The Legend of Pancho Barnes is now streaming on Netflix. If you don't know about Pancho Barnes you are missing out on one of the most colorful characters in early aviation. This lady raced against Earhart, she flew stunts for movies, she was pals with some of the greats such as Chuck Yeager, General Jimmy Doolittle, and Buzz Aldrin. She was just one of the guys and could tell a raw joke better than any of them.

She had a ranch with bar called The Happy Bottom Riding Club that hosted parties for all the early test pilots from the nearby base. You might remember her from the movie The Right Stuff. She was a hard drinking, tough talking gal that sometimes answered the door minus top much to the suprise of a new visitor.

The Legend of Pancho Barnes is a great little documentry that has some great pictures, videos and recollections from those early test pilots and other people that knew her.

Here is the Wikpeda link about her if you want to know more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancho_Barnes

Added to my instant queue. Thanks!

Thanks for the headsup Warbirds!

What a fascinating woman. First read of her in Wolfe's classic All the Right Stuff, then again in Yeager's autobiography.
A lot going on at Muroc Field in those days.

You wouldn't want to mess with her by the looks of it

I caught part of a biography I think it was on her. Tough gale and the stories she must have had. She'll always be the real deal and I'll always be a pudknocker.

For some reason, it's always women who look like her who like to answer the door topless.

Colorful stories of her and her club/bar in Chuck Yeager's autobiography. Thanks for the link!

Funny, I just started watching, "The Right Stuff," again earlier today.

"What do you have to do to get your picture up there, anyway?" One of my ALLTIME FAVORITE movies EVER!!!

I read the book.

Put a mustache on her and she'd look like Pancho Villa.

Now what will you two PUDKNOCKERS be havin'?

Gotta watch TRS again now

Hi I am the producer and writer of "The Legend of Pancho Barnes" and was delighted to see the discussion. If you like the film please also consider visiting our website, www.legendofpanchobarnes.com and check out the DVD, it's loaded with bonus features.

So, one of the reasons we chose the title "Legend of Pancho Barnes" was that there is so much information about Pancho that turned out to not be true, or could not be corroborated. As Yeager said when we interviewed him, Pancho liked publicity and knew that rumors were grist for that mill, so pretty much no matter what the story she didn't deny it! This, and the fact that a lot of really crazy things happened at her "Happy Bottom Riding Club" made the whole topic of project irresistible to me.

I did want to follow up on one common misconception about the club stated on this board. In The Right Stuff they do have a wall of photos of pilots who have bought the farm. In reality, there was no such wall. All the photos in the club (and you can see this when you watch the doc) were of airplanes. As one of the test pilots explained to us, Pancho's place was all about the fun of life and living it, drinking, dancing and carousing, and not about dying.

Welcome to our little group NickSpark. That certainly is a wonderful opening post.

Congratulations on the documentary. It is great to see one of the creators of something we discuss actually here on our board.

Please do stick around and join us regularly.

Very cool it is my pleasure ... in fact the fun of making a project like this, is seeing how people respond to it.

If any of you are interested in submarines and the Cold War, you might also consider checking out my other film "Regulus: The First Nuclear Missile Submarines" which is out on DVD and available on Amazon.com

I am bumping this because I believe it was overlooked.

Here we have one of the primary creators of this documentaries and an opportunity to add a quality poster to the forum..

NickSpark, are there any interesting tales that didn't make it into the production either because of content or the inability to confirm them ?

Thanks for replying to my post Nick, your love of history and old planes shows in your work. I was facinated by this character after seeing the movie made about her many years ago and wanted to know more and now I do, thanks.

There were many things about Pancho we could not confirm for all sorts of reasons, and some of them we did put into the film anyway (listen to the DVD commentary track if you get the chance, we explain our reasoning). Other things were quite precious but did not make the cut because we didn't have space or it seemed extraneous. People usually have a couple questions for us when we screen the film at festivals, the most prominent one being "What happened to Pancho's son Billy...what wasn't he in the film?" Sadly, he was killed in an accident at the controls of his P-51 Mustang a few years after Pancho's death. Another question we get a lot is about Pancho's famous R613K Travelair "Mystery Ship"...where is it today? We recently revealed on our webpage under "Production Journal" that is in the UK and recently restored to flying condition.

One story Yeager shared that we didn't put in the film, was about a famous Texas rancher from Marfa who was flying into Pancho's Happy Bottom Riding Club and radioed ahead, telling Pancho that he "wanted it on toast". Yeager explained that when the fellow arrived, Pancho persuaded her "hardest blonde" hostess to strip naked, and they placed her on a large serving platter with pieces of bread so as to form a nice-looking sandwich. Obviously it made for a memorable moment when the rancher walked in...but this one antic was awfully hard to figure out how to show in our film so it was cast aside in favor of other things. It was so wild and funny though, I sometimes regret we didn't figure out how to make it work!