Little Miss Veedol arrives at new home

Replica promotes first transpacific flight

By Lynne Lynch

Herald staff writer

MOSES LAKE - The miniature replica airplane "Little Miss Veedol" was moved Friday to a new home in East Wenatchee City Hall's rotunda.

The city bought the plane for $5,000 from the plane's owner, Bob Heikell of Moses Lake.

East Wenatchee City Attorney Devin Poulson said Friday the plane was hung about 30 feet high in the center of the rotunda. The plane is prominent to city hall visitors.

Heikell said he sold the plane because it was starting to age after spending about 72 hours in the air.

A bolt sprung free from a wing strut last summer. He realized if he lost another bolt, the wing and entire plane would have followed, he said.

"It took about 2,000 hours to build it and I didn't want anything to happen to it," he said. "It had been such an attraction for people in Wenatchee, Moses Lake and literally all over the country, to be honest. I wanted to retire it before something happened to it."

The replica was modeled after the "Miss Veedol," the Bellanca J-300 Special made famous in 1931 by aerial circus star Clyde Pangborn and playboy Hugh Herndon Jr.

Pangborn and Herndon flew the first nonstop flight of more than 5,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean, landing near Wenatchee.

Their flight lasted 41 hours, 15 minutes and was almost twice the distance flown by Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, according to the Spirit of Wenatchee Web site.

Heikell and friends Frank Wright and David Knannlein, both of Ephrata, started to build the replica in 2002. The friends were inspired after hearing about Pangborn and Herndon and a separate project of Wenatchee's Experimental Aircraft Association to build a full-size replica.

The miniature could be used to promote the overlooked story of the Pangborn/Herndon flight and attract attention to the full-scale replica, Heikell said. He retold their story during an interview with the Columbia Basin Herald.

The Pangborn/Herndon flight started with a different intent.

They took off from New York with the goal of beating the eight days around the world record set by Wylie Post and Harold Gatty.

The first stretch of Pangborn and Herndon's flight went well until they got lost in Asia and their plane became mired in the mud after landing on a small airstrip in Siberia.

They wired ahead to the American Embassy in Japan for clearance to land in Tokyo. Upon landing, they were immediately placed under house arrest as suspected spies for taking aerial photos of a militarily sensitive area. They were documenting their trip with photos.

They spent 60 days under house arrest and were each fined $1,000.

But while in Japan, they learned of a Japanese newspaper offering a $25,000 prize for the first nonstop flight across the Pacific. They decided to compete for the transpacific prize as they had lost too much time to beat the record set by Gatty and Post.

Upon their release, they added fuel and oil capacity to their airplane and adjusted it to drop the landing gear to improve their mileage.

They eventually left for the U.S on Oct. 4, 1931, from Samishiro Beach, Japan.

While in the air, Pangborn noticed pieces of the landing gear were hanging out, which could have prevented a safe landing.

So he went outside to the wing, released the hanging pieces, returned to the inside of the plane and repeated the task on the other side of the plane.

Also during the trip, the engine quit because the wing fuel tanks hadn't been pumped full of fuel. The problem for them over the ocean, was there wasn't an electric starter in the plane.

Pangborn figured if he dove the plane straight down in a procedure called "windmilling," the prop would start to turn.

He dropped the plane from 15,000 feet to 1,500 feet and it restarted.

They reached the United States and landed the plane on its belly Oct. 5 at Fancher Field near Wenatchee.

"They were quite the heroes for a while. But everyone forgot about them," Heikell said. "I've often thought if (Steven) Spielberg got ahold of it, he could really make it something."