1931: More than 41 hours after departing Japan, Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon Jr. perform a controlled crash landing near Wenatchee, Washington. After the dust settles, they emerge from the airplane to complete the first-ever nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean.

Pangborn had served as a flight instructor during World War I, and then followed the career path of many pilots of the 1920s, traveling the country as a barnstormer.

The stock market crash of 1929 brought an end both to Pangborn's barnstorming days and to the fledgling aircraft company he had co-founded. But the young pilot knew a fellow aviator who had flown as a demo pilot for the defunct company. And Hugh Herndon Jr. had money.

The two quickly started to put together ideas to keep them flying. The pair decided to break the around-the-world record then held by a German Zeppelin. After months of planning in early 1931, Pangborn and Herndon suffered a setback when Wiley Post broke the record flying his Lockheed Vega.

Despite the record being shortened from 20 days to less than 9, the duo decided to continue with their plans to fly. Their Bellanca Skyrocket departed New York on July 28. After landing in a storm in Siberia, the aviators were more than a day behind schedule and decided to abandon their attempt to break the record.

Instead Pangborn and Herndon decided to go for the $25,000 prize (worth about $360,000 in today's money) offered by a Japanese newspaper for the first nonstop flight between Japan and the United States.

On Oct. 4 (Japanese time), the Bellanca, named Miss Veedol for a brand of motor oil, lifted off from an 8,000-foot runway in Misawa, north of Tokyo. The small single-engine airplane was heavily modified to carry 930 gallons of fuel on board, but Pangborn was worried they wouldn't make it to the United States unless the weather was perfect. So he decided to save fuel by making the flight without landing gear.

Miss Veedol was modified with a primitive – and disposable – precursor to retractable landing gear. Instead of having the gear fold inside the airplane, Pangborn rigged a mechanism that simply dropped the main gear off the plane during flight. Without the gear, the more aerodynamic airplane could fly 15 mph faster and gain 600 miles in range. Of course when it came time to land, it would be a rough touchdown.

A few hours into their flight, the gear was released, but only the wheels fell off. The landing gear struts remained in place. Pangborn knew this would reduce the range and make the belly landing much more dangerous. So at 14,000 feet over the Pacific, the former barnstormer walked on out on the wing struts and freed the rest of the landing gear.

The creative aerodynamic improvement paid off, and after nearly 40 hours of flying, Miss Veedol crossed the west coast of the United States. Not content with simply making it across the Pacific, Pangborn wanted to set a new long-distance record by flying across Washington state to the eastern part of the state or all the way to Idaho. But fog blanketed the region, and the Bellanca turned around, back to the west to find a suitable landing site.

Pangborn decided to fly to Wenatchee, in the middle of Washington. He had grown up nearby, and his mother still lived there.

Just after 7 in the morning on Oct. 5, Miss Veedol flew over Wenatchee, and Pangborn managed a nearly perfect belly landing in a large open field. The propeller struck the ground, but the airplane was largely undamaged.

Pangborn and Herndon had flown more than 41 hours and covered more than 5,500 miles. Despite being the first to cross the Pacific – a flight longer than Lindbergh's Atlantic crossing – the duo won no fame or fortune beyond the prize. It wouldn't be until after World War II that an airplane would repeat the nonstop flight.

Pangborn went on to fly more than 24,000 hours in his 40-year flying career before dying in 1958. Today the airport in Wenatchee is known as Pangborn Memorial Airport.

The Experimental Aviation Association chapter in Wenatchee built a replica of Miss Veedol in 2003. The cities of Misawa and Wenatchee remain sister cities to this day, and there are plans to ship the new Miss Veedol to Japan in 2011, where it will fly in celebrations on the 80th anniversary of the historic nonstop flight.

Source: Various





Image: Miss Veedol touched down without landing gear at Fancher Field in East Wenatchee, Washington.

Courtesy Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center.

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