Pan Am Pt. 3: The Fall

The Beginning of the End

In 1973, the OAPEC, or Organization Of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, announced an embargo. The embargo was targeted at countries that supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War, which unfortunately for Pan Am included the United States. An embargo, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is a cessation of trade with a specific country. The U.S. no longer had access to a drop of Middle Eastern gas, and that meant trouble, as the Middle East was where 4/5th of the entire world oil supply came from. The U.S. did get fuel from Venezuela and Canada, but those were small potatoes compared to the Middle East. 

Ultimately, this was a gigantic blow to Pan Am. First, gas prices quadrupled, from $3 to  $12 per barrel. This meant Pan Am had to spend four times as much in fueling up a plane, and because they had almost a hundred planes in service, this was a huge change. And if this wasn’t bad enough, people lost interest in flying: who wanted to buy a ticket in the thousands of dollars? Pan Am was caught in a political conflict brewing for years, and one that is still going on to this day. All they could do was wait.

The 747’s flight inventory didn’t help either. Production stalled. Supply chains were clogged. People quit more than they did before. New planes weren’t being shipped in time, and old planes like the 747 were starting to become gas hogs and more scorned. To be fair, they were still superb: but the 747 could only be an revolutionary icon for so long. It had been almost a half-decade since it came out. People wanted change and innovation, and the 747 had started to wear thin in that regard. Pan Am couldn’t bring innovation unlike the countless times it managed to do so because of horrible misfortune.

The final part of Pan Am impacted by the embargo was their transatlantic flights. Pan Am’s main selling point was their long, picturesque around-the-world flights from America to London or Beirut or Athens: it was part of that legendary brand image. But transatlantic flights, especially 747’s, used a giant amount of fuel: it simply was far too expensive to manage. With transatlantic profits being cut, Pan Am fell into a state of despair. Their primary revenue source had vanished. Now, it was up to Juan Trippe, as usual, to make a miracle, as he had done so many times before. But his health was declining - he was in his mid-seventies and had suffered a stroke. He kept working at Pan Am but he would no longer be the President. Trippe and the 747, once legendary figures of success, were eroding. And it would only get worse.

Tenerife

March 27, 1977. A pristine, clear day, especially along the coasts of Tenerife, capital of the Canary Islands. Beaches were swarming, the air was fresh, and it was a wonderful day for travel. The embargo was over, after all: time to resume a normal life. And so two planes were fully loaded that day: KLM flight 4805, Rijn, one of the first dozen B747’s created in existence, and Pan Am 1736, Clipper Victor, the very first B747 created and shipped. Both planes had flown for seven years strong at this time: Rijn without incident, Clipper Victor with a hijacking and a university publicity stunt. Initially, both planes were supposed to land at Gran Canaria Airport, but a Canary Islands separatist group planted a bomb inside which injured eight people, and announced intentions for a second. The airport was shut down immediately and all planes were to divert to Los Rodeos, a far smaller one. Pan Am requested flying in a holding pattern as they had the fuel to do so but were ordered to divert to Tenerife.

The pilots for both planes were extremely experienced: flying KLM 4805 was Captain Jacob Veldhuyzen Van Zanten, or “Jaap”. He had accrued 11,700 flight hours, was KLM’s senior flight instructor and mentor, and flew 1,545 hours on the 747. Co-pilot Klaas Meurs was similarly experienced, with 9,200 hours and 95 747 hours. Willem Schreuder, the Flight Engineer exceeded Van Zanten’s flight experience himself with 17,031 hours and 543 747 hours total. The KLM crew had flown together before and had formed quite a cordial relationship, although Van Zanten was known for his impatience.

Pan Am matched and exceeded the veteranship of the KLM flight with a seasoned crew of their own, with Captain Victor Grubbs, First Officer Robert Bragg and Flight Engineer Robert Harms. Grubbs had 21,043 hours of flight time, with 564 hours on the 747. He was a senior pilot well-known for his quick thinking and correct decision-making. First officer Robert Bragg stood closely behind with 10,800 flight hours and 2,796 hours on the 747, and Warns with 15,210 flight hours and 559 hours on the 747. Their experience helped aid each other in creating a professional, suitable cockpit. They bought their unique areas of expertise on the table and combined it.

Los Rodeos was a tiny, regional airport unable to handle the amount of jetliners a typical airport as JFK or Le Bourget could. They could not park on a runway since they took up so much space, and were placed on a taxiway. Thus, they also could not taxi in a conventional format, down a taxiway because the taxiway was fully parked, so they instead had to go down consecutive, tiny taxiways in order to rotate back to the now-cleared taxiway before making it to the runway and taking off. Just reading this may give the reader a headache, and it likely gave the pilots one too. There was giant room for error in this convoluted process, and other factors didn’t make their chances any brighter.

The weather at Tenerife was unpredictable, particularly at Los Rodeos because it sat at an altitude of 2,477 ft above sea level. Sometimes, a torrent of rain would start to pour, replaced quickly by the shining sun, replaced by a blanket of hazy fog, and so on. It was often unbearable. And what was more, there were delays. Van Zanten chose to refuel immediately at Los Rodeos rather than Gran Canaria even though he had ample fuel to reach the latter. Perhaps he feared another separatist bombing? Perhaps he thought his plane could land last because there were so many planes going to the same destination? Whatever the case, refueling took a long time. And once that was finished, a family of four was looking for a child who had been lost in the airport, and that delayed takeoff by a further 35 minutes. And even more, one Dutch tour guide decided not to go to Gran Canaria because she felt it was unnecessary, and this prompted a discussion between her and KLM.

So KLM had been delayed by a sheer amount of misfortune. And Pan Am was now on the runway, as it was before KLM. If Van Zanten had waited another hour or so, things would be alright. But Van Zanten was growing impatient. His wife may have been worried about him because she may have been afraid that he was caught up in the earlier bombing. Van Zanten had a decent cause to fear this as news traveled at a slower pace in 1977 than 2022. He was also forced to follow KLM guidelines that if a pilot was in a cockpit for a certain limit, he would have to take a break. And he was approaching that limit quite quickly. If he and the crew took a break, they would have to delay the plane even longer than it already had been) and so he just wanted to “get it over with.” Thus, he orders all passengers to come back, as KLM 4805 is now taking off. The passengers are excited as they head on to Gran Canaria… but little did they realize in a blink of an eye, they would all be dead.

Around this time, Pan Am passengers and crew do not leave the plane, and they wait for takeoff. They should have taken off sooner but did not receive takeoff clearance. KLM 4805 meanwhile requests and is granted permission to taxi and is told that their and Pan Am’s main objective is to taxi down the runway, make a backwards turn 180 degrees, take the third exit, use a parallel taxiway, perform an 148 degree turn to the parking space, make yet another 148 degree turn and then reach the runway again to finally take off after the Pan Am had done this. Now if that sounded extremely hard to follow and understand, that was because it was. KLM and Pan Am also thought the same way, and Van Zanten asked for clarification: the controller emphatically said it was the third. With this, the two planes begin their objective. Or at least the controller thought they would, because he fails to realize the rush KLM is in. 

The two planes complete the convoluted instructions given to them and both line up on Runway 30. Van Zanten is being held up, and his limit is rapidly approaching. He is aware of Pan Am, but he deduces that they have already taken off. He begins to advance the throttles, but is stopped when Meurs says they are not cleared for takeoff. “No, I know that. Go ahead, ask.” Van Zanten responds. Meurs does so, telling the ATC that they are ready for takeoff and are waiting for clearance. The instructions given back by ATC include “takeoff” but do not give instructions for takeoff. Meurs reads back the message, and says that they are taking off, interrupted by Van Zanten saying that they are going. The tower responds… OK. And that is all.

This was a major point of complaint, the “OK” part. OK is nonstandard English and is colloquial, and is usually not used in ATC communication. However, the ATC controller was unskilled in English and thus was not aware of that. He also tended to say something long after he said “OK”, a statement that tended to contradict what the original message was seemingly. For example, if a pilot asked if he could land, the controller would say “OK…” and then say “Wait to land.” Those two instructions contradicted themselves, and this drove pilots off to no end. And for KLM, this was no different: after he said “OK”, the controller said “wait until you are cleared for takeoff.”

If Van Zanten had heard this, he would’ve pushed throttles to idle and canceled takeoff. Unfortunately, Pan Am’s Victor Grubbs decided to radio ATC at the exact same time, as he had not heard KLM, with the message “and we’re still taxiing down the runway, the Clipper 1736!” Indicating that they had not taken off yet. Either the ATC or Pan Am’s message could’ve gotten Van Zanten to stop, but they happened at the exact same time… causing a radio heterodyne, or jam to happen. Both messages canceled out and caused a shrill noise that likely wouldn’t have elicited a reaction from the KLM crew. If they had listened carefully enough, they could’ve picked out the messages… but KLM did not train pilots to do such as that was not anticipated or a frequent cause of error. Thus, KLM began to take off.

At the exact same time, Pan Am 1736 was getting very impatient. KLM had delayed them for an hour and thirty minutes after all, and they voiced that vocally. “He hung us up for an hour and thirty minutes, that bastard… now he’s in a rush!” said FE Warns. “Let’s get out of here”, said Grubbs nervously. They quickly asked for clearance from the ATC… but they were still on the runway.

Flight Engineer of KLM Willem Schrueder listened to the full conversation between Pan Am and ATC. He noticed that Pan Am was waiting for clearance… but not yet clear. He becomes nervous and asks Van Zanten… “Is he not clear then?” worried that Pan Am could interfere. “What do you say?” asked Van Zanten. “Is he not clear then, that Pan American?” Schreuder asks again, more anxious than before. “Oh yes.” Van Zanten replies emphatically. Either he was irritated with Schrueder, or he thought that Pan Am had taken off long before, or he was simply too impatient to wait any longer… nobody knows. But KLM reaches “V1” and it becomes impossible to abort the takeoff. Grubbs sees the KLM plane and in a sheer act of terror, tries to force it onto the grass by rearing the engine to full speed. He tries to get the plane off the runway. Meanwhile, Van Zanten also sees the Pan Am plane and exclaims “Oh shit!” and he tries to abruptly take off. So high is the angle of attack and so sudden that the plane suffers a 27-in tailstrike, the tail scraping onto the ground… but the plane manages to become airborne, only a few hundred feet away from Clipper Victor.

But it is far too late. The KLM hits the Pan Am flight at 151 mph, slicing through the upper deck, killing all in that area. The pilots all survive, Captain Grubbs with a broken leg and FO Bragg/FE Warns with minor injuries, but Clipper Victor is on fire, the plane fully sheared. People not in the upper deck evacuate somewhat successfully, although many perish from the nature of the smoke and fire. KLM stays airborne although all hydraulics and engines have been lost from the violent nature of the impact, continues for about 0.1 miles before falling violently on the runway, breaking into three pieces and inverting before setting into a fiery inferno, killing all on board. It is presumed that several may have survived the impact on the KLM but died because the fire caused by Van Zanten refueling beforehand was so severe it wiped out all in an instance. It was like a flash fire but somehow far worse. In the end, 583 were killed in the worst accident of all time.

After Tenerife

Unlike accidents like Turkish 981, where victims were from multiple parts of the world, passengers were exclusively American or Dutch. Still, the entire world mourned with intense grief. “How could this happen?” was the question the whole world was interested in hearing about. Even the terrorist group regretted their actions, stating it was not their intentions for such a disaster to happen. Everyone wanted to find answers for such a horrifying event, and although it came slowly, it would come eventually. And what happened greatly shocked the public.

There was an absurdly long chain of misfortunes leading to the accident. For one, Tenerife was an unscheduled stop, as said before: Los Rodeos wasn’t fit for two jumbo jets, but it was the only alternative. Had the planes reached another airport slightly better-suited, things could’ve gone differently. Another chain of incidents happened after that heightening the chances for disaster, such as Pan Am taking the wrong exit. The pilots thought they were not asked to take that exit as it was near impossible (turning 146 degrees in such a short distance was near-unattainable) and didn’t take off when they should have, and KLM had taken off without clearance. But why?

Jacob Van Zanten, as previously stated, was the poster child of KLM. He had tens of thousands of flight hours to his name, was certified for almost a dozen types of aircraft, and appeared in many KLM advertisements in photo. He was the most senior pilot in an airline already one of the best in the world, so he was clearly extremely gifted. And he was known for being very kind and humble, to the point where he would ask colleagues to call him “Jaap” and not “Captain Van Zanten.” So how could Van Zanten make such fundamental errors and be so utterly disrespectful to the point of negligence? The answer would be due to a multitude of reasons.

For one thing, Van Zanten had done very little actual flying in the past few years. He was a flight instructor, so he either flew in a flight simulator, was training someone else or was in the photo booth getting photos of himself shot. He in a simulator was conditioned to take off without real ATC clearance, as a simulator doesn’t have an ATC. So he was about to take off before F/O Meurs (who he actually had trained) told him to wait a minute. Also, the phrasing of messages was very confusing. There was the “OK”, Meurs’s vague statement of “taking off” (which could also be interpreted as “at takeoff”) also confused the ATC as a result. And on top of that, the controller gave the word “takeoff’ in his instructions without giving them clearance, which made Van Zanten think they were cleared for takeoff. And unfortunately too, Clipper 1736 was concerned at the exact same time as the ATC, and chose to coordinate their concerns at the exact same time. Confusion kept mounting.

And then there was a tremendously imbalanced power hierarchy amongst the pilots. Meurs had just 95 hours on the 747, despite not being a rookie by any means: it was Van Zanten who had also trained him, so he perhaps had a great deal of respect for the Captain. He did question Van Zanten when he didn’t have air traffic clearance, but ultimately failed to push harder. Schruder, although more experienced than either, believed flight engineers should just maintain the plane, check the systems and not actually fly. That was not their role. He as a president of an aviation union should’ve known otherwise, but the Dutch had a specific sense of hierarchy. It was well-ingrained into Dutch Pilots and Schruder as a whole, which caused him to ultimately defer. Although he also questioned Van Zanten by asking if Pan Am was clear, he seemed to accept Van Zanten was correct in taking off and Van Zanten’s “Oh Yes!” seemed to reiterate that.

Finally, there was stress which caused the accident. If Van Zanten didn’t take off soon, he would be held criminally culpable and then face jail times as well as the others. He and the others were under intense pressure in that aspect. He also saw that weather was worsening as rain and fog began to increase, that his wife could have been worried (since she often read the evening news) and loading passengers took longer than usual due to lost passengers and such. He was under giant pressure and nothing seemed to alleviate that, causing him to make irrational decisions.

In the end, reports were divided. Spain’s report said Van Zanten was solely to blame, with his poor attitude causing the crash. The Dutch report painted Van Zanten as a hero who tried to do the best with what he had, being deferential but unfairly pressured. Both were simultaneously true and false, and all failed to consider the long, awful string of coincidences that had added to the accident’s likelihood. But in the end, Tenerife led to CRM, or Crew Resource Management, which emphasized deference and respect through a flight crew: in order to prevent a pilot like Van Zanten from having an overly large amount of influence. Although even this would take a while to be implemented after, as in many flights the pilot’s seniority was not to be questioned (Birgenair 301 for instance, 1999). And Los Rodeos took a long time to be refurbished: BOAC 548 suffered a deep stall at Tenerife, undetected by the ATC, killing 118. And then another runway incursion happened at Madrid’s airport, between a Aviaco and an Iberia, killing 93. It was near-identical to Tenerife, and after these incidents happened, Los Rodeos was finally refurbished. Tenerife bought a lot of changes to the table, but these changes took time to implement. Like any other plane crash in general.

And finally, what is to be discussed is the reputation Van Zanten has gotten in the years to come. He has been vilified, universally condemned as an angry, abusive captain who yelled at his subordinates and took off because he was trigger-happy… when it was anything but. In reality, Van Zanten was a kind and conscientious person who happened to make a very, very costly mistake in the heat of the moment. It wasn’t all his fault as many believe, but he wasn’t a hero as others might… he was a pilot tasked with making a difficult decision. And he made the wrong one at that. And sometimes… you just can’t be perfect.

Reagan’s Deregulation

The deregulation of the 70s by President Ronald Reagan opened a whole new can of worms. It meant that competition was more open than ever before, because gone were the stringent set of rules and laws that governed airline space. There were less background checks, audits, and governance on corporate culture: airplanes were free to do whatever they wished. And that meant previously obscure carriers began to gain attention and compete. They began to expand in operations, soon putting Pan Am at jeopardy… 

Pan Am could do little to curb this. Juan Trippe, the visionary owner, had suffered a stroke recently and he mostly spent his time recovering. The 747 and L-011’s and previously fancy aircraft now looked obsolete compared to the copious amounts of fleet coming in… and Pan Am no longer had a monopoly on even that, as everyone was buying aircraft. As long as you had over a million dollars back then, you could start an airliner. And this was a heaven to the people willing to become entrepreneurs and a hell to established companies like Pan Am. All they could do was watch as their market share eroded. 

And this sudden jilt in influx of competition only got more and more severe. There were some rocky situations that made things worse: Pan Am began losing revenue at the same time competition increased because assets depreciated quicker than you could say the word “Clipper.” And as deregulation continued, assets depreciated even more. It seemed like Pan Am was wearing out, an old, fading star in the solar system and soon to collapse. And what happened after deregulation made matters worse.

National Airlines

In 1980, Pan Am wished to purchase National Airlines, a small but wieldy regional airliner somewhat successful with a few DC-9’s and DC-10’s. National Airlines was known for being southern, operating primarily in Florida. It also shipped cargo nationwide, making it versatile in both passenger and cargo categories. Thus, National caught the attention of Pan Am.

Pan Am and Texas International, a rival conglomerate, decided to bid for National Airlines. This caused National’s stock price to soar during the ordeal, where it was unsure who would gain ownership. After long weeks of gnashing at throats, corporate arguments and such, Pan Am purchased National for $437 million. This was an extremely steep price for such a small company, and many experts believe Pan Am had overpaid. 

And it soon showed. Pan Am and National’s fleet were entirely different, and incompatible aside from the B727. They couldn’t mesh with each other, and Pan Am’s sophisticated, refined culture didn’t match National’s laid-back, southern culture. And National really didn’t offer enough flights for Pan Am to stand a significant competitive advantage from low-cost brands. And Pan Am’s balance sheet, already somewhat crippled, burst after this ordeal. Expenses increased as a whole, and the acquisition itself was handled awfully by Pan Am management, with salaries and wages disputed for weeks. It would soon be eclipsed, however, by an even worse nightmare…

Lockerbie

In the days before the bombing, Pan Am was already declining rapidly. Most of their assets were sold, including the Pacific (transpacific) fleet, some of the 747 fleet, and the InterContinental hotel branch. Pan Am essentially started to become a budget airliner, lowering the fares and fleet that once made it a titan in the field of aviation. It was most certainly a tough time for Pan Am, and Lockerbie ended up being the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

On December 21, 1988, Clipper Maid Of The Seas (original name Clipper Morning Light) was set to take off from Frankfurt, go to London and end in New York. It had completed the first leg successfully and was now preparing for the second. It was one of the first 15 or so 747’s built, and was shipped to Pan Am a month after the ill-fated Clipper Victor. It was well-maintained, to the point where it appeared on BBC Television and photo shoots as it was one of the joys of the airline. 

Upon Clipper 103 was captain James Bruce MacQuarrie, a veteran pilot with 11,000 hours and 4,000 on the 747, one of the most experienced pilots of Pan Am. First Officer Raymond Ronald Wagner had 12,000 hours in total and 5,500 hours in the 747. Flight engineer Jerry Don Avritt had 8,000 hours and 500 on the 747. Clearly, the crew was extremely seasoned and could overcome any survivable accident–which was not the case here. 

Apart from the flight crew, many people on board were Syracuse University students returning to New York for the holiday season ending. Aside from that, there was a former Miss France, a UN Commissioner, and an Olympic medalist on board: heightening the plane’s prestige. There are a total of 259 people on board, mainly of American and British descent. The flight attendants have a high amount of seniority, with several veteran attendants serving for up to 28 years tending to the flight. 

The flight was delayed thirty minutes due to engine issues that were not a cause of the accident. After takeoff, the flight is fairly routine, with refreshments and supper being served at a usual time. After about 37 minutes, Clipper 103 transmits a routine squawk. It also requests clearance to 31,000 feet, or regular cruising altitude. Not soon after, however, the plane suddenly explodes, with the cabin ripping off of the plane. This also causes the Number 3 engine to get torn off, and this violent eruption tears the plane into three pieces: the cabin, cockpit and horizontal stabilizer. All three parts fell like a torrent into the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, where Clipper Maid Of The Seas was heading over. 

At Lockerbie, a quaint town where people were celebrating Christmas, an inferno never seen before rained down upon Sherwood Crescent. Debris fell upon dozens of houses and streets, killing 11 in the process and destroying roughly 21 houses. People had initially thought it was a bomb or a earthquake… until the cabin of the plane was discovered, with the crew strapped on to the seats inside. A flight attendant apparently had survived and was alive inside the cabin but succumbed shortly after being found. The rest of the cabin was scattered all around Lockerbie, bodies and engine fuel littering the streets.

Apparently, three people or more had initially survived the initial impact. One of them being a young girl who had landed in the grass and had suffered severe bone damage, but was still conscious. Investigators say had she and another survivor had received immediate medical care, they had a chance of survival. But the sudden destruction of such an isolated city was more focused upon by emergency services, as it was simply unprecedented, the level of destruction. They were unaware of the initial survivors. In the end, 270 people were killed in Britain’s worst terrorist attack of all time and plane crash. It is also Pan Am’s second deadliest accident after Tenerife. The whole world immediately caught note to this and began asking questions: Why? The answer would be far more convoluted than anyone would expect.

The Investigation

No motive was ever found for the bombing… no specific one, that is. Several terrorist groups ranging from ISIS to an Islamic Jihad organization claimed responsibility, although no claim was ever merited with evidence. There were rumors Gaddafi’s Libyan forces did it to get revenge on the U.S. for the Gulf War, but no correlation was ever found between the two. A terrorist called Helsinki claiming he had planted the bomb, but the man was later found to not be culpable. So just who had done such a thing?

First of all, the bomb should not have made it onto the aircraft in the first place. Basic detection would have scanned it and removed it, but Pan Am used archaic X-ray detection which could not find it. Pan Am was later found criminally culpable in this regard, the second time they were criminally charged (the first was Pan Am 160 where lithium batteries imported by Pan Am set the plane on fire and ultimately on to a dive). The bomb was snuck into a suitcase which also contained a watch and a battery, which was checked… but simply not detected. So now investigators knew what exactly caused the crash, but they still couldn’t know two. They suspected a variety of organizations but none simply were correlated.

Abredesat Al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer, was found to have been a chief culprit in the crime. He confessed to planting the bomb, and in 2020 was sentenced to life in prison. However, whether he acted alone in planting the bomb or was a co-conspirator remained unknown and is hazy even today. Gaddafi of Libya accepted responsibility for the bombing and the Libyan government as well, although they have never confessed to ordering the planting of the bomb. During the Libyan Civil War, the Prime Minister Abdul Jalil said Gaddafi give the order for the bomb, but this has never been confirmed. Suspects are being interviewed to this very day, from all sorts of terrorist groups, although no one group has ever been found to be culpable in any way. In 2014, an ex-Iranian spy claimed Iran was the party responsible for the bombing, although this too has never been confirmed. In 2020, Abu Agela Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi was charged with creating the bomb and is sentenced to life in prison, but he has so far been the only other one.

Lockerbie was a tragedy that was one too many for passengers. It would taint Pan Am’s reputation forever, right up until bankruptcy. For on that day, it wasn’t just Clipper Maid Of The Seas which went down in flames… Pan Am’s iconic status and indisputable brand went down with it as well.

The End

By 1991, Pan Am was a crippled shell of its former self. It was sucked dry from the sheer amount of competition, customer distrust after Lockerbie, rising fuel prices from a second fuel embargo during the Gulf War, and a lack of transatlantic routes after they all were sold to United in order to make space for assets. Basically, the luxury and stardom Pan Am had in the 70s was replaced with a weak, budget airliner that was Pan Am in name only. Juan Trippe had been dead for a decade, and his successors had been so inefficient that they made a mockery out of his ideals. Failed purchases, negligence, corporate miscommunication… Trippe would be shuddering in his tomb. And if he had lived, he would have likely fired every higher-up on the spot, for they had disobeyed the precedent that he had set for his airliner by making irrational decisions.

In Jan 8, 1991, after losing hundreds of millions of dollars from getting sued from the Lockerbie bombing and oil prices, Pan Am filed for bankruptcy protection. They had no choice: profits diminished quicker than a Concorde could take off. Delta had bought Pan Am for $1.4 billion, thinking it could turn a profit. But Pan Am was still hemorrhaging $3 million a day, and after two months of consistent losses, Delta had enough. At 9:00 AM, new Pan Am CEO Russell Ray Jr. was given a call by Delta to “shut it down.” He immediately executed a shutdown plan and hours later… Pan Am was no more. Clipper 436, or Clipper Goodwill, was the final flight operated, a B727, from Barbados to Miami. When Goodwill had landed… the world said goodbye to a legendary, iconic airliner one last time.

Aftermath

Pan Am’s brand name was bought five different times by different investors, all falling bankrupt within years. To this date, revitalization of the iconic brand has been rapt with failure, with lawsuits and lack of interaction in general a contributing factor. It was bought furthermore by a railway and flight school system, both with very limited success. To this day, Pan Am seems to be dead.

But is it? The iconic globe is still a recognized brand image to this day. The culture and the standards set by Trippe and Pan Am still make flights bearable. It is likely aviation travel for middle-class people like you and I would have never existed without the hand of Pan Am. Nor airplane food, amenities, or maybe even flying in general: after all, Pan Am popularized air travel with the Clippers in the first place. Pan Am may be grounded, but their influence extends towards all travel… so in that aspect, when you step foot on an airplane, you extend the life and reputation of Pan Am. Juan Trippe perhaps never truly died, merely he simply manifested his spirit into the luxuries we take for granted today. 

The story of Pan Am is a very long one, fraught with both successes and tragedies, but it teaches us many lessons: to be innovative but cautious, daring but not overly so, quick but never haughty. It is an airliner that shall live on in the hearts and experiences of millions in the years past and the years to come.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this article as much as I had writing it.