(Pancho Barnes) Barnes Pancho @·AIRCRAFTUBE

  • Pancho Barnes and her German Shepherds at Santa Monica (1931) Pancho Barnes and her German Shepherds at Santa Monica (1931)
    Pancho Barnes and her German Shepherds at Santa Monica (1931)
  • Pancho Barnes (circa 1929) Pancho Barnes (circa 1929)
    Pancho Barnes (circa 1929)
  • Pancho Barnes and the Powder Puff Derby racers at Long Beach, California Pancho Barnes and the Powder Puff Derby racers at Long Beach, California
    Pancho Barnes and the Powder Puff Derby racers at Long Beach, California
  • Pancho Barnes (left) with fellow women pilots Pancho Barnes (left) with fellow women pilots
    Pancho Barnes (left) with fellow women pilots
  • Pancho Barnes and Amelia Earhart Pancho Barnes and Amelia Earhart
    Pancho Barnes and Amelia Earhart
  • Pancho Barnes in front of her Travel Air Type R Mystery Ship Pancho Barnes in front of her Travel Air Type R Mystery Ship
    Pancho Barnes in front of her Travel Air Type R Mystery Ship
  • Pancho Barnes and her Travel Air Model R Mystery Ship Pancho Barnes and her Travel Air Model R Mystery Ship
    Pancho Barnes and her Travel Air Model R Mystery Ship
  • Pancho Barnes at Santa Monica before the Santa Monica-Cleveland derby (August 1931) Pancho Barnes at Santa Monica before the Santa Monica-Cleveland derby (August 1931)
    Pancho Barnes at Santa Monica before the Santa Monica-Cleveland derby (August 1931)
  • Pancho Barnes in her cockpit at Los Angeles Metropolitan Airport Pancho Barnes in her cockpit at Los Angeles Metropolitan Airport
    Pancho Barnes in her cockpit at Los Angeles Metropolitan Airport
  • Pancho Barnes and a puppy wearing a parachute Pancho Barnes and a puppy wearing a parachute
    Pancho Barnes and a puppy wearing a parachute
  • Pancho Barnes and a friend in the desert (signed photo) Pancho Barnes and a friend in the desert (signed photo)
    Pancho Barnes and a friend in the desert (signed photo)
  • Pancho Barnes with pilots around the piano, including Chuck Yeager (right) Pancho Barnes with pilots around the piano, including Chuck Yeager (right)
    Pancho Barnes with pilots around the piano, including Chuck Yeager (right)
  • Poster of the documentary "The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club" (2009) Poster of the documentary "The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club" (2009)
    Poster of the documentary "The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club" (2009)
  • Cover of Lauren Kessler's biography "The Happy Bottom Riding Club" (2000) Cover of Lauren Kessler's biography "The Happy Bottom Riding Club" (2000)
    Cover of Lauren Kessler's biography "The Happy Bottom Riding Club" (2000)

Pancho Barnes

Florence Lowe "Pancho" Barnes (July 22, 1901 – March 30, 1975) was a pioneer American aviator, one of the first women to be licensed as a pilot in the United States and the first woman stunt pilot of the motion picture industry. In 1930 she broke Amelia Earhart's women's world air speed record, and in 1931 she founded the first union of movie stunt pilots. She raced in the Women's Air Derby and was a member of the Ninety-Nines. In later years she became famous as the owner of the Happy Bottom Riding Club, a ranch, bar and restaurant in the Mojave Desert next to what became Edwards Air Force Base, where the legendary test pilots of the supersonic era gathered.

Early life

She was born Florence Leontine Lowe on July 22, 1901, in Pasadena, California, to Thaddeus Lowe II and his first wife, Florence May Dobbins. Raised in a wealthy family on a large estate in San Marino, California, she attended the area's finest private schools, including The Bishop's School in La Jolla. Her father, an avid sportsman and horseman, taught her to love the outdoors and she became an accomplished equestrian. Her grandfather was Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, the pioneer balloonist who had founded the nation's first military air unit, the Union Army Balloon Corps of the Army of the Potomac, during the American Civil War. He took his granddaughter, then aged nine or ten, to one of the first American aviation meets, held near Los Angeles in 1910.

A rebellious tomboy, Florence was married in 1919 (1921 according to some biographers), at her family's urging, to the Reverend C. Rankin Barnes, an Episcopal minister of South Pasadena; their son, William E. "Bill" Barnes, was born soon after. The life of a clergyman's wife did not suit her. In the mid-1920s she rode horses as a stuntwoman for Hollywood films, and after her mother's death in 1924 she inherited part of the family fortune.

The origin of "Pancho"

In the late 1920s, disguised as a man, she signed on with a group of friends as a crew member of a freighter bound for Latin America, which turned out to be running guns to Mexican revolutionaries. Stranded at San Blas, she escaped with the helmsman, Roger Chute, and the pair crossed the Mexican countryside on horse and burro. Joking that her companion looked like Don Quixote, she was nicknamed after his squire, Sancho Panza – but Chute preferred "Pancho", and the name stuck for the rest of her life. After four months abroad, she returned to San Marino in 1928.

Aviation career

Learning to fly

In 1928, while driving her cousin Dean Banks to his flying lessons, she decided on the spot to learn to fly herself, and convinced his instructor, Ben Catlin, a World War I veteran, to take her on that same day. She soloed after only six hours of instruction and soon bought her own Travel Air biplane, becoming one of the very first women pilots in the United States.

Air racing and records

Barnes organized her own barnstorming show and took part in air races. In August 1929 she entered the first Women's Air Derby (nicknamed the "Powder Puff Derby" by Will Rogers), from Santa Monica to Cleveland, but was eliminated when she struck a car parked near the runway while landing at Pecos, Texas. She returned to competition in 1930 under the sponsorship of the Union Oil Company and, on August 4, 1930, flying her Travel Air Type R "Mystery Ship", set a new women's world speed record of 196.19 mph (315.74 km/h), beating the mark held by Amelia Earhart. The same year she became the first woman to fly from Los Angeles to Mexico City, and she also beat Roscoe Turner by twenty minutes in a race from San Francisco to Los Angeles. In the early 1930s she also flew maximum-weight take-off trials for Lockheed on the dry lake at Muroc.

Hollywood stunt pilot

After her contract with Union Oil expired, Barnes moved to Hollywood to work as a stunt pilot for the movies. She flew in several air-adventure films of the 1930s, notably Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels (1930), for which she helped record authentic aircraft sounds. Having experienced the dangers and low pay of the profession first-hand, she founded in 1931 the Associated Motion Picture Pilots (AMPP), a union of film stunt fliers that promoted flight safety and standardized pay for aerial stunt work. Firmly convinced that women had a place in military aviation, she also helped found, with Bobbi Trout and other women pilots, the Women's Air Reserve, whose members trained in first aid, parachuting and disaster relief flying.

Barnes had extensive connections in Hollywood. Her close friend George Hurrell, then a struggling painter and photographer in Laguna Beach, took the portrait used on her pilot's licence; by introducing him to her film-world friends, among them Ramon Novarro, she launched his career, and Hurrell later became head of the portrait department at MGM. She also counted aviator Moye Stephens, writer Richard Halliburton and actor Richard Arlen among her friends. In 1932 she even ran, unsuccessfully, for Los Angeles County Supervisor.

The Happy Bottom Riding Club

Barnes lost most of her fortune in the Great Depression. By 1935 only her Hollywood apartment remained; she sold it and, in March 1935, bought 180 acres (73 ha) of land in the Mojave Desert, next to the Rogers dry lake and the small Muroc army airfield, then an adjunct of March Field. There she built a ranch with its own airstrip, raised livestock and, from 1939, held a government contract under the Civilian Pilot Training Program to provide aircraft and instructors. In 1940 she also founded Barnes Aviation at Lancaster, a company later run by her son.

After World War II she developed her property into a "flying dude ranch", the Rancho Oro Verde Fly-Inn Dude Ranch, with runways, hangars, a flying school, a motel, a swimming pool, a dance hall, rodeo grounds and stables. Its bar and restaurant, run as a private club for her friends from the air base and from Hollywood, became famous as the Happy Bottom Riding Club. The early test pilots of Muroc – renamed Edwards Air Force Base in 1949 – were regulars, and Barnes became close friends with Chuck Yeager, Bob Hoover, Walt Williams, Jack Ridley, General Jimmy Doolittle, General Albert Boyd, Buzz Aldrin, as well as North American Aviation flight test mechanic Bob Cadick and flight test supervisor Roy Ferren. Successful test flights were celebrated there, and Barnes traditionally offered a free steak dinner to any pilot who broke the sound barrier. In June 1952 she married her fourth husband, pilot Eugene "Mac" McKendry, at the ranch before hundreds of guests, with General Boyd giving the bride away.

Conflict with the Air Force

A change of command at Edwards in 1952 brought Barnes into conflict with the United States Air Force. The USAF wanted to extend the base and planned a new, very long runway, intended for future aircraft, that would have crossed her ranch. It first offered her a price close to that of undeveloped desert land; while she was seeking a fair re-appraisal, the base leadership accused her of running a house of ill repute. The ranch was declared off-limits to military personnel and the value of her business collapsed. Barnes sued the government, acting as her own attorney, in order to clear her name and obtain fair compensation. In 1953, at the height of the legal battle, the ranch was destroyed by a fire of mysterious origin. The case continued nevertheless: her name was cleared and she was finally paid for her land and business – $375,000 according to most accounts ($185,000 according to her biographer Lauren Kessler). In the end, the planned runway was never built.

Later years and death

After the government bought her out, Barnes moved to Cantil, then to the Gypsy Springs area further north in the Mojave Desert, hoping to start a similar ranch again, but the project never succeeded. Afflicted by health problems, including breast cancer, and short of money, she divorced McKendry in 1962. From the late 1960s she was once again a familiar figure at Edwards, where she became known as the "Mother of Edwards AFB"; the bar of the base officers' club was named the Pancho Barnes Room in her honor, and in 1971 old friends including Buzz Aldrin threw a party for her seventieth birthday.

Barnes was due to be the keynote speaker at the Antelope Valley Aero Museum's "Barnstormers Reunion" on April 5, 1975. When a friend could not reach her, her son Bill went to her home in Boron and found her dead on March 30, 1975; the coroner determined that she had died nearly a week earlier. With special permission from the Air Force, her ashes were scattered over the site of the Happy Bottom Riding Club – though a crosswind blew part of them back into the cockpit of the small Cessna. Her son Bill was himself killed on October 4, 1980, at the controls of a North American P-51 Mustang near Fox Field, Lancaster.

Legacy

Her Travel Air Mystery Ship, NR613K (race number 32), was later bought by Paul Mantz and used extensively in film work, before Barnes bought it back at an auction where fellow pilots made sure nobody bid against her. It was long kept in a hangar at Mojave Airport, then sold to a private collector and taken to the United Kingdom, where it has been restored.

Since 1980, the site of the Happy Bottom Riding Club has hosted the annual "Pancho Barnes Day" organized by the USAF Test Pilot School and Edwards AFB, with a barbecue, music and dancing in memory of this aviation pioneer and friend of test pilots. Barnes is honored on the Wall of Honor of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

In popular culture

  • Her life and personality were portrayed in the 1983 film The Right Stuff, adapted from Tom Wolfe's 1979 bestseller; she was played by Kim Stanley.
  • She was the subject of a heavily fictionalized 1988 CBS TV film, Pancho Barnes, written by John Michael Hayes, directed by Richard Heffron and starring Valerie Bertinelli.
  • Three biographies have been published: The Lady Who Tamed Pegasus by Grover Ted Tate, Pancho: The Biography of Florence Lowe Barnes by Barbara Hunter Schultz (1996) and The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes by Lauren Kessler (2000).
  • The PBS documentary The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club (2009), produced and written by Nick T. Spark and directed by Amanda Pope, with Kathy Bates as the voice of Barnes, won an Emmy Award.
  • Pancho Barnes and her club are visited by a young Hal Jordan in the comic series DC: The New Frontier, and in the 2019 film Captain Marvel the fighter pilots' bar is called "Pancho's Bar" in her honor.

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