Tales of Pan American World Airways.

• Author: Ripley, Kate
• Position: Services in Alaska are remembered - Company profile

Tales Of Pan American World Airways

Today, operating in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Pan Am struggles to survive. But the carrier is remembered in Alaska as an aviation superstar that pioneered new routes in the 49th state and around the world.

Pan American World Airways, once known as the flagship airline of the United States overseas, has accomplished many firsts, including inaugurating air routes between the United States and Latin America 60 years ago. In 1935, the airline opened routes across the Pacific to China, and in 1939, it developed trans-Atlantic airline service.

Among numerous other entries on Pan Am's long list of firsts are many entailing Alaskan aviation feats. The company forged its way through Alaska flight history beginning in 1931, when its technical adviser, famous aviator Col. Charles Lindbergh, made a survey flight from New York to the Orient via Alaska. Alaska aviation and Pan Am progressed hand-in-hand from that point for many years to follow.

Samuel Pryor, a Pan American vice president, told the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce in 1963, "It is no overstatement that Pan American and Alaska grew up together."

Only one year after Lindbergh's survey flight, Pan American, under founder Juan Trippe's guidance, purchased the equipment and facilities of Alaska's two largest airlines - Alaskan Airways and Pacific International Airways of Alaska. The combined acquisitions were suffering $100,000 in operating losses after spending $500,000 on equipment and development work, according to a 1945 historical account written by J. Howard Hamstra of New York, a Pan Am vice president.

Pan American formed a subsidiary, Pacific Alaska Airways, to buy the two struggling operations -- hoping to further the air carrier's vision of a flight path to the Orient through Alaska, which it provided years later. Under terms of the sale, Pan Am inherited a mishmash of airplanes; operating bases at Fairbanks, Anchorage and Nome; and mail contracts, known as Star Routes, for various Interior, Kenai Peninsula and Western Alaska communities.

"To undertake operations with such a heterogeneous assortment of equipment and a series of disconnected mail routes under the severe geographical and climatic conditions of Alaska, with its limited traffic potential, was sufficient to give pause to any prudent management," says Hamstra in his narrative. "Pan American's determination to enter Alaska was, therefore, motivated not by the immediate commercial possibilities of the investment, but by experimental considerations looking to long-range development objectives."

By 1933, PAA had reorganized operations and was maintaining scheduled service on more than 2,600 miles of Alaska air routes. The same year in Fairbanks, the company constructed a modern hangar and improved its maintenance base.

Also in 1933, three Fairchild seaplanes from Fairbanks landed at Auke Bay, near Juneau, with 11 passengers and 360 pounds of first-class mail. It was the first time air mail was...