The Gates Flying Circus, Ivan Gates and Upside-Down Pangborn, and the Barnstorming Outfit That Sold a Million Americans Their First Ride

The Gates Flying Circus was the largest and most successful traveling airshow in American history, and it is credited with carrying more than a million passengers on their first-ever airplane rides during the 1920s. Founded by promoter Ivan Gates and led in the air by chief pilot Clyde “Upside-Down” Pangborn, the outfit turned barnstorming from a hand-to-mouth novelty into a nationwide business that introduced ordinary Americans to flight. More than any government program, it was a fleet of surplus biplanes and one-dollar rides that convinced a country the airplane belonged to them.

Where the Barnstorming Era Came From

When the Great War ended in 1918, the U.S. government was left holding a mountain of training airplanes it no longer needed. The star of that surplus was the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny,” a big, forgiving biplane that had taught thousands of young men to fly.

The government sold them off cheap. You could buy a brand-new Jenny, still in its shipping crate with the packing grease on the fittings, for a few hundred dollars - about the price of a good used car.

That created a strange new class of Americans: young men who knew how to fly and now owned an airplane, but had nowhere to fly it. There were no airlines, no real airports, no cargo routes, and no job called “pilot.”

So they invented their own work. A pilot would set down in a farm-town pasture, wait for the curious crowd to gather, lean on the wing, and offer a ride - usually five dollars to see your own barn from a thousand feet up. That was barnstorming, and for a few wild years it was the only flying game in the country.

What Made the Gates Flying Circus Different

Most barnstormers worked alone or in pairs, drifting between county fairs and sleeping under the wing. Ivan Gates had a bigger idea.

Gates wasn’t really a pilot. He was a promoter and showman who understood that in 1920 the airplane wasn’t transportation - it was spectacle, the most thrilling thing a small-town crowd could imagine. He reasoned that if one airplane drew a crowd, a whole branded fleet with an advance man riding ahead of the show could draw thousands.

So he built a squadron rather than a single ship - airplanes painted and numbered, staffed with pilots, wing walkers, and parachute jumpers working as a troupe. They would roll into town, tack up posters, buzz Main Street to announce themselves, and put on a show people talked about for the rest of their lives.

Who Was Clyde “Upside-Down” Pangborn?

Clyde Pangborn became the heart of the show. He was a quiet, serious man who didn’t drink much and didn’t brag - but in the air he was fearless in a way that’s hard to convey today. His nickname, “Upside-Down Pangborn,” was earned honestly: he flew his Standard biplane inverted low enough over the grandstand that spectators could read the numbers on his wings.

As field manager and chief pilot, Pangborn ran the circus like part business and part military campaign - advance men, a schedule, a payroll, and a roster of the best low-level pilots and stunt performers in the country.

At its peak, that organization carried better than a million passengers. If you were an ordinary American in the 1920s - a farmer, a shopkeeper, a schoolteacher, a kid - and you took your first airplane ride, there’s a real chance it was in a Gates airplane flown by one of Pangborn’s pilots out of a cow pasture on a Sunday afternoon.

What the Show Actually Looked Like

The circus arrived over town in formation, then broke off into stunts: loops, rolls, and spins that looked like the airplane was falling out of the sky before snapping back to life at the last second - with Pangborn inverted over the crowd.

Then came the wing walkers, and here the danger was real. Most performed without a parachute, because a chute was heavy and spoiled the effect. A performer would climb out of the front cockpit at seventy or eighty miles an hour, work out along the lower wing hanging onto flying wires thinner than a finger, and stand up at the wingtip with arms spread.

One signature act was the plane change: two airplanes flying formation, one stacked above the other, with a performer climbing to the top wing of the lower ship, grabbing a rope ladder trailing from the airplane above, and transferring between two moving aircraft in midair - with roughly 800 feet of open air below.

Some performers hung by their teeth, clamping down on a leather bit rigged to the airplane and letting go with both hands. It was the deadliest job in a deadly business. The wind, a slipped grip, or a gust off a treeline killed some of them, and everyone involved knew the risk. They did it anyway.

The One-Dollar Ride That Built an Aviation Nation

Ivan Gates’s smartest move wasn’t a stunt at all - it was a price cut. The standard barnstorming ride cost five dollars, a full day’s wage for many people, and plenty who wanted to go up simply couldn’t spare it.

So at certain shows, Gates dropped the price of a ride to one dollar.

The crowds came in like a tide. The circus flew people all day long - loading them in, taking them around the pattern, setting them down grinning, and loading the next one - turning the operation into an assembly line of joy.

Gates had grasped a lesson the airlines wouldn’t learn for another fifty years: you make it up on volume. Get the whole town in the air, and the whole town goes home believing in airplanes.

Why the Barnstorming Era Ended

Two forces ended barnstorming and the Gates Flying Circus with it.

The first was simple arithmetic. Wood rots, fabric tears, and engines wear out. The war-surplus Jennys didn’t last forever, and once the supply of cheap airplanes dried up, you couldn’t just buy another for a few hundred dollars.

The second was regulation. In 1926, Congress passed the Air Commerce Act, and for the first time the federal government began licensing pilots and airplanes and writing rules about how low and where you could fly.

Much of what made barnstorming what it was suddenly became illegal. You couldn’t drop into any pasture, fly a stunt fifty feet over a crowd, or put a wing walker out without a parachute. The wild, dangerous heart of the practice was regulated out of existence.

There’s a real loss in that - something brave and beautifully reckless disappeared. But those same rules are the reason a functioning aviation system exists at all. The licensing framework born from the Air Commerce Act became the Bureau of Air Commerce and eventually the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The certificate in your wallet, the medical, and the annual inspection on your airplane all trace back to the moment the country decided the barnstorming days had to end.

What Happened to Clyde Pangborn

The pasture stunt pilot went on to one of aviation’s landmark achievements. In 1931, just a few years after the circus wound down, Pangborn and Hugh Herndon made the first nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean, flying from Japan to the state of Washington.

To cut drag and save fuel, Pangborn dropped his landing gear into the sea after takeoff and set the airplane down on its belly on the far shore. The wing walker’s chief pilot had become one of the great long-distance aviators of the age.

The barnstorming era looks, from a distance, like a sideshow of daredevils and cow pastures. But it was really the nursery of American flight - where the pilots came from, where the mechanics learned their trade, and where a million ordinary people touched the sky for the first time. The airmail, the airlines, and the entire modern world of aviation grew out of that Sunday-afternoon pasture.

Key Takeaways

The Gates Flying Circus, founded by promoter Ivan Gates, was the largest traveling airshow in U.S. history and carried over a million passengers in the 1920s.
Chief pilot Clyde “Upside-Down” Pangborn ran the circus like a business and became famous for flying a Standard biplane inverted low over crowds.
Cheap war-surplus Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” biplanes, sold for a few hundred dollars after 1918, made the barnstorming boom possible.
Gates’s one-dollar ride used high volume to introduce entire towns to flight, a pricing insight that predated the airlines by decades.
The 1926 Air Commerce Act ended barnstorming but created the licensing framework that became the modern FAA; Pangborn later made the first nonstop Pacific crossing in 1931.