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Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) is an airline that was, at one time, the principal international US-based airline. The Lockerbie disaster in 1988 exacerbated the company's financial problems, which forced it to sell off many of its aircraft (most of which were soon broken apart) and international routes to its competitors. The company finally collapsed in 1991 (operations were ended on December 4). An attempt was made to revive the company in the late 1990s, but the new Pan Am ultimately ended up facing bankruptcy again and the name was sold in 1998. The current owners of the Pan Am brand operate a small number of flights within the continental United States, to Puerto Rico and to the Dominican Republic.
History
Formation
Pan Am was founded by aviator Juan Terry Trippe as a seaplane service from Key West, Florida to Havana, Cuba, and operated its first southbound flight on October 28, 1927. The U.S. government approved Pan Am's contract with little objection, out of fears that the German-owned Colombian carrier SCADTA would not have any competition in bidding for routes between Latin America and the United States. Pan Am filled its two Fokker Trimotors by soliciting passengers on Florida trains and in Havana nightclubs.
Trippe and his associates planned to extend Pan Am's network through all of Central and South America. During the late 1920's and early 1930's, Pan Am purchased a number of ailing or defunct airlines in Central and South America, and negotiated with federal postal officials to win most of the government's air mail contracts to the region. In September of 1929, Trippe toured Latin America with Charles Lindbergh in order to negotiate landing rights in a number of countries, including SCADTA's home turf of Colombia. By the end of the year, Pan Am offered flights down the west coast of South America to Peru. The following year, Pan Am purchased the New York, Rio, and Buenos Aires Line (NYRBA), giving it a seaplane route along the east coast of South America to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and westbound to Santiago, Chile.
In 1929, Pan Am's holding company, the Aviation Corporation of the Americas, was one of the hottest stocks on the New York Curb Exchange, and flurries of speculation surrounded each of its new route awards. On a single day in March, its stock rose 50% in value. Trippe and his associates had to fight off a takeover attempt by the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation in order to keep their control over Pan Am. (UATC was the parent company of what are now Boeing, Pratt & Whitney, and United Airlines.)
The Clipper Era
Boeing 314 Clipper
Pan Am Boeing 314
While Pan Am was developing its South American network, it also negotiated with Britain and France to begin seaplane service between the United States and Europe. Britain's parastatal Imperial Airways was eager to cooperate with Pan Am, but France was less willing to help, as its state carrier Aeropostale was a major player in Latin America and a competitor of Pan Am on some routes. Eventually, Pan Am reached an agreement with both countries to offer service from Norfolk, Virginia to Europe via Bermuda and the Azores using Sikorsky S-40 flying boats. Pan Am also procured an air mail contract from Boston to Halifax, preparing for North Atlantic flights in the future.
Pan Am also planned to begin land plane service over Alaska to Japan and China, and sent Lindbergh on a successful survey flight in 1930, but difficulties with the Soviet Union and Japan made the route unviable. Trippe then decided to begin service from the West Coast to Honolulu, and from there to Hong Kong and Auckland, following the existing routes of steamships. After negotiating rights to land at Pearl Harbor, Midway Island, Wake Island, Guam, and Subic Bay in 1934, Pan Am shipped $500,000 worth of aeronautical equipment westward in March of 1935, and ran its first survey flight to Honolulu in April with a Sikorsky S-42 flying boat. The Post Office opened up bids for a San Francisco-Canton mail route later that year, and Pan Am won the contract, running its first commercial flight in a Martin M-130 on November 22 to massive media fanfare. Later, Pan Am used Boeing 314 flying boats for the Pacific route: in China, passengers could connect to domestic flights on the Pan Am-operated China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) network.
The "Clippers," as they were called, were the only American passenger aircraft of the time capable of intercontinental travel. Most of the Clippers were impressed into the military during World War II: during this era, Pan Am pioneered a new air route across western and central Africa to Iran.
Postwar Developments
After the war, Pan Am's fleet was quickly replaced by faster conventional aircraft such as the Boeing 377, Douglas DC-6, and Lockheed Constellation. Pan Am also lost its distinction as the United States' official international airline: first to American Overseas Airways, and later to a number of carriers designated to compete with Pan Am in certain markets, such as TWA to Europe and Northwest Orient to East Asia. With competition on many of its routes, Pan Am began investing in new innovations such as jet aircraft (the Boeing 707, which Boeing, under pressure from Pan Am, modified to seat six across instead of five), widebody aircraft (the Boeing 747, for which Pan Am was the launch customer with about 25 orders in 1968), and even supersonic aircraft (as a launch customer for the Concorde and as a potential customer for the abandoned Boeing 2707).
In 1962, with traffic increasing, Pan Am commissioned IBM to build PANAMAC, a large computer that booked airline and hotel reservations, and held very large amounts of information about cities, countries, airports, aircraft, hotels, and restaurants. The computer came to occupy the fourth floor of the Pan Am building, which was then under construction in Manhattan and which was to be the largest commercial office building in the world for some time. Pan Am also built Worldport, a terminal at the Kennedy Airport, now the Delta Flight Center, distinguished by its elliptical, four-acre roof, suspended far from the outside columns of the terminal below by 32 sets of steel posts and cables)
In 1980, with airline deregulation well underway, Pan Am, under the direction of Chairman William Seawell (who also sold the Pan Am building), acquired National Airlines in an attempt to build up its U.S. domestic network, after finding large difficulties in getting approval for its domestic routes. A bidding war, however, caused Pan American to pay far more than the actual value of National Airlines. Around this time, Juan Trippe, who had been in retirement for about ten years, died. The airline's rapidly deteriorating financial position led it to sell most of its Pacific routes to United Airlines in 1985. After Pan Am Flight 103 crashed in 1988, the airline finally began to fall apart. Travel agents avoided booking passengers on Pan Am for fear that passengers had begun to associate danger with Pan Am. In March 1991, the airline sold off its profitable London Heathrow routes (arguably Pan Am's biggest international destination), again to United Airlines. In August of that year, Delta Airlines purchased the remaining profitable assets of Pan Am, including its remaining European routes and the JFK WorldPort, and injected some cash into a smaller Pan Am predominately serving the Caribbean and Latin America.
Pan Am continued to incur heavy losses and only survived until December 1991, when Delta refused to inject any more cash into the company. The airline's Latin American routes from Miami International Airport were sold to American Airlines.
Pan Am's resurrection
A new investment group including Charles Cobb (the former Ambassador to Iceland) and Mickey Arison (the chairman of Carnival Corp.) purchased the rights to the Pan American brand after the original carrier declared bankruptcy. In 1996, Guilford launched a new Pan Am, with an Airbus A300 called the Clipper Fairwind. The new airline was headed by the last Vice-Chairman and last Operations Officer of Pan Am, Marty Schugrue, who also helped in the creation of the Frequent Flyer system and who served as President of American Airlines. but it only survived for one year before ceasing operations.
In 1998, Pan Am was sold to Guilford Transportation Industries, a railroad company headed by Tim Mellon of the Pittsburgh bank family, and launched again with a fleet of seven Boeing 727's, flying to nine cities in New England, Florida, and Puerto Rico. Pan Am has cooperative service arrangements with Boston Maine Airways.
Other facts of interest
- Charles Lindbergh was a Pan Am pilot during the 1930's.
- On January 6, 1942 Pan American became the first commercial airline to have a flight that went around the world.
- During the Cold War, Pan Am was the main air link between West Germany and West Berlin.
- The Beatles arrived at Idlewild International Airport in New York aboard a Pan Am DC-8 (Clipper Defiance, which was eventually broken apart in Long Beach, California) in 1964.
- The Pan Am Building in Manhattan was the largest commercial office building in the world when constructed in 1963.
- Pan Am was depicted as having commercial flights to the moon in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
External links
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