Otto Ross, 98, says he’s one of the few people left who witnessed Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon’s 1931 achievement of the first nonstop, trans-Pacific flight.
No one really knew where Pangborn and Herndon would land after they took off from Japan; they didn’t have a radio on the plane to save on weight.
“Mrs. Pangborn (Clyde’s mother) and his brother (Percy), who was a jeweler in Wenatchee, were convinced he was going to land in Wenatchee,” Ross (’49 Hort.) says. “It was just electrifying that something like this would happen.”
Ross says Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic got so much press, but Pangborn and Herndon’s flight “was so much more difficult.”
At Fancher Field, where the aviators landed the plane in East Wenatchee, “we got to look at the airplane and look at how they landed, and hear the story of how Pangborn, while they were under arrest in Japan, had the time to reinforce the belly on Miss Veedol.” That was necessary because the pilot planned all along to belly-land the plane after dropping the landing gear over the ocean.
Ross joined the US Navy out of high school and was in training to become a pilot but, with the end of the war, the need declined.
“They said, ‘Well, we’ve got too many aviation cadets, you can either stay in or get out.’ I went back to Washington State College and studied horticulture. I was in the Sigma Nu fraternity and graduated in 1949.”
He started working in his father’s orchard in Orondo and eventually bought the business. Ross started a second orchard nearby overlooking the Columbia River – “just beautiful,” he says. Later, he and a Sigma Nu fraternity brother bought yet another orchard in Quincy.
Ross bought a small plane and built runways at his orchards so he could fly between Orondo and Quincy.
“I still have a little airstrip here, the Ross Orchards landing strip at Orondo. It’s still on the map,” he says. But soon after graduating from WSC, flying competed with skiing for Ross’s attention.
“There was a bunch of us who wanted to go skiing, and we started skiing at Stevens Pass. I’m still skiing at 98 and I still teach a class at Mission Ridge. I’ve been invited back for next year.”
Courtesy Mission Ridge / X