FIRST - Nonstop transpacific flight - East Wenatchee, WA - First of its Kind on Waymarking.com

In the summer of 1931, barnstorming pilot Clyde ‘Upside Down’ Pangborn (so named because he often showed off by flying his Curtiss Jenny upside down while training pilots during World War I) and international playboy Hugh Herndon Jr. attempted to break the record for flying around the world which was set just a few months before by Wiley Post and Harold Gatty. Though they got off to a good start, they became bogged down in Siberia and had to abandon their effort. Before giving up completely, they heard about another contest - the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun was offering $25,000 to the first pilots to fly nonstop across the Pacific Ocean. Pangborn and Herndon decided to give it a shot and flew to Japan rather than back to America.

On the morning of October 3, 1931, Pangborn and Herndon took off from Sabishiro beach in Japan in their specially modified Bellanca CH-400 Skyrocket named ‘Miss Veedol.’ A little over 41 hours later, they would land near this spot in what is now East Wenatchee, securing the $25,000 prize and their names in the history books.

The account of Pangborn and Herndon’s flight is a fascinating one. First, there had been three unsuccessful attempts made before theirs - none getting more than halfway. The modifications made to the Bellanca aircraft included adding extra fuel tanks and rigging the landing gear so that it could be jettisoned after takeoff to reduce drag. This, of course, guaranteed a crash landing, so skids were added underneath the fuselage. To keep the weight down, they brought very little with them - they didn’t even wear shoes.

When the landing gear didn’t completely fall off, Pangborn, in true barnstormer fashion, crawled outside the plane to manually remove it. Another time, Herndon forgot to switch to the backup fuel tank and the engine ran out of fuel and died. Pangborn brought the plane into a nosedive causing the propeller to ‘windmill’ in order to restart the engine.

To win the prize money, Pangborn and Herndon only had to reach the continental United States and the first suitable landing spot would have been Seattle, so why Wenatchee? Well, as it turns out, Wenatchee was Clyde Pangborn’s hometown, so I’ve got to think that he had his sights set on Wenatchee all along. Actually, they had flown as far as Spokane in an attempt to set a distance record in addition to the nonstop transpacific flight but thought better of it and returned to Wenatchee.

Upon their successful, albeit crash landing in Washington state, Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon Jr. became instant celebrities. But even in 1931 record-setting flights were becoming a commonplace. Newspapers at the time were more concerned with the World Series than this flight. Today, Pangborn and Herndon are all but forgotten. There’s a permanent exhibit about the historic flight at the Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center which includes, among other things, the actual propeller from ‘Miss Veedol’ that had been damaged during the rough landing.

FIRST - Classification Variable: Item or Event Date of FIRST: 10/05/1931 More Information - Web URL: [Web Link]

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