PAN AM'S FLEET
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(1927-1929)
When Juan Trippe obtained the Fokkers, he obtained the services of Andre Priester, KLM's chief engineer, who was to set the safety and engineering standards for all airlines that exist to this day. The F-VIIa/3m's life with Pan American was brief, but the aircraft was an undoubted success... |
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More Fords flew in the colors of Pan American than for any other airlineówith the possible exception of TACA, the Central American carrier which bought up every used Ford it could find when other airlines had moved on to modern airliners. Most of Pan Am's Fords were flown by its subsidiaries or associates in Latin America, and most of them were the so-called heavy-duty models, with Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines. These were various series of the 5-AT, although in 1933 Pan Am acquired some of the Whirlwind-powered 4-ATs for operations in Cuba.
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During the latter 1920s, the Fairchild Airplane was the leading manufacturer of utility aircraft in the western hemisphere. Fairchild built the aerial equivalent of the small pickup truck, and these were of inestimable benefit to many small airlines, from the deserts of Peru to the frozen wastes of Alaska.
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SIKORSKY FLYING BOATS
S-36, S-38, S-40, S-42, S-43 Flying boats had problems of passenger convenience. Transferring from a small launch on to a Clipper Ship or an Empire Boat could be quite an adventure in choppy water. And the provision of such necessary services were expensive. But the advantages of being able to alight on a cleared waterway, whatever the size and weight of the flying boat, outweighed such considerations. There was also the matter of safety. Popular, and even specialist opinion, favored the view that a flying boat could at least alight on water in an emergency, and stood an outside chance of remaining afloat until help arrived. And the availability of large stretches of water was inestimably greater than the availability of suitable landing strips, especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As a matter of geographical coincidence, almost all the great cities of the world, especially those on the routes of Europe's colonial powers, and the United States, in its overseas territories and its Latin American sphere of influence, were either on the coast or on or near large waterways.
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The Commodore Flying Boat was originally designed for naval patrol work but after examining all the valuable choices, Ralph O'Neill realized it was ideal for carrying passengers and mail on NYRBA's east coast route to Buenos Aires. In March 1929, he ordered six Commodores from Consolidated Aircraft, whose owner, Reuben Fleet, was a substantial NYRBA stockholderóor became so as a result of the acquisition. By the time the Commodore went into service on 10 November 1929, the order had been augmented to fourteen.
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Pan American issued its specification for a long-range flying boat as early as 1931. Two bids were submitted, one for the Sikorsky S-42 and one for the Martin M-130. Juan Trippe accepted both. The Martin weighed about 26 tons, compared to the S-42's 21, and could carry up to 41 passengers, compared to the Sikorsky's 32. Nevertheless, the Martin's primary consideration was range, and it was designed primarily for this objective. As the pictures show, it was an elegant craft, capturing the aesthetic imagination and evoking the memory of the ships which gave the Clipper flying boats their names.
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When Juan Trippe turned his eyes towards the Atlantic, and even while the Martin Clippers were going into service in the Pacific, Pan American engineers prepared specifications for a flying boat capable of carrying large loads on longer equivalent ranges. Not that the Atlantic segments were longer: but the severe headwinds could make the equivalent ranges longer.
Boeing won the design competition and signed a contract with Pan Am on 21 July 1936 for six Boeing 314s. It outstripped all rivals in size, with twice the power of the Martin M-130. The 14-cylinder double-row Wright Cyclones were the first to use 100-octane fuel. The finest flying boat to go into regular commercial service, the Boeing 314 weighed 40 tons, and the first batch cost $550,000 per aircraft. |
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The story of how the Douglas Aircraft Company, of Santa Monica, California, came to enter the commercial airliner field is one of the best known in air transport history. The Boeing Airplane Company, of Seattle, Washington, had, in 1933, produced an aircraft, the Model 247, which was so much in advance of the types of only a few years previously that it quite literally began a new era. Its justifiable claims for the title of the first modern airliner were well-based, incorporating as it did two NACA-owled Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines, stressed skin surfaces, a monocoque fuselage, and partially retractable landing gear, among other refinements. By comparison, the 95 mph Ford Tri-Motor was completely outclassed by the 165 mph 247, and looked ponderous by comparison, as indeed it was.
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COMING SOON
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It could cruise at 14,000 feet, or, as the neatly descriptive phrase went at the time, "above the weather." The Model 307, or Stratoliner, was a straightforward conversion from the supremely successful B-17 Flying Fortress bomber, with a 33-seat commercial fuselage substituted for the bomber's. The most important technical feature was that the entire cabin was pressurized so that the use of special oxygen equipment was unnecessary. Pressure differential was 2 1/2 lb/sq. in. Another aspect of the stringent specifications was that high octane fuel was being developed to obtain higher supercharger pressure to maintain engine power at high altitudes...
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Juan Trippe had been accustomed to sponsoring new generations of aircraft, and it must have been quite a shock to his system to see Hughes and T.W.A. not only taking over such leadership, but also receiving extensive international route awards from the Civil Aeronautics Board, enthusiastically supported by the President, and now challenging the Chosen Instrument, as Pan American was unofficially dubbed, on the lucrative North Atlantic route. However, Trippe knew a good thing when he saw one, and did not hesitate to purchase Constellations, at $750,000 each.
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COMING SOON
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The DC-4 made its first flight on 14 February 1942, by which time the United States was heavily involved in World War II. The Douglas long-range landplane could not have come at a better time. It went into service as the Army's C-54 and the Navy's R5D and altogether, 1,163 were built. Almost 80,000 ocean crossings were made during the war, including a 250-strong armada which delivered two divisions of troops to Japan from Okinawa, following the surrender.
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After World War II the major airlines of the United States realized that they had to have a modern airliner to serve the secondary, or feeder routes which supplemented the trunk systems. The Consolidated-Vultee and Martin companies, both wartime manufacturers of flying boats, competed for the market. Martin was actually in the lead at first, its Model 2-0-2 going into service in November 1947. But it was unpressurized, and there was also a structural deficiency which led to its withdrawal from service. United withdrew its support for a later variant, the Model 3-0-3, and even though T.W.A. and Eastern started service with the vastly improved (and pressurized) Model 4-0-4 in October 1951, most of the airlines turned to Consolidated Vultee, or Convair, as it became known, for its fine series of twin-engined airliners.
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Pan American's dominated the international airline arena during the 1960s a decade when the volume of air transport quadrupled, that it acquired 120 of the Boeing 707-300 Series. Twenty-six of these were of the basic version, with Pratt & Whitney JT4A-9 straight jet enginesóthe so-called "Ole Smokies" as they became known rather unkindly in later years, along with the original JT3C-6 engines of the 100 Series. Then came the JT3D-3 turbofan, or bypassóengines which resulted in the "B" versions and the further developments which resulted in the Advanced models. The turbofans gave the aircraft greater range, capacity, and profitability than before, and above all cut about half a mile off the almost two miles takeoff distance required for the Boeing 707.
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Whether or not Douglas was superstitious, the date 13 October 1955 was certainly an unlucky day at Long Beach. Overnight all plans to build a turboprop airliner were dropped as the Pan Am order brought the startling realization that the folks in Seattle had stolen a march.
Douglas lost precious time in developing its new breed. The Boeing 707 actually went into service with Pan American an agonizing sixteen months before the first DC-8 was delivered; and but for faithful customers like United, K.L.M., and other European airlines, as well as Japan Air Lines, Douglas would never have come close to covering the costs of the DC-8 production. As it was, even though some 450 aircraft were sold, the company estimated that it lost money on the entire project. |
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As the best example of its flexibility, Boeing produced the Model 720, with a fuselage sixteen feet shorter and a wing span fifteen feet shorter than the 707's. First ordered by United Air Lines, it marked that airline's return to the Boeing camp after its extensive DC-8 program, and went into service on the one-stop Chicago-Los Angeles route on 5 July 1960. Other orders followed but the Boeing 720 did not sell in great numbers. Nevertheless, it served Boeing's purpose in being able to offer an airliner which was smaller than the 707/ DC-8 standard and was suitable for medium-stage routes of lower traffic density...
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This time, Trippe went for broke. The new Pan American airliner generation was more than twice as big as the Boeing 707's which were currently the flagships; and almost twice as big as the biggest airliner then in service, the "stretched" Douglas DC-8-63. Predictably, the new airliner was immediately dubbed the Jumbo Jet, a name deplored by many, but destined to stick to the type, whether the purists liked it or not.
On 13 April 1966, Pan American Airways, in conjunction with the Boeing Aircraft Company, launched a new generation of airliners, by placing an order for twenty-five Boeing 747s. In mixed class seating, each could carry between 360 and 380 passengers. In all-tourist or all-economy configuration, it would later carry about 450, while special versions built for Japanese domestic services and inclusive tour operators would carry 500. By the standards of the period, and even today, twenty years later, the size of the airliner isóat the risk of over-working the termósomewhat awe-inspiring. Each 747 cost $21,000,000. Incidentally, the 1986 price averaged $110,000,000. |
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Although during the 1970s the Boeing 747 did well, there were many routes on Pan Am's network which could not sustain year-round loads, and so the airline sought a smaller aircraft to fill the gap.
With its great production experience, Douglas narrowly won the race for first flight honors. The DC-10 made its maiden flight on 24 October 1970, the L-1011 TriStar on 16 November of the same year. But Douglas pulled ahead, with the DC-10 entering airline service on 5 August 1971, the Tristar on 26 April 1972. Subsequently, both companies experienced setbacks. Lockheed lost ground when Rolls Royce went bankrupt and severely disrupted the TriStar program. Lockheed was saved by the U.S. Senate's approval of the Emergency Loan Guarantee Act (by a margin of one vote) on 2 August 1971. The program survived but Lockheed's competitive stature was badly compromised. |
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Even while Boeing and Pan American were planning to launch the wide-bodied era with the Boeing 747, the Europeans were studying the problems of coping with the dense airline traffic on the world's busiest air routes, invariably short-haul city pairs. Meanwhile, in the United States, both Douglas and Lockheed, traditional rivals of a previous airliner era, studied the problem with a different set of criteria from the Europeans.
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The 737-100 first flew on 9 April 1967 and went into service with the German airline Lufthansa, and was not a marketing success. But Boeing soon followed this up with the 737-200, which, although slow in the early years, became a big winner. United was the first operator, starting service on 28 April 1968, and slowly but surely, Boeing began to steal the markets away from Douglas and B.A.C., which by now was a poor third in the running. Once again, Boeing was ready to comply with special customer wishes, producing its now well-known gravel kit to enable the 737, even with its low-slung engines, to be able to use strips that the rear-engined rivals could not.
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The idea of a wide-bodied aircraft designed especially for short-haul air routes germinated during the 1960s in Great Britain and France. First thoughts at the de Havilland plant at Hatfield, England, appear to have occurred at about the same time as those for a Breguet-Nord project in Paris. Joint discussions resulted in a cooperative study for the HBN-100. Breguet-Nord then merged with Sud Aviation (which was working on its Galion) to become Aerospatiale. The joint project became known as the A300, with design leadership centered at Toulouse.
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PAN AM BUILDING ROOFTOP SERVICE
NEW YORK AIRWAYS (1965-1977) |
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PAN AM EAST 60TH STREET HELIPORT
OMNIFLIGHTS HELICOPTER SERVICE |
COMING SOON! - UNDER CONSTRUCTION
