In 1931, Pangborn and co-pilot Hugh Herndon Jr. flew their plane, Miss Veedol, on the first non-stop flight across the Pacific Ocean.

The 1900 United States census listed Clyde Pangborn (b. October 1893) and his brother Percy (b. January 1891) living with their mother Ola [sic.]

He graduated from high school in 1914 and enrolled in the University of Idaho, where he studied civil engineering for two and a half years.

After college, Pangborn worked briefly as an engineer for a mining company before he joined the Air Service during World War I.

[citation needed] After World War I, Pangborn took up barnstorming, exhibition flying, and aerial acrobatics, which he did for the next nine years.

He received national fame after assisting in a mid-air rescue of stuntwoman Rosalie Gordon, who had become caught on Pangborn's landing gear while demonstrating a parachute jump, in Houston, Texas.

The Great Depression, however, made them all go bankrupt, and as a result, he turned his attention to breaking world records in flight.

In 1931, Pangborn and Herndon sought to fly around the world and break the current record of 20 days and 4 hours, set by the airship Graf Zeppelin in 1929.

Herndon, the son of Standard Oil heiress Alice Boardman, asked his mother for the $100,000 to finance the flight.

Pangborn and Herndon attempted the flight anyway, taking off from New York on July 28, 1931, in their red Bellanca J-300 Long Distance Special, the Miss Veedol, but poor weather conditions forced them to abandon their efforts while they were flying over Siberia.

Three hours after takeoff, a problem arose: the device intended to jettison the landing gear partially failed.

Because there was no built-in starter, Pangborn dove the airplane from cruise altitude and pulled out at 1,400 ft (430 m) to get the engine started.

Pangborn's mother, brother, and a reporter from the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun had already assumed Wenatchee was their destination and were there waiting for their arrival.

[14] Prior to World War II, he had become the Chief Test Pilot for Bellanca Aircraft Corporation in New Castle, Delaware.

[15] From 1941 through the end of the war in 1945, Pangborn served as Senior Captain, Royal Air Force Ferry Command during which time he made approximately 170 trans-ocean flights (crossing both the Atlantic and the Pacific).

He was instrument-rated to fly any plane, single or multi-engine, land or sea, and had logged more than 24,000 flight hours over his 40 years of piloting.