Pan Am: Juan Trippe's Airmail Monopoly, Coral Reef Bases and the 747

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Pan American Airways began in 1927 as a geopolitical block. U.S. Army Air Corps officers including Henry Arnold and Carl Spaatz feared a German-backed Colombian airline seeking landing rights in the Panama Canal Zone and set up a shell company to win the Key West to Havana airmail contract. Juan Trippe, backed by Vanderbilt and Harriman money, already held landing rights in Havana, and days before the deadline the two groups merged with Trippe in control. Guaranteed mail payments funded expansion, and Washington made Pan Am its chosen instrument abroad. In 1935 the chartered ship North Haven carried crews to Midway and Wake Island to blast coral, build radio stations and hotels for the flying boats.

Pan Am flew the first transpacific mail in 1935 and transatlantic passengers by 1939, and in January 1942 the Pacific Clipper flew home westward after Pearl Harbor, completing the first circumnavigation by a commercial airliner. It launched the Boeing 707 in 1958 and pushed Boeing to build the 747, which entered service in 1970. Then the 1973 oil crisis, 1978 deregulation, a costly purchase of National Airlines and the 1988 Lockerbie bombing drained it. Pan Am ceased operations on December 4, 1991.

• Pan Am's clippers took their name from fast sailing ships, and pilots wore naval style uniforms to borrow the trust of ocean liners.
• IBM built the PANAMAC computerized reservation system for Pan Am, filling an entire floor.
• The Pan Am Building over Grand Central Terminal was briefly the largest commercial office building in the world.
• With almost no domestic routes, Pan Am had no feeder network once deregulation let rivals fly overseas.
• To survive the 1980s it sold its Manhattan headquarters, its hotel chain and its Pacific division to United Airlines.