I was, however, lucky enough to have flown Pan Am a handful of times, including trips from Frankfurt to JFK on a 747, and from JFK to Rio de Janeiro on an L-1011. Working for a major carrier wouldn’t be a realistic option for several more years. On the day the carrier fell, I was a young Beech-99 captain still cutting his teeth. By the end, though, they weren’t paying very much. South Florida is where it all began, 64 years earlier, on a route from Key West to Havana.įor pilots, a job with Pan Am was once the most prestigious and glamorous job in aviation. Pan Am’s final flight was a Boeing 727 from Barbados to Miami. I remember some of the footage: panicky-looking employees rushing around a ticket counter, that sort of thing. I almost never watch television in hotel rooms, but this time, for some reason, I had the news on. I was laying over that night in a Sheraton in Burlington, Vermont. “Now the world is every man’s oyster,” Juan Trippe once said.ĭecember 4th, 1991, was a Wednesday. It was just a shell of itself in the end, with dismal service and shabby old planes. The airline’s winnowed remains stumbled on for another year or so. Four years after that, its transatlantic network was handed over to Delta. Six years later Pan Am would sell its Tokyo-Narita hub and Asian routes to United. Most agree that the final chapter began around the time of the disastrous merger with National Airlines in 1980. The carrier’s slow and ignominious decline, punctuated by the sales of its most valuable assets and - for a final coffin nail, the Lockerbie bombing - is a tale of hubris, poor management, the volatility of a deregulated airline industry, and plain old bad luck. It was the only airline to have its own Manhattan skyscraper - the Walter Gropius-designed Pan Am Building, soaring over Grand Central Terminal. Founded and led by a visionary entrepreneur from New Jersey named Juan Trippe, the airline’s network would reach into every nook and corner of the planet, its blue globe logo among the world’s most widely recognized trademarks. Its achievements include conquest of the Pacific Ocean and launch of both the 707 and 747, the two most influential jetliners of all time. Pan Am’s firsts, bests, longests, mosts, and whatever other superlatives you might come up with, are untouched, and untouchable.
This is possibly, maybe, the most significant (and unfortunate) anniversary in airline history, marking the death of history’s most significant airline. IT WAS thirty years ago, on December 4th, 1991, that Pan American World Airways ceased operations.