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Evergreen Journal: On a mission to repeat history
Group hopes to re-enact trans-Pacific flight
Wednesday, November 8, 2000
By CANDY HATCHER
EAST WENATCHEE -- Two nights a week, you can find the spirit of Wenatchee in an old airport hangar.
There's a dentist working with a retired fighter pilot, and a mechanic supervising a banker and an office manager, and a handful of other volunteers with solder and glue, all painstakingly constructing a piece of community pride.
When Washington native Clyde Pangborn flew from Misawa, Japan, to East Wenatchee in 1931 -- the first non-stop flight across the Pacific Ocean -- he set more in motion than his Bellanca airplane, Miss Veedol.
His feat won the international award for the greatest achievement in flight that year. It inspired a still-thriving sister-city relationship between Misawa and Wenatchee. And 67 years later, it brought together a group of private pilots intent on teaching their community about its legend.
In 2003, they're planning to celebrate the centennial of the Wright brothers' first flight by flying their homemade plane around the world.
The last leg of that flight, from Misawa to Pangborn Memorial Airport, will commemorate Pangborn's record-setting journey.
"It's not easy, but it's doable," said Len Pugsley, one of the project's chairmen who spends most Tuesday and Thursday nights building the plane, called, appropriately, the Spirit of Wenatchee.
"It's a wonderful opportunity. A great adventure."
Everyone working on this plane knows the story of Clyde Pangborn, down to his world records, his penchant for safety and his 41-hour, 13-minute flight Oct. 3-5, 1931.
"Clyde Pangborn was one of the finest pilots of that day," Pugsley said. "He was every bit the pilot" Charles Lindbergh was.
Pangborn, as chief pilot for the Gates Flying Circus in the 1920s, helped rescue a stunt
woman whose parachute had caught on the landing gear of his plane.
He was a barnstormer, then a test pilot before setting out with Hugh Herndon in 1931 to break the around-the-world flight record.
Pangborn, 34, had the skill and expertise; Herndon's family supplied the money. The two set out from New York in late July in a Bellanca Skyrocket, crossed the Atlantic and flew from Wales to London, then Berlin and Moscow.
Herndon, at the controls while Pangborn slept, got lost in Mongolia. Then, in Siberia, the plane landed in mud in a rainstorm, and the two abandoned plans to go after the record.
They were tried as spies, convicted and fined, but the Japanese government gave them one chance to resume flying. If that attempt failed, their plane would be confiscated.
Pangborn worried that the amount of fuel they'd need to get to Seattle would overload the plane, so he secretly designed a way to drop the plane's landing gear after takeoff to reduce the weight.
When the plane left the beach near Misawa, 200 miles north of Tokyo, it was carrying 930 gallons of fuel but no survival gear or navigational equipment. Not even a radio.
Three hours into the flight, Pangborn dropped the wheels, but the landing-gear struts did not release.
He knew that trying a belly landing with struts still attached would kill them.
Flying at 14,000 feet, Pangborn climbed out the cockpit window, onto the wing supports and, hanging onto the plane with one hand, removed the struts.
Early the morning of Oct. 5, Pangborn was looking for clear weather to land in the Northwest. Seattle, Spokane and the Tri-Cities were too foggy. He knew Wenatchee, where his mother and brother were waiting, would be better.
Pangborn guided the plane to a near-perfect belly landing at Fancher Field, winning recognition, but no money, for his feat. Eventually, his plane was sold. It disappeared somewhere south of England and was never recovered.
Pangborn continued flying, piloting the first night air express from New York to Los Angeles. He worked as a test pilot and senior captain in the Royal Air Force Ferry Command. He held the world record for airplane-to-airplane exchanges.
When he died in 1958, he had accumulated more than 24,000 hours of flying time. He never lost an airplane, never harmed a passenger.
Arnie Clarke will be at the controls next time.
Clarke, 65, a retired Air Force pilot who was shot down twice over Vietnam and has survived two crash landings since, plans to fly the Spirit of Wenatchee from Misawa to East Wenatchee. He will land the Bellanca replica on its belly, just as Pangborn did.
First, they'd need a plane. Buying a Bellanca, they decided, would be too costly and the repairs too extensive. But when Len Pugsley, Brian Odell and Rick Ruffle, all pilots, began reading about the planes people had built and flown to commemorate the first trip between London and Australia, they thought:
Why not build our own Bellanca?
"It didn't take a lot of money to get started," Clarke said, "and it was an adventure."
Pugsley remembers looking at photographs of Pangborn's plane. "It looked buildable," he said.
About two years ago, they tried to get blueprints from the descendants of the Bellanca family. They were turned down because of liability concerns.
So the group borrowed the fuselage of a 1930 Bellanca Pacemaker from a San Francisco collector and drew up plans using reverse engineering.
They needed somewhere to build it. A dilapidated hangar at Wenatchee's airport was empty; the port districts of Chelan and Douglas counties donated it.
Volunteers rewired the building, repaired the roof, redid the floors, put in heat and new doors, rebuilt the kitchen and painted.
The volunteers have drifted in and out, although most of the dozen that made up the core have stuck with the project. East Wenatchee's Rotary Club has pitched in. Ditto for the community foundation.
Residents of Misawa, Japan, are building a part for the plane. They've donated money, visited Wenatchee and are keeping track of the Wenatchee group's prog
ress.
The pilots have divvied up responsibilities. Clarke, a flight instructor for 30 years and the one who plans to train the pilots, had several conversations with a man who had been a mechanic for Pangborn in the 1930s.
Ron Jacobus, a retired dentist and electrical engineer, was put in charge of wood construction. Ruffle, a hydro mechanic and machinist, coordinates the metal work.
The fuselage they are copying was hauled out of a swamp in Alaska, rusty and missing several pieces.
The metal they are molding used to be a fish ladder at the Rocky Reach Dam.
The pilots have held pancake breakfasts and picnics and auctions to raise money. They are selling T-shirts and sweat shirts and pins. It's slow going, they admit.
But "compared to the early pioneers," Pugsley said, "the troubles we're having are very minor."
"All of us that build this airplane and are involved are the ones who will fly it around the world," he said. The plane will have tiny cameras, like those NASCAR uses, installed in the cockpit.
They hope schoolchildren will follow the flight on the Internet (see the project's Web site: www.spiritofwenatchee.com) and learn something about flying and history.
It's time for Wenatchee to shed its association with a child sex-abuse scandal and become known for something positive, the pilots said.
Added Nanette Neely: "We want it to be a community project to bring people together."
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
These people are on a mission. They're working to build -- and eventually fly -- a replica of the plane that put their town in the aviation history books 69 years ago.
If they can raise the money, if they can get the fuselage finished and the wings built and all the machinery working, these people have a chance to bring international acclaim to a town that, lately, has had more than its share of bad publicity.
Arnie Clark, chief pilot of the Spirit of Wenatchee, inspects the steel frame that he and other volunteers are assembling in a Wenatchee hangar. The plane is a replica of Miss Veedol, a Bellanca aircraft that Washington native Clyde Pangborn flew non-stop from Misawa, Japan, to East Wenatchee in 1931. The group hopes to repeat the historic feat.
Gilbert W. Arias/P-I
The story of Pangborn
They realized they still could collect $25,000 if they were the first to fly from Japan to the United States. But when they landed in Tokyo, they were arrested, charged with flying through a no-fly zone and with taking photos illegally of Japanese military installments.
Rollin Goodman eyes the plane's rear elevator. He is one of the many volunteers on the Spirit of Wenatchee project, which is building a replica of a 1930s Bellanca. In 2003, they hope to celebrate the centennial of the Wright brothers' first flight by flying their homemade plane around the world.
Gilbert W. Arias/P-I
New pilot a Vietnam vet
Like the others in the core group of volunteers building the plane, he is a member of the Experimental Aircraft Association, which had bandied about the idea of replicating Pangborn's journey for several years.
Spirit of Wenatchee volunteers Brian McNeill, left, Pat Moore and Rollin Goodman work on the plane's elevator in a hangar donated by Chelan and Douglas counties. Volunteers rewired the building, repaired the roof, redid the floors, put in heat and new doors, rebuilt the kitchen and painted. The pilots have held pancake breakfasts and picnics and auctions to raise money.
Gilbert W. Arias/P-I
P-I reporter Candy Hatcher can be reached at 206-448-8320 or candyhatcher@seattle-pi.com
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