The Gates Flying Circus, Ivan Gates, and Upside-Down Pangborn - the Barnstorming Outfit That Sold America Its First Airplane Ride a Dollar at a Time

The Gates Flying Circus was the largest and most organized barnstorming outfit in American history, founded in the early 1920s by showman Ivan Gates. By slashing the price of an airplane ride from the going rate of $10–$15 down to just $1, Gates put more than one million Americans in the air for their first flight - many of them seeing their own towns from above for the very first time.

Where the Gates Flying Circus Came From

After the end of World War I, hundreds of surplus military trainers sat idle across the country, available cheap. The two workhorses were the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” and the lesser-remembered Standard J-1 - both wood-and-wire, two-seat trainers.

The Standard shipped from the factory with a troublesome Hall-Scott engine prone to catching fire. Savvy operators pulled it and bolted on a war-surplus Hispano-Suiza engine - a “Hisso” - turning an unreliable machine into a cheap, honest, dependable airplane.

Ivan Gates looked at all those idle airplanes and all those small towns full of people who had never seen an aircraft up close, and he saw a business. The Gates Flying Circus was born.

What Made Gates Different From Other Barnstormers

There were dozens of barnstorming outfits and hundreds of lone-wolf pilots in those years. What set Gates apart was that Ivan Gates was not a pilot - he was a showman and a businessman who built the biggest, most organized flying circus the country ever saw.

Most barnstormers charged $10 to $15 per ride. In 1922, that was more than a working man earned in a week, so the average person took one flight in a lifetime - if ever.

Gates flipped the model. He dropped the price to $5, then clean down to $1 a ride, and made his money on volume. He would keep three or four airplanes in constant rotation - load, launch, land, and reload - from morning until the field went dark.

To move that many people, the Standard J-1s were modified with a wider front cockpit that could seat two or even three passengers wedged in shoulder to shoulder. Riders climbed to roughly 500 feet over their own hometowns and, for the first time, looked down on their own house, their church steeple, and their fields laid out like a quilt.

Who Was “Upside-Down” Pangborn?

The circus’s biggest star was Clyde Pangborn, nicknamed “Upside-Down Pangborn” for his habit of rolling a wood-and-fabric biplane inverted and flying it low over the crowd - holding it upside down until the castor oil ran the wrong way and the engine coughed for fuel.

His signature act was the plane change. Two Standards flew in formation, one above the other. A wing walker - often with no parachute - climbed out of the upper airplane, hung from a rope ladder in the propeller blast, and dropped onto the wing of the lower aircraft. Pangborn frequently flew the receiving airplane, holding it steady while a performer’s life dangled from the top wing.

The circus also featured wing walkers who stood atop the upper wing at cruise, arms spread wide. One of its best-known performers was Rosalie Gordon, a young woman of about 90 pounds who made the ladder climb look almost graceful.

These stunts carried real danger. Barnstorming lived right at the edge of what was survivable, and performers knew the risks they were taking.

How Barnstorming Shaped American Aviation

When the circus came to town, one airplane would peel off and fly low down Main Street, engine roaring off the storefronts, scattering handbills onto the sidewalks advertising the show at the local fairgrounds. By afternoon, a thousand people might line a hayfield, cars and wagons parked three deep.

That hayfield spectacle is where a whole generation caught the flying bug - not in a classroom, but watching an inverted Standard roar over the crowd. A young airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh barnstormed in exactly these years, working the same hayfields before he ever flew his Ryan monoplane to Paris.

Why the Barnstorming Era Ended

Two forces, really the same force, brought the curtain down.

First, the supply of cheap surplus airplanes dried up, and the aircraft still flying were wearing out.

Second, and more decisively, the federal government stepped in. In 1926, Congress passed the Air Commerce Act - the direct ancestor of today’s aviation regulatory system. It created the first federal pilot licenses, the first aircraft airworthiness certificates, and rules governing how low aircraft could fly over towns.

Every one of those sensible rules was a nail in the coffin of the flying circus, because the entire trade depended on flying low over crowds in uninspected airplanes flown by unlicensed pilots. By the end of the 1920s, the Gates Flying Circus had folded, and Ivan Gates himself met a sad end a few years later during the Depression.

What Happened to Clyde Pangborn

Clyde Pangborn never stopped flying. In 1931, a few years after the circus wound down, he and partner Hugh Herndon flew a red monoplane named Miss Veedol nonstop across the Pacific Ocean - from Japan to Washington State - becoming the first people ever to make that crossing.

To lighten the aircraft, Pangborn did something only a barnstormer would think of: he dumped the landing gear into the sea after takeoff. Roughly 40 hours later, running on fumes over Wenatchee, Washington, he set the monoplane down on its belly in the dirt and walked away - a barnstormer’s landing on the far side of an ocean crossing.

Why These Airplanes Still Matter

Barnstorming was not a dead end; it was the schoolhouse of American aviation. The pilots who learned by the seat of their pants over a Kansas hayfield went on to fly the mail, cross oceans, win wars, and build the airlines.

That’s why organizations like the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) matter. When you walk the vintage rows at Oshkosh and find a genuine Standard J-1 or Curtiss Jenny restored down to the last turnbuckle, you’re looking at the airplane that may have given your great-grandmother her first ride - the start of everything.

Key Takeaways

• The Gates Flying Circus, founded by Ivan Gates in the early 1920s, was the largest and most organized barnstorming operation in U.S. history.
• By cutting ride prices from $10–$15 to just $1, Gates gave more than one million Americans their first airplane flight.
• Its star, Clyde “Upside-Down” Pangborn, was famous for inverted low passes and mid-air plane-change stunts.
• The 1926 Air Commerce Act, which introduced federal pilot licenses and aircraft certification, effectively ended the barnstorming era.
• In 1931, Pangborn and Hugh Herndon flew Miss Veedol on the first nonstop transpacific flight, from Japan to Wenatchee, Washington.