Though not a household name now, Clyde Pangborn led a remarkable life of derring-do.
He made the first nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean, at one point crawling outside the plane to fix a problem. Pangborn was also a barnstormer, a flight instructor, a test pilot, and a war hero.
Luckily, his exploits live on in mementos, photos, newspaper clippings, and letters housed in Washington State University’s library, donated by his brother Percy after Clyde Pangborn’s death in 1958.
Although technically the first nonstop trans-Pacific flight,
USPS commemorated the flight thusly in 1981. (Courtesy US Postal Service)
The Pangborn brothers grew up in eastern Washington and north Idaho, but neither had a connection with Washington State College. Percy learned of the library’s archival work and wrote to ask if WSU would be interested in his brother’s papers.
Mary Avery, a library archivist at the time, said WSU was “most excited” to have a firsthand account of the history of aviation. She discussed the archive and Clyde Pangborn’s achievements in a 1967 program filmed at WSU.
Perhaps the most famous of Pangborn’s achievements was the first nonstop, trans-Pacific flight in 1931. That wasn’t Pangborn’s initial goal, however. He and navigator Hugh Herndon had hoped to set a record for the fastest around-the-world flight before bad weather dashed that plan. But they knew a Japanese newspaper was promising a $25,000 cash prize for the first flight across the Pacific, so they headed to Japan.
They weren’t greeted warmly. In fact, the Japanese police believed them to be spies and arrested them and confiscated their plane, the Miss Veedol. Correspondence in the WSU archive indicates the delicate negotiations that took place to free the aviators.
A letter to Percy Pangborn from the president of the company that sponsored the original around-the-world flight said there had been no press coverage of their arrest because the US State Department had “asked us to help them by not arousing an anti-Japanese feeling here in the states. It seems that there is a very bad political situation in Japan at this time …”
Pangborn’s mother wrote to US senator William Borah of Idaho, imploring him to use his influence on “behalf of the boys.” Borah responded, “I would not worry. Everything is being done that can be done and I think it will work out all right.”
It did work out. The aviators were fined and told to leave Japan and not return.
They loaded up the Miss Veedol with more fuel than was recommended for the 1931 Bellanca Skyrocket CH-400 plane and took off on the 4,500-mile flight—longer than Charles Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic. To make the fuel stretch even farther, Pangborn designed a system to ditch the landing gear over the ocean; the initial drawings are among his papers at WSU. But two struts didn’t release, requiring Pangborn to climb outside the airplane in freezing wind, miles above the ocean, to loosen them.
Such a terrifying feat might have been easy for a former barnstormer like Pangborn, though.
After teaching flying in World War I, he toured the country performing “death-defying flying stunts” with the Gates Flying Circus. He received great acclaim for a “miracle of the air” in 1924, when a stuntwoman’s parachute caught on the landing gear of the plane he was piloting and he helped rescue her. “No movie thriller…has ever approached the remarkable achievement of three acrobatic airmen,” a newspaper clipping breathlessly reports.
Otto Ross (’49 Hort.) was a young boy living in Orondo when Pangborn and Herndon landed in Wenatchee. “We’d been hearing about (the trans-Pacific flight) on the radio for quite some time,” says Ross, who’s now 98. “Dad bundled us up into the car and we got to Wenatchee. Pangborn and Herndon were still standing and talking to people. It was just such a thrill to be there. I may have shaken their hands, I can’t remember, but at least I got to go all the way around their airplane. Right from there on, I always wanted to be a flier.”
Ross would go on to become a pilot and says every time he landed on the airstrip at Fancher Field where Herndon had belly-landed the Miss Veedol, he’d remember seeing Pangborn and Herndon there.
After success in the trans-Pacific flight, Pangborn won other aviation prizes. He became a test and demonstration pilot. When World War II began, he joined the Royal Air Force Ferry Command and made more than 170 flights to deliver much-needed American- and Canadian-made planes to support combat operations in Europe. Flights left from Canada, and among his papers is a surrogate Canadian passport that’s covered in immigration stamps dated 1941 through 1945. His wartime service “may have been his greatest contribution” to aviation, according to Pangborn’s entry on the US Centennial of Flight website.
Clyde Pangborn is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The regional airport in Wenatchee is named after him. And WSU holds his papers—as archivist Avery called them in 1967, “an exciting slice of Washington history.”
Here are online resources to learn more
about this aviation first:
WSU Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections houses the extensive Clyde Edward Pangborn Collection. View some of its contents through their digital collections.
WSU Libraries’ films have videos discussing the collection and showing newsreel footage of the flight’s actual landing and ticker tape celebrations.
Photos from the collection, as well as from additional sources, have been gathered in a special magazine photo gallery.
The Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center has a permanent exhibit on Clyde Pangborn, “Home Address: Anywhere in the Air.” They also provide a virtual tour.
The Spirit of Wenatchee has a replica of the Miss Veedol found at air shows throughout the Pacific Northwest. They also makes presentations to schools and community groups to keep the memory of the first nonstop, trans-Pacific flight alive.
Find this all at magazine.wsu.edu/extra/derring-do.
Web exclusive
Witness to flight history: Otto Ross’s story