation, the circus introduced roughly a million Americans to the sky, one dollar at a time - a substantial share of a nation that had mostly never seen an airplane up close.

Who Was Clyde “Upside-Down” Pangborn?

Clyde Pangborn - “Pang” to those who knew him - was born in the high country of Washington State. He had been a flight instructor during the war, teaching cadets, and afterward signed on with Gates. He quickly rose to become the outfit’s chief pilot, the man the entire program was built around.

His nickname told you everything: Upside-Down Pangborn. He could fly a Jenny inverted, low and slow, holding it there while the 90-horse engine coughed and starved because its fuel system was never designed to run upside down. He’d fly the length of the crowd on his back before rolling out at an altitude that would horrify a modern insurance man.

The Stunts: Wing Walking and the Plane Change

Every circus needs a star act, and the Gates Flying Circus had two of the most dangerous ever performed.

The first was the wing walker - a man standing, unstrapped, on the top wing of a Jenny in a hundred-mile-an-hour wind trying to peel him off the airplane.

The second, and far more difficult, was the plane change. A second aircraft would climb above the first and unroll a rope ladder from its belly, whipping in the slipstream. The man on the lower wing would catch the ladder and climb from one airplane up into another in mid-air, with nothing beneath him but a thousand feet of open sky.

Pangborn was the pilot who made the plane change work. The stunt lived or died on the flying: two airplanes had to hold tight formation, one directly above the other, close enough for a man to bridge the gap and steady enough that a single gust wouldn’t turn the act into a funeral. The wing walker got the applause, but the pilots holding those two machines in the same piece of sky were doing the truly hard thing.

How Dangerous Was Barnstorming?

It was brutally, genuinely dangerous. Barnstormers flew worn-out war-surplus airplanes with no reliable parachutes in the early days, into fields they had never seen, in weather they had no way to forecast. The OX-5 engine could quit without warning, and often did.

The government, in those first years, had almost nothing to say about any of it. There was no pilot’s license to earn, no airworthiness inspection, and no rules governing how low you could fly over a crowd or how worn an airplane could be before it had to be grounded. A man could buy a Jenny on Monday, teach himself to fly by Wednesday, and be selling rides over a county fair by Saturday. Many did exactly that - and many died doing it. Nearly every stunt a spectator watched had already killed someone, somewhere, who tried it and got it wrong.

How Barnstorming Led to the FAA

Out of all that recklessness came the framework that made American aviation safe.

By the mid-1920s, the accidents had become a public scandal. Barnstormers had proven to the whole country that the airplane was real, that it worked, and that ordinary people wanted to fly - but the crashes were making headlines and giving aviation a reputation as a death trap. The people who could see where it was all heading understood that flying would never mature past a carnival act without rules.

So in 1926, Congress passed the Air Commerce Act. That law created the framework we still fly under today: pilot licensing, aircraft certification, and rules of the air. It was the direct ancestor of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

A large part of why that law was written - the reason the public demanded it - was the barnstormers themselves. By flying so hard, so low, and so close to the edge, they forced the country to decide what kind of aviation it wanted. And in doing so, they flew themselves out of a job: once you needed a licensed pilot and a certified airplane and could no longer buzz a crowd at fifty feet, the wide-open era was over. The Gates Flying Circus wound down at the end of the 1920s.

Clyde Pangborn’s First Nonstop Flight Across the Pacific

The people the circus made didn’t disappear. In 1931, Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon made the first nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean, flying from Japan to Washington State.

To make the weight and fuel work, Pangborn drew on years spent crawling around the outside of airplanes in flight. He rigged his aircraft to drop its landing gear after takeoff to cut drag - and when part of the gear hung up and didn’t release cleanly, he climbed out onto the struts of his own airplane over the open Pacific to knock it loose by hand.

He flew across the widest ocean on Earth and bellied the plane into a field in Washington State, not far from the high country where he was born - one half of the first crew ever to cross the Pacific nonstop. It was the barnstormer’s story compressed into a single flight: the nerve to climb out onto the airplane, and the skill to bring it home.

The Legacy of the Gates Flying Circus

The barnstormers weren’t careful - but they were the ones who took a nation with its feet firmly on the ground and taught it to look up. In an era when avgas was cheap and airspace was nearly unregulated, the Gates Flying Circus put a million ordinary Americans in the air and, in the process, helped push the country toward the regulations that made modern flight possible.

Key Takeaways

The Gates Flying Circus, founded by promoter Ivan Gates in 1922, was the most successful barnstorming troupe of the era, carrying an estimated one million passengers.
Gates’s key innovation was dropping the price of a ride to one dollar, opening flight to entire towns rather than just the wealthy.
Barnstormers flew war-surplus Curtiss JN-4 “Jennies” with unreliable OX-5 engines in an almost completely unregulated environment, making the work extremely dangerous.
The public outcry over accidents helped drive the Air Commerce Act of 1926, the direct ancestor of today’s FAA.
Star pilot Clyde “Upside-Down” Pangborn went on to make the first nonstop Pacific crossing in 1931, flying from Japan to Washington State.