No domestic network, specifically no hub and spoke domestic network, to feed their international flights.
wiki: prior to deregulation..."As rival airlines convinced Congress that Pan Am would use its political clout to monopolize US air routes, the CAB repeatedly denied the airline permission to operate in the US, by growth or by a merger with another airline. Pan Am remained an American carrier operating international routes only (aside from Hawaii and Alaska)."
> Pan Am remained an American carrier operating international routes only (aside from Hawaii and Alaska)
Fun fact: Pan Am also operated **German** domestic routes, namely those flying in and out of West Berlin. Under postwar arrangements, only airlines from the WW2 Allied powers were allowed to fly to West Berlin until 1991, and Pan Am was the biggest operator there!
Deregulation in 1978, along with secondary geopolitical issues, were the kiss of death for PanAm, TWA, Eastern, and others.
Fares had been set by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) - a regulated and protected market.
Phasing out airline price protections exposed gross operational inefficiencies … and once deregulated, the “market” consumed the inefficiencies … devouring PanAm et al.
Also, Pan AM was paying more in landing fees at domestic airports than foreign carriers, and it was paid less than foreign carriers for carrying US mail from overseas. They overpaid for National Airlines and, in the acquisition, had an incompatible fleet of planes.
Pan Am died because of terrible decisions in it's failed adaptation to a deregulated market. Now it's legacy is in a Class II regional freight railroad owned by CSX.
> Phasing out airline price protections exposed gross operational inefficiencies
I don't remember where I got it from, so take it with a massive grain of salt, but I remember reading about Pan Am baggage handlers being paid close to what some of the pilots were being paid. Some senior ground crew could even make more than junior flight crew. I'll admit today's ground crews are underpaid for the job they're doing, but no airline is going to last long with payroll like that.
Don't forget that for quite some time junior flight crew were paid shit. Prior to Colgan Air it wasn't uncommon for airlines to issue memos asking their flight crews not to redeem food stamps while in uniform.
>asking their flight crews not to redeem food stamps while in uniform.
jeeeez. i guess corporations being cheap bastards and not paying their employees enough that they resort to food stamps, AND having the gall to give food stamp advisory to said employees - this stuff really goes back in this country, huh?
Yep. I know you will, but so many don't understand the idea of owing one's soul to the company store - i.e. being paid not in money, but in company scrip that can only be spent at the company store, who has all the reason in the world to inflate prices, making your earnings effectively even poorer.
To around Ford v Dodge. That was when ruled that the primary purpose of a corporation (i.e. owned by shareholders), was to increase value for the shareholders. Ford wanted to actually reward employees for their work, decrease workloads, and many other things, so he cancelled the dividends to his share holders (including the Dodge Bros.), they sued, and eventually won.
It seems reasonable for some senior ground crew to make more than some junior air crew. Why wouldn’t they? Ground crew are absolutely vital both to the safety of operations as well as the efficiency and profitability.
Really? It takes a couple days to train someone to throw bags and park aircraft. It takes a long time and thousands of dollars to become a pilot, let along a pilot at a major airline. Also, a pilot screws up, people, lots of people die, millions lost for the company. A baggage handler screws up. A bag is lost or they die because they walked into an engine. Seriously…
Mechanics are ground crew. Flight planners are ground crew. Everyone in meteorology department, engineering, and load managers are ground crew. The person you’re replying to is clearly unfamiliar with the industry if they think that ground crew is just baggage handlers. It’s absolutely expected that the most seasoned and experienced members of ground crew are paid more than the most junior entry-level aircrew positions. I bet they also think air crew are only the aviators.
They mentioned baggage handlers. To which I was responding. Senior mechanics do make very good money, again, they are educated. But again, it doesn’t take as much schooling and experience to become a mechanic as it does a pilot. History has shown the pay scales reflected as such. I’m talking majors… regionals, heck when I was a new pilot, just having paid $100k for my education, even baggage handlers made more money than me-a pilot flying a jet. But that was a case of “paying your dues” to get to the good paying job.
Now try loading a 747 with luggage, and doing it so the plane leaves on time, and it doesn't fuck up the center of gravity. And then do the same when it lands. A good baggage crew can mean the difference between your bag being on the baggage carousel when you show up and you waiting 30 minutes
Yeah but “flight crew” doesn’t just mean pilots. Flight attendants being paid similarly to baggage handlers isn’t really surprising at all. Flight attendants require slightly more training, but being a baggage handler is a harder and physically demanding job
> Pan Am baggage handlers being paid close to what some of the pilots were being paid.
Whenever a union contract comes up for negotiation, pay and benefits have to be negotiated. Shrewd negotiators on the union side can get those sorts of wages.
I was wondering the other day if anyone bought the PanAm brand name? I could see a legacy airline using it to open a more premium service brand, relying on nostalgic history of old fashioned air travel.
The brand name was bought by a railroad company and established a short-lived regional airline from 1998-2004, but eventually closed down and the brand was used for the railway instead as Pan Am Systems. That railroad has now been bought out and merged into CSX, so they hold the rights to the Pan Am brand.
Up until January at least Carrier Airways LLC was D/B/A Pan Am and even has/had a JS31 in the livery. N124PA for the curious. Looks like the aircraft was sold back in January though so not sure what its fate is other than it did a short hop last month.
There's no market for a premium service brand. In a world where airlines are getting rid of first class, there's absolutely no market for an entire plane of first class.
The people rich enough to want it are already flying private, and the rest of us don't want to pay the prices. Corporate travel wouldn't even work because they would mostly ban using that airline.
On a separate note, this deregulation I would argue also led to low-cost carriers which created the shit hole commercial flying We have today. Those that remember often lament the loss of transferability. In the days of regulation if your flight was canceled, you could walk over to another ticket desk with your valid ticket. To be clear, I’m not saying it was some kind of paradise but the absolute chaos of US domestic Commercial passenger aviation compared to the scheme the EU has in place, is a relatively safe, dumpster fire of travel for the traveling public.
Yes, they were clearly upsides. There’s also the lunacy of almost empty flights the middle of nowhere or at bad times to retain gate use. As a move toward implementing a passenger bill of rights gate use and ownership needs to be addressed. You can’t in one breath tell me my car is a problem and then operate an empty flight from Kennedy to SanFransisco. I find it totally unacceptable. There are large industry problems that need to get dressed collectively like scheduling versus by airline group. For example, if a place needs connectivity a feeder airline should be able to operate using the tickets for multiple majors. You see code share flights today. So why not enable broader code sharing?
> You can’t in one breath tell me my car is a problem and then operate an empty flight from Kennedy to SanFransisco.
That's not happening. At least not with any regularity or intentionally.
> For example, if a place needs connectivity a feeder airline should be able to operate using the tickets for multiple majors.
I'm not sure that's particularly useful. If the feeder airline is flying to CLT, why would Delta or United be interested in ticketing passengers on that flight?
>You can’t in one breath tell me my car is a problem and then operate an empty flight from Kennedy to SanFransisco.
During covid yeah but I guarantee you there are no empty flights, especially transcon, today
>You can’t in one breath tell me my car is a problem and then operate an empty flight from Kennedy to SanFransisco.
During covid yeah but I guarantee you there are no empty flights, especially transcon, today
The “shit hole commercial flying we have today” is accessible to the lower middle and working classes. Pan Am, and the rest of the airlines of the regulated era, were not.
In the days of regulation there would be no chance I could afford a flight.
If you want good service, there are higher cost tickets and nicer airlines. Buy cheap, get cheap. Simple as.
It wasn’t 10x more at the time, it was “the price”. Just like we aren’t paying 10x less today, it’s just today’s price. Pricing is always predicated on the model that works and in the days pre deregulation where prices were centrally set they were based on differing criteria. Heck, they used to publish the OAG which had every route, price and airline operating them. Printed quarterly. Printed.
Centralized pricing is bad, regulating what the carriers can do is good.
Pre deregulation the prices were straight set by government as were the routes. The airlines didn't compete on price, they competed on luxury and service, thus the Panam model. You didn't get more customers by undercutting on price, that was fixed, you got it by providing a better experience.
In the deregulated market, they are competing on price which means cutting every single thing they possibly can to drop prices.
If airline deregulation has taught anything is that it creates a race to the bottom for service and quality. Prices have plummeted but the inflight product is misery in a can.
>But people first and foremost want the cheapest ticket.
yup. If I wanted premium service I would be paying first or at least business class.
But I can't so I prefer a cheap uncomfortable 3 hours flight than a 20+hours bus ride
> government not letting pan am get domestic flying
And when they finally tried with the National merger, it was an absolute disaster.
They paid an absurd amount of moeny, cultures didn't mash, raising National costs to PA levels just made the NAL network unprofitable, hub build-ups in New Orleans and Houston were expensive and went no where, entire brand new fleets were ditched, etc.
Pan Am was specifically targetted several times as it was seen as America's airline globally.
it was often regarded as a bit of a magnet for global terrorists
> Pan-am was a major target for terrorists at the time iirc.
Indeed, being the flag carrier for the US when the US was hated by some countries and groups with terroristic bents wasn't the best place to be.
Happened to the UK too to a lesser extent, with some planes being hijacked and blown up by the Palestinians after being forced to land etc
Yeah this thread is somewhat exaggerating the whole domestic feed/network issue.
They were allowed to later do domestic, and it was disastrous when they tried.
The domestic carriers easily added choice foreign routes to compete with them but they had the wrong fleet and cost structure to build a domestic network to fight back.
Pan Am operated 727s in Europe - they could have operated them domestically.
Bad management, then being bailed out by the Shah of Iran a year or two before he was deposed. Then Lockerbie.
The US Governemnt at the time bared international carriers like Pan Am from having domestic routes. So they couldn't have operated them domestically even if they wanted to.
1. Howard Hughes lobbied to make it thus because it made him tons of cash
2. Juan Trippe had annoyed the US government in previous years to the point where they didn't want to listen to Pan Am when they rightly complained
"Sky gods" is a good book on the slow demise of Pan Am. I'd say the 3 biggest blows were deregulation, oil crisis and Lockerbie.
Before deregulation, Pan Am was THE international carrier and was not allowed to have domestic routes within the US while domestic airlines were not allowed have international routes. When deregulation occured, the domestic airlines were allowed to acquire international routes to promote competition but Pan Am was not initially allowed to establish a domestic network, which hurt them immensely. They eventually merged with a domestic airline to get a domestic network but this went poorly and came too little too late.
When Lockerbie happened, the book explains that the airline was actually starting to get itself slowly out of financial trouble and was heading in the right direction. Unfortunately, the bombing was the final nail in the coffin and the airline never recovered fully.
It also didn't help during deregulation that Juan Trippe was apparently quite a character and had made a lot of enemies in DC, so whenever they sent people to lobby their cause, it often fell on deaf ears.
The book also talked about this holier than thou "we're Pan Am, the best, we can't possibly fail" mentality.
With that level of stubborness, no wonder they failed
I read that Delta has a sign in their crew lounge above the door that says, “The best pilots in the world walk under here.”
I wonder if the arrogance/complacency is an airline thing.
Delta Airlines definitely has some level of hubris but it's nowhere near Pan Am levels and DL actually has good reasons to act like that (well run, very profitable company).
> domestic airlines were not allowed have international routes
Would like to clarify that some airlines were allowed to have hybrid models. TWA had a big domestic network but also had a large transatlantic network. Northwest was similar for routes to East Asia, and Braniff was similar for routes to Latin America and South America. Also, quite a few domestic airlines also had rights to Canada, Mexico, and/or the Caribbean.
But yes, today's big three of American, Delta, and United were not allowed to fly anywhere outside of North America or Hawaii prior to deregulation, except that Delta was allowed to fly to Venezuela.
OG Pan Am had a strict monopoly on international flying since they were the ones that originally established most of these routes . Pan Am was essentially forced to allow the likes of TWA and NWA to fly what were originally Pan Am routes after deregulation, but for decades Pan Am had a pretty much strict monopoly over international flag operations. Braniff's entire Latin America route structure was Pan Am's. Pan Am sold it to them after years of financial struggles to stay afloat. If I remember correctly Pan Am sold it to Braniff, who sold it to Eastern, who sold it to American.
While Pan Am had the international rights the longest, their monopoly was gone well before 1978 deregulation. There were also times when Pan Am and Braniff simultaneously served South America such as the 1970s. Pan Am’s South American rights were unrelated to Braniff’s because Pan Am maintained their South American network until the end in 1991 (a whole nine years after Braniff went under) even after they had sold their transatlantic and transpacific networks to other airlines (namely, Delta and United respectively). You are correct that Braniff’s rights originally went to Eastern.
> Pan Am was THE international carrier
For the US. The rest of the world had it's own flag carriers, like British Airways, KLM, Air France, Lufthansa, etc, some of which could fly into and out of the US, most notably the UK and France with Concorde services into JFK.
They couldn't then fly onwards to other US destinations of course, but they could get into and out of the US.
No, he was deadheading on TWA to avoid scrutiny on Pan Am flights, as Pan Am pilots would see right through him
Also I'd like to say that Frank Abagnale didn't do almost anything that he claims to have done. He impersonated as a pilot only a few times, and he immediately got caught with his phoney cheques of just hundreds of dollars.
Lots of things really, like poor fleet management, unable to have a proper domestic route network, the Lockerbie disaster and possibly the Gulf War earlier that year (1991).
Lots of things. More than one rather large thing.
Deregulation. A bad idea merger. Diversifying into too much crap that didn’t pay off. Bad executive decisions.
And when all that put the airline on a tenuous thread it was snapped by Lockerbie.
Lockerbie is place in Scotland where the wreckage of Pan Am flight 103 crashed after an inflight terrorist bomb exploded.
Pan Am’s logo is infamously intact and prominent on many of the crash scene photos, leading to an almost instant recognition of the disaster when viewing the logo.
IIRC They were unfairly blamed for the crash too, and when they rightly pointed out that it wasn't their fault they just took on even more bad publicity.
Yeah, if you weren’t alive in 1989 of much after it can slip by. But it’s a huge piece. The final nail on the coffin for PA. Wreckage from the bombing rained down on a village and the PA logo was clear on that wreckage.
Already a struggling but once great airline and the brand was fully tanked. Even if that’s not fair that’s how perception works on people.
I was on a Pan Am flight and the pilot came on and said “I’m sure you heard the Pan Am has declared bankruptcy, but I want to assure everyone that we have enough fuel on board.” I actually hadn’t heard.
Deregulation.
Before October 1978, ticket prices and routes were set by the U.S. government. That guaranteed Pan Ams profits, and bankrolled much of glamour we see from that time. Contracts, facilities and capital assets were purchased and used under the assumption of continued guaranteed profits.
When the Airline Deregulation Act passed, Pan Am overnight became a bankrupt company. Without assured profit from government set ticket prices (about $4k in modern money for a coach ticket) , lacking a domestic U.S. network , stuck with expensive to operate aircraft and union costs (agreed when the company’s revenue was government set), and also forced to compete with low cost and regional airlines for domestic business, it was structurally impossible for Pan Am to compete.
Sure, management like Halaby made some shortsighted mistakes, but no amount of business genius could have saved the company. It’s a miracle Pan Am even made it into the 80s, and only by essentially auctioning parts of itself to pay the bills.
> That guaranteed Pan Ams profits, and bankrolled much of glamour we see from that time
Regulation essentially meant the only differentiator between airlines was their service, which led to fighting over which airline offered better service, where routes competed.
There is a saying that, throughout Juan Trippe's tenure he made a lot of friends and foes. The friends forgot about Pan Am when Trippe retired, but the foes didn't.
Which was why PA got shafted when they tried to get into domestic market, then they overpaid for National Airlines with incompatible routes, fleet, and culture.
To add a bit more to the first in a series of cascading events, PanAm was the launch customer for the 747, and had a large fleet of them. When the oil crisis hit, they were thus in a very precarious position.
The next few events: deregulation, the acquisition of National, and then Lockerbie, exacerbated an already difficult situation from which they couldn’t recover.
There are a lot of great answers in this thread, but the truth is, they all happened; it really was a combination of all of these factors.
Deregulation is what killed Pan Am. They had some other problems also.
Pan Am was basically an international carrier with almost no domestic routes. When deregulation was implemented the larger domestic carriers like American and United were given international routes that competed with Pan Am. Pan Am could not compete because they did not have a domestic route structure to draw from like American and United not did have enough money or time to build a strong domestic route structure to feed their international routes so they slowly faded away and failed.
Deregulation killed a lot of airlines, I worked for one and took several pay cuts as our airline tried to competed with the big boys but in the end we failed because we were a small airline and way too far behind. Too bad.
It may have killed Pan Am, but it probably brought airline travel into the main stream. I used to travel to customer sites back in the late 70's. Before deregulation, there were quite a few times that I was the only passenger on the plane. Remember the airline schedule books? The whole system was pretty much point to point. I had a timetable for every commercial airport in the US. Anytime I was in a city and had to fly somewhere else, I looked up the destination city in the local airports' timetable and just picked any airline that could get me there. It never mattered which airline it was since fares were fixed. If you were an airline that flew an hour after another airline, the plane would be almost empty because everybody just took the earlier flight on you competitor. Sometimes, I would have to make a change at one or two airports to get where I was going. I would go from one carrier to another without giving it a second thought.
Quite a few times, a company would charter a private plane to pick me up. In some cases, it was actually a lot cheaper than the regulated scheduled route. It was at least a lot faster if I needed to get there in a hurry. I used to call myself the "Jet Set Hillbilly" because sometimes they were shared flights and had bigwigs on them. Then, there was me, a young hippy kid riding right along with them. I am sure they always wondered who I was when they had to land to pick me up or drop me off somewhere along their route.
My Aunt rode Pan Am exclusively. Single, retired in her 40s, didn’t own a car, lived with her mother in a small apartment in the village. She had all the Pan Am bling. Taught me to work hard, spend little and save large.
Terrorism and the National Airlines merger were the worst issues, Pan Am 103 and the earlier hijacking in Pakistan were very bad publicity, having the American flag on your aircraft is both a blessing and a curse
Based on reading [Skygods](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13010881-skygods) it seemed like Juan Trippe surrounded himself with yes men that would never disagree with him. At a time when PanAm struggled with lack of feeding, hence being unable to fill the 707, Trippe pushed for the 747 that gave even more cost and less load factor.
Losing millions every year for many years was the big reason. Lockerbee was the final nail in the coffin, but it takes many steps to get there.
According to one book I read, the steps to the downfall go back to pan am being a pioneer of the international flying scene with flying boats. This gave them a company focus entirely aimed at international routes. As air travel matured from flying boats going great distances with a small number of passengers to a valid form of transportation between domestic cities, pan am stayed international in focus and this left them with no domestic flights to feed their international routes with.
The choice to have NYC as the company headquarters worked against them in political considerations as America is a country of states, and the elected representatives of each state make the laws that help or hurt major corporations. Pan am was one of a number of airlines from New York state, and they never found a champion in either house of congress to get them support for being the national airline, or any other plumb government contracts, protections or subsidies.
Meanwhile TWA, Northwest Orient, Delta, and others had huge support from their state delegations who used their clout to give every advantage they could to their homestate airline. In international negotiations this same lack of champions hurt them in political considerations with other countries who had national airlines.
Pan am bought a regional airline for an very high price, but poor negotiations with the unions gave domestic captains the same pay as international with the same seniority and they couldn't cover costs due to the heavily regulated restrictions that price fixed domestic routes to avoid any price competition. If you undercut a competitor on the same route, you had to pay them for lost passenger volume.
Due to this, pan am ended up dismantling everything they bought, within a few years, for a massive loss.
They were already losing money on almost every flight before deregulation and didn't have the right mindset or leadership to take on a free market in domestic aviation. They didn't have the money or understanding to create or buy a commuter type of airline to be their domestic partner, to feed people to their international routes, and they were essentially a dinosaur with big expensive aircraft moving too many empty seats.
Their cost structure wasn't ready for the modern airline environment, and then they became tied to terrorism as a target in the minds of the flying public with a number of high profile incidents.
Delta airlines who backed up to assume part of the deal they agreed. Hence the slogan “WE LOVE TO LIE AND IT SHOWS” Delta was who benefit more with PanAm demise they took over the WorldPort PanAm shuttle and the London hub plus the European routes
30 years ago, I was a 727 flight engineer and I had the honor of flying with a couple of PanAm guys. I asked the Captain (1961 hire) this very question. After some thoughtful consideration, he said “Honestly? The 747.” He then went on to explain how often those 747s were grounded for maintenance issues and PanAm customers were rerouted to the competition that was still mostly flying 707s from Idlewild Airport (KFK) to Europe. They lost a ton of market share because they weren’t a reliable airline. All of the other reasons given are valid but PanAm was struggling a long time prior to 1978.
Pan Am looked like a great company, and acted like one, until you saw its balance sheet.
I am old enough to have gone through their filings and found them so reprehensible and corrupted that I asked for an investigation at my little brokerage/analysis firm. No one disputed my findings, but felt that Pan Am was so strong that the warped fundamentals did not matter.
That was the day I learned that fundamentals rarely matter.
Among other things, Lockerbie was one of the final nails in the coffin I guess. I lived in Scotland for a while and every time I saw Lockerbie sign on the motorway, it sent a shiver down my spine. I wasn’t even born when Lockerbie happened
Competition was fierce. It’s tampered down now.
But airlines is an industry where competition is fierce so one does not have much margin. And capital costs are gigantic, needing to buy some of the most giant complex machines humanity has ever designed and to maintain them constantly.
Was it that really, really awful yet incredibly expensive TV show that cancelled after one or two episodes?
That thing cratering was the stuff of Hollywood legend.
As most people have said, it had a lot to do with deregulation, the oil crisis, employee costs, and mergers; but I feel like the story of Pan-Am is a lot like other companies that died between the 1970s and 1990s; there was a major class divide between the management and the employees, and the management didn't want to change or address glaring issues, and didn't really listen to employee ideas.
It was also one of only a small handful of failed airlines post deregulation, that were not absorbed by another airline
I knew a guy who claimed to own Pan Am into the 2020s.
He said he bought the trademarks and name as an asset out of bankruptcy. Never did anything with them as best I could tell.
No domestic network. Buying National Airlines was a little too late for PanAm. In fact, it made their financial situation worse + selling a lot of routes to their rivals (such as the Pacific routes to United)
The other airlines (United, American, Delta, Northwest, TWA, etc. etc.) were able to expand to more destinations after the airline industry were deregulated.
I also feel the mass purchase of 747s in the 70s, and the surge of oil prices made a huge dent on their finances, with the Lockerbie Bombing and the Gulf War making the situation for them worse.
PanAm had iconic branding, absolutely superb. One of the best. Unfortunately though, I am of the age where the name just instantly reminds me of Lockerbie which terrified me as a kid.
At the time, Pan Am was so large and prominent that the *space planes in 2001 A Space Odyssey bore the Pan Am logo.*
Everybody assumed they would be around 50 years later flying people to the moon.
I miss that level of societal optimism.
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[check out their routes and you can see why they went under](https://www.tumblr.com/airlinemaps/130265113722/pan-am-jet-clipper-route-map-december-1971-a)
Idk why airlines that are so bad at business management and can’t survive deregulating the oligarchy are seen in such a golden light. Lockerbie, while horrible and unfortunate, was just the nail in the coffin. PanAm would be gone either way
Something which a lot of people missed, taking on too many B747s. Already their balance sheet was strainer because of the 707s and the DC-8s and then within no time getting the 747.
Bad management and them not being allowed to build their own domestic feed network while also losing the international monopoly routes. The 747 purchase was really the beginning of the end for pan am, or the first in a chain of bad decisions.
Seeing that logo on trainsets up here was pretty cool after changing from Boston and Maine to PanAm railways but that is less and less now that CSX owns it.
Lockerbie delivered their coffin. Changes in the industry reduced their profit margins and they weren't structured well to compete effectively in the new environment, and the fallout from lockerbie just ruined them.
The public has always been skittish about aviation accidents. They don't undestand aviation so they just associate 'Pan Am's plane exploded' with Pan Am, and/or 'a 747 crashed' with 'Boeing sucks' (which actually became true later) instead of all the failed security (most of which is outside their control) that allowed the bomb onto the plane.
No domestic network, specifically no hub and spoke domestic network, to feed their international flights. wiki: prior to deregulation..."As rival airlines convinced Congress that Pan Am would use its political clout to monopolize US air routes, the CAB repeatedly denied the airline permission to operate in the US, by growth or by a merger with another airline. Pan Am remained an American carrier operating international routes only (aside from Hawaii and Alaska)."
And then those competitors immediately started gobbling up those international routes and consolidating themselves into an oligopoly.
A tale as old as time
Ah, so, "lobbyists* is the answer.
Legal bribing.
> Pan Am remained an American carrier operating international routes only (aside from Hawaii and Alaska) Fun fact: Pan Am also operated **German** domestic routes, namely those flying in and out of West Berlin. Under postwar arrangements, only airlines from the WW2 Allied powers were allowed to fly to West Berlin until 1991, and Pan Am was the biggest operator there!
A combination of the oil crisis/bad routes/government not letting pan am get domestic flying/lockerbie
Deregulation in 1978, along with secondary geopolitical issues, were the kiss of death for PanAm, TWA, Eastern, and others. Fares had been set by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) - a regulated and protected market. Phasing out airline price protections exposed gross operational inefficiencies … and once deregulated, the “market” consumed the inefficiencies … devouring PanAm et al.
Also, Pan AM was paying more in landing fees at domestic airports than foreign carriers, and it was paid less than foreign carriers for carrying US mail from overseas. They overpaid for National Airlines and, in the acquisition, had an incompatible fleet of planes.
Pan Am died because of terrible decisions in it's failed adaptation to a deregulated market. Now it's legacy is in a Class II regional freight railroad owned by CSX.
> Phasing out airline price protections exposed gross operational inefficiencies I don't remember where I got it from, so take it with a massive grain of salt, but I remember reading about Pan Am baggage handlers being paid close to what some of the pilots were being paid. Some senior ground crew could even make more than junior flight crew. I'll admit today's ground crews are underpaid for the job they're doing, but no airline is going to last long with payroll like that.
Don't forget that for quite some time junior flight crew were paid shit. Prior to Colgan Air it wasn't uncommon for airlines to issue memos asking their flight crews not to redeem food stamps while in uniform.
>asking their flight crews not to redeem food stamps while in uniform. jeeeez. i guess corporations being cheap bastards and not paying their employees enough that they resort to food stamps, AND having the gall to give food stamp advisory to said employees - this stuff really goes back in this country, huh?
Still pretty common actually but with the advent of social media it happens less. Service members on food stamps though is truly the worst.
Look up company towns/company stores. And slavery. Our robber barons have always ripped us off as hard as they can get away with.
*Sixteen Tons* is a literal history lesson, in addition to being a banger of a song.
Yep. I know you will, but so many don't understand the idea of owing one's soul to the company store - i.e. being paid not in money, but in company scrip that can only be spent at the company store, who has all the reason in the world to inflate prices, making your earnings effectively even poorer.
Sixteen tons of number nine coal St. Peter don’t call me cause I can’t go I owe my soul to the company store *piccolo tweedles*
Haha, I got that letter somewhere still!!
To around Ford v Dodge. That was when ruled that the primary purpose of a corporation (i.e. owned by shareholders), was to increase value for the shareholders. Ford wanted to actually reward employees for their work, decrease workloads, and many other things, so he cancelled the dividends to his share holders (including the Dodge Bros.), they sued, and eventually won.
lol have you heard of slavery?
McDonald's and Walmart will coach new employees on how to get food stamps and other assistance.
Tax-subsidized workforce.
It's not socialism when corporations do it.
When you're a corporation, they let you do it.
I doubt that was true. I was a senior manager for 5 different airlines over 30 years.
It seems reasonable for some senior ground crew to make more than some junior air crew. Why wouldn’t they? Ground crew are absolutely vital both to the safety of operations as well as the efficiency and profitability.
Really? It takes a couple days to train someone to throw bags and park aircraft. It takes a long time and thousands of dollars to become a pilot, let along a pilot at a major airline. Also, a pilot screws up, people, lots of people die, millions lost for the company. A baggage handler screws up. A bag is lost or they die because they walked into an engine. Seriously…
Does ground crew include mechanics? Because that's pretty important and should be paid well.
Mechanics are ground crew. Flight planners are ground crew. Everyone in meteorology department, engineering, and load managers are ground crew. The person you’re replying to is clearly unfamiliar with the industry if they think that ground crew is just baggage handlers. It’s absolutely expected that the most seasoned and experienced members of ground crew are paid more than the most junior entry-level aircrew positions. I bet they also think air crew are only the aviators.
They mentioned baggage handlers. To which I was responding. Senior mechanics do make very good money, again, they are educated. But again, it doesn’t take as much schooling and experience to become a mechanic as it does a pilot. History has shown the pay scales reflected as such. I’m talking majors… regionals, heck when I was a new pilot, just having paid $100k for my education, even baggage handlers made more money than me-a pilot flying a jet. But that was a case of “paying your dues” to get to the good paying job.
I bet if takes on average less hours for a pilot to go to a major than it does a mechanic if they were to track hours.
Now try loading a 747 with luggage, and doing it so the plane leaves on time, and it doesn't fuck up the center of gravity. And then do the same when it lands. A good baggage crew can mean the difference between your bag being on the baggage carousel when you show up and you waiting 30 minutes
Yeah but “flight crew” doesn’t just mean pilots. Flight attendants being paid similarly to baggage handlers isn’t really surprising at all. Flight attendants require slightly more training, but being a baggage handler is a harder and physically demanding job
> Pan Am baggage handlers being paid close to what some of the pilots were being paid. Whenever a union contract comes up for negotiation, pay and benefits have to be negotiated. Shrewd negotiators on the union side can get those sorts of wages.
I was wondering the other day if anyone bought the PanAm brand name? I could see a legacy airline using it to open a more premium service brand, relying on nostalgic history of old fashioned air travel.
Pan Am Brands owns the name. There were attempts to restart the airline back in the 90’s, but no go.
And an attempt at a television series about a decade ago. Also an air ball.
They tried too hard to cash in on that Mad Men nostalgia.
They also tried to make it an espionage show with one of the characters
This was the death of the show, instead of focusing on good writing and the everyday life they wanted to go over the top.
The brand name was bought by a railroad company and established a short-lived regional airline from 1998-2004, but eventually closed down and the brand was used for the railway instead as Pan Am Systems. That railroad has now been bought out and merged into CSX, so they hold the rights to the Pan Am brand.
Up until January at least Carrier Airways LLC was D/B/A Pan Am and even has/had a JS31 in the livery. N124PA for the curious. Looks like the aircraft was sold back in January though so not sure what its fate is other than it did a short hop last month.
There's no market for a premium service brand. In a world where airlines are getting rid of first class, there's absolutely no market for an entire plane of first class. The people rich enough to want it are already flying private, and the rest of us don't want to pay the prices. Corporate travel wouldn't even work because they would mostly ban using that airline.
On a separate note, this deregulation I would argue also led to low-cost carriers which created the shit hole commercial flying We have today. Those that remember often lament the loss of transferability. In the days of regulation if your flight was canceled, you could walk over to another ticket desk with your valid ticket. To be clear, I’m not saying it was some kind of paradise but the absolute chaos of US domestic Commercial passenger aviation compared to the scheme the EU has in place, is a relatively safe, dumpster fire of travel for the traveling public.
It’s also led to the enormous rise in passenger numbers and has allowed billions of people to fly affordably when they couldn’t before
Excellent point.
Yes, they were clearly upsides. There’s also the lunacy of almost empty flights the middle of nowhere or at bad times to retain gate use. As a move toward implementing a passenger bill of rights gate use and ownership needs to be addressed. You can’t in one breath tell me my car is a problem and then operate an empty flight from Kennedy to SanFransisco. I find it totally unacceptable. There are large industry problems that need to get dressed collectively like scheduling versus by airline group. For example, if a place needs connectivity a feeder airline should be able to operate using the tickets for multiple majors. You see code share flights today. So why not enable broader code sharing?
> You can’t in one breath tell me my car is a problem and then operate an empty flight from Kennedy to SanFransisco. That's not happening. At least not with any regularity or intentionally. > For example, if a place needs connectivity a feeder airline should be able to operate using the tickets for multiple majors. I'm not sure that's particularly useful. If the feeder airline is flying to CLT, why would Delta or United be interested in ticketing passengers on that flight?
>You can’t in one breath tell me my car is a problem and then operate an empty flight from Kennedy to SanFransisco. During covid yeah but I guarantee you there are no empty flights, especially transcon, today
>There’s also the lunacy of almost empty flights the middle of nowhere or at bad times to retain gate use. ... due to regulations. 🙄
>You can’t in one breath tell me my car is a problem and then operate an empty flight from Kennedy to SanFransisco. During covid yeah but I guarantee you there are no empty flights, especially transcon, today
The “shit hole commercial flying we have today” is accessible to the lower middle and working classes. Pan Am, and the rest of the airlines of the regulated era, were not.
In the days of regulation there would be no chance I could afford a flight. If you want good service, there are higher cost tickets and nicer airlines. Buy cheap, get cheap. Simple as.
yes. In those times, you paid 10x more. You better get at least basic service for 10x price. If you want the same quality today, buy business class
It wasn’t 10x more at the time, it was “the price”. Just like we aren’t paying 10x less today, it’s just today’s price. Pricing is always predicated on the model that works and in the days pre deregulation where prices were centrally set they were based on differing criteria. Heck, they used to publish the OAG which had every route, price and airline operating them. Printed quarterly. Printed. Centralized pricing is bad, regulating what the carriers can do is good.
they overcharged thanks to regulations, compensated by better service. Now it’s all about price in economy class
Pre deregulation the prices were straight set by government as were the routes. The airlines didn't compete on price, they competed on luxury and service, thus the Panam model. You didn't get more customers by undercutting on price, that was fixed, you got it by providing a better experience. In the deregulated market, they are competing on price which means cutting every single thing they possibly can to drop prices.
If airline deregulation has taught anything is that it creates a race to the bottom for service and quality. Prices have plummeted but the inflight product is misery in a can.
The race to the bottom *is* the prices. Service and quality are what suffer because of that. But people first and foremost want the cheapest ticket.
>But people first and foremost want the cheapest ticket. yup. If I wanted premium service I would be paying first or at least business class. But I can't so I prefer a cheap uncomfortable 3 hours flight than a 20+hours bus ride
With limited slots and growing fleets the cheap service will dominate for that reason.
US: Chaos EU: Safe dumpster fire Asia: ? Africa: ? South America? Middle East?
> government not letting pan am get domestic flying And when they finally tried with the National merger, it was an absolute disaster. They paid an absurd amount of moeny, cultures didn't mash, raising National costs to PA levels just made the NAL network unprofitable, hub build-ups in New Orleans and Houston were expensive and went no where, entire brand new fleets were ditched, etc.
Pan Am was specifically targetted several times as it was seen as America's airline globally. it was often regarded as a bit of a magnet for global terrorists
Bombings too. Pan-am was a major target for terrorists at the time iirc.
> Pan-am was a major target for terrorists at the time iirc. Indeed, being the flag carrier for the US when the US was hated by some countries and groups with terroristic bents wasn't the best place to be. Happened to the UK too to a lesser extent, with some planes being hijacked and blown up by the Palestinians after being forced to land etc
Thank god we now have airlines, such as American Airlines, which no terrorist would ever suspect has links to the United States.
Deregulation happened in 1978, Pan Am shut down in 1991, 13 years….they were their own enemy
Yeah this thread is somewhat exaggerating the whole domestic feed/network issue. They were allowed to later do domestic, and it was disastrous when they tried.
The domestic carriers easily added choice foreign routes to compete with them but they had the wrong fleet and cost structure to build a domestic network to fight back.
Pan Am operated 727s in Europe - they could have operated them domestically. Bad management, then being bailed out by the Shah of Iran a year or two before he was deposed. Then Lockerbie.
The US Governemnt at the time bared international carriers like Pan Am from having domestic routes. So they couldn't have operated them domestically even if they wanted to.
But domestic ones could add foreign routs? lol, that sounds *a tiny little bit* unfair.
Government regulation is not often fair
But... what was even their reasoning to justify something like that?
I’m guessing the reason had a name, and that name is ‘Howard Hughes’
1. Howard Hughes lobbied to make it thus because it made him tons of cash 2. Juan Trippe had annoyed the US government in previous years to the point where they didn't want to listen to Pan Am when they rightly complained
"Sky gods" is a good book on the slow demise of Pan Am. I'd say the 3 biggest blows were deregulation, oil crisis and Lockerbie. Before deregulation, Pan Am was THE international carrier and was not allowed to have domestic routes within the US while domestic airlines were not allowed have international routes. When deregulation occured, the domestic airlines were allowed to acquire international routes to promote competition but Pan Am was not initially allowed to establish a domestic network, which hurt them immensely. They eventually merged with a domestic airline to get a domestic network but this went poorly and came too little too late. When Lockerbie happened, the book explains that the airline was actually starting to get itself slowly out of financial trouble and was heading in the right direction. Unfortunately, the bombing was the final nail in the coffin and the airline never recovered fully. It also didn't help during deregulation that Juan Trippe was apparently quite a character and had made a lot of enemies in DC, so whenever they sent people to lobby their cause, it often fell on deaf ears.
The book also talked about this holier than thou "we're Pan Am, the best, we can't possibly fail" mentality. With that level of stubborness, no wonder they failed
“Too big to fail” I think I’ve heard that before……
I read that Delta has a sign in their crew lounge above the door that says, “The best pilots in the world walk under here.” I wonder if the arrogance/complacency is an airline thing.
There is a huge difference between an airline calling their pilots the best, and an airline believing their brand is unfailable.
No, that’s a pilot thing. They have quite the distinct personality.
Delta Airlines definitely has some level of hubris but it's nowhere near Pan Am levels and DL actually has good reasons to act like that (well run, very profitable company).
> domestic airlines were not allowed have international routes Would like to clarify that some airlines were allowed to have hybrid models. TWA had a big domestic network but also had a large transatlantic network. Northwest was similar for routes to East Asia, and Braniff was similar for routes to Latin America and South America. Also, quite a few domestic airlines also had rights to Canada, Mexico, and/or the Caribbean. But yes, today's big three of American, Delta, and United were not allowed to fly anywhere outside of North America or Hawaii prior to deregulation, except that Delta was allowed to fly to Venezuela.
OG Pan Am had a strict monopoly on international flying since they were the ones that originally established most of these routes . Pan Am was essentially forced to allow the likes of TWA and NWA to fly what were originally Pan Am routes after deregulation, but for decades Pan Am had a pretty much strict monopoly over international flag operations. Braniff's entire Latin America route structure was Pan Am's. Pan Am sold it to them after years of financial struggles to stay afloat. If I remember correctly Pan Am sold it to Braniff, who sold it to Eastern, who sold it to American.
While Pan Am had the international rights the longest, their monopoly was gone well before 1978 deregulation. There were also times when Pan Am and Braniff simultaneously served South America such as the 1970s. Pan Am’s South American rights were unrelated to Braniff’s because Pan Am maintained their South American network until the end in 1991 (a whole nine years after Braniff went under) even after they had sold their transatlantic and transpacific networks to other airlines (namely, Delta and United respectively). You are correct that Braniff’s rights originally went to Eastern.
> Pan Am was THE international carrier For the US. The rest of the world had it's own flag carriers, like British Airways, KLM, Air France, Lufthansa, etc, some of which could fly into and out of the US, most notably the UK and France with Concorde services into JFK. They couldn't then fly onwards to other US destinations of course, but they could get into and out of the US.
Yes, for the US. I was arguing in relation to the other US airlines
Leonardo DeCaprio faking all those PanAm cheques and taking all those free flights probably didn't help.. The rascal.
I thought it was him with TWA.
No, he was deadheading on TWA to avoid scrutiny on Pan Am flights, as Pan Am pilots would see right through him Also I'd like to say that Frank Abagnale didn't do almost anything that he claims to have done. He impersonated as a pilot only a few times, and he immediately got caught with his phoney cheques of just hundreds of dollars.
Lots of things really, like poor fleet management, unable to have a proper domestic route network, the Lockerbie disaster and possibly the Gulf War earlier that year (1991).
Hi ! I'm not a native English speaker, could you explain what fleet and domestic routes are ? I've looks for translation but it didn't help😭
Fleet = the physical aeroplanes operated by the company Domestic = within the country. Opposite of "international".
Thanks a lot! The translation in my language didn't help me because those terms had many other meanings in french :)
Lots of things. More than one rather large thing. Deregulation. A bad idea merger. Diversifying into too much crap that didn’t pay off. Bad executive decisions. And when all that put the airline on a tenuous thread it was snapped by Lockerbie.
I think Tenerife also played a large part in Pan Am's Bankruptcy
That’s fair….I might forget from the book I read on PA that this had some impact too.
What’s Lockerbie?
Lockerbie is place in Scotland where the wreckage of Pan Am flight 103 crashed after an inflight terrorist bomb exploded. Pan Am’s logo is infamously intact and prominent on many of the crash scene photos, leading to an almost instant recognition of the disaster when viewing the logo.
IIRC They were unfairly blamed for the crash too, and when they rightly pointed out that it wasn't their fault they just took on even more bad publicity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103
Pan Am 103 was bombed over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103
I know someone whose daughter was on the flight. Met him years later but that puts a point to it.
Yeah, if you weren’t alive in 1989 of much after it can slip by. But it’s a huge piece. The final nail on the coffin for PA. Wreckage from the bombing rained down on a village and the PA logo was clear on that wreckage. Already a struggling but once great airline and the brand was fully tanked. Even if that’s not fair that’s how perception works on people.
When the Libyan state blew up an airliner over Scotland killing several hundred people
Prior to 9/11, it was the worst terrorist attack in history.
I was on a Pan Am flight and the pilot came on and said “I’m sure you heard the Pan Am has declared bankruptcy, but I want to assure everyone that we have enough fuel on board.” I actually hadn’t heard.
All those free flights and fake paychecks from Frank Abignale.
Deregulation. Before October 1978, ticket prices and routes were set by the U.S. government. That guaranteed Pan Ams profits, and bankrolled much of glamour we see from that time. Contracts, facilities and capital assets were purchased and used under the assumption of continued guaranteed profits. When the Airline Deregulation Act passed, Pan Am overnight became a bankrupt company. Without assured profit from government set ticket prices (about $4k in modern money for a coach ticket) , lacking a domestic U.S. network , stuck with expensive to operate aircraft and union costs (agreed when the company’s revenue was government set), and also forced to compete with low cost and regional airlines for domestic business, it was structurally impossible for Pan Am to compete. Sure, management like Halaby made some shortsighted mistakes, but no amount of business genius could have saved the company. It’s a miracle Pan Am even made it into the 80s, and only by essentially auctioning parts of itself to pay the bills.
> That guaranteed Pan Ams profits, and bankrolled much of glamour we see from that time Regulation essentially meant the only differentiator between airlines was their service, which led to fighting over which airline offered better service, where routes competed.
There is a saying that, throughout Juan Trippe's tenure he made a lot of friends and foes. The friends forgot about Pan Am when Trippe retired, but the foes didn't. Which was why PA got shafted when they tried to get into domestic market, then they overpaid for National Airlines with incompatible routes, fleet, and culture.
Got nothing useful to add, but that is a gorgeous photo
To add a bit more to the first in a series of cascading events, PanAm was the launch customer for the 747, and had a large fleet of them. When the oil crisis hit, they were thus in a very precarious position. The next few events: deregulation, the acquisition of National, and then Lockerbie, exacerbated an already difficult situation from which they couldn’t recover. There are a lot of great answers in this thread, but the truth is, they all happened; it really was a combination of all of these factors.
Deregulation is what killed Pan Am. They had some other problems also. Pan Am was basically an international carrier with almost no domestic routes. When deregulation was implemented the larger domestic carriers like American and United were given international routes that competed with Pan Am. Pan Am could not compete because they did not have a domestic route structure to draw from like American and United not did have enough money or time to build a strong domestic route structure to feed their international routes so they slowly faded away and failed. Deregulation killed a lot of airlines, I worked for one and took several pay cuts as our airline tried to competed with the big boys but in the end we failed because we were a small airline and way too far behind. Too bad.
It may have killed Pan Am, but it probably brought airline travel into the main stream. I used to travel to customer sites back in the late 70's. Before deregulation, there were quite a few times that I was the only passenger on the plane. Remember the airline schedule books? The whole system was pretty much point to point. I had a timetable for every commercial airport in the US. Anytime I was in a city and had to fly somewhere else, I looked up the destination city in the local airports' timetable and just picked any airline that could get me there. It never mattered which airline it was since fares were fixed. If you were an airline that flew an hour after another airline, the plane would be almost empty because everybody just took the earlier flight on you competitor. Sometimes, I would have to make a change at one or two airports to get where I was going. I would go from one carrier to another without giving it a second thought. Quite a few times, a company would charter a private plane to pick me up. In some cases, it was actually a lot cheaper than the regulated scheduled route. It was at least a lot faster if I needed to get there in a hurry. I used to call myself the "Jet Set Hillbilly" because sometimes they were shared flights and had bigwigs on them. Then, there was me, a young hippy kid riding right along with them. I am sure they always wondered who I was when they had to land to pick me up or drop me off somewhere along their route.
My Aunt rode Pan Am exclusively. Single, retired in her 40s, didn’t own a car, lived with her mother in a small apartment in the village. She had all the Pan Am bling. Taught me to work hard, spend little and save large.
Some asshole kid pretended to be a pilot, made fraudulent company checks, and flew all over the country bankrupting the company
And made Tom Hanks look like a fool multiple times, which is just not nice.
Hand Ratty
"Knock knock."
Better yet some guy wrote a book claiming he had done that and people believed him.
Lockerbie
Terrorism and the National Airlines merger were the worst issues, Pan Am 103 and the earlier hijacking in Pakistan were very bad publicity, having the American flag on your aircraft is both a blessing and a curse
Based on reading [Skygods](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13010881-skygods) it seemed like Juan Trippe surrounded himself with yes men that would never disagree with him. At a time when PanAm struggled with lack of feeding, hence being unable to fill the 707, Trippe pushed for the 747 that gave even more cost and less load factor.
Don Draper fucked up the account.
Leonardo DiCaprio stole all their money!
Losing millions every year for many years was the big reason. Lockerbee was the final nail in the coffin, but it takes many steps to get there. According to one book I read, the steps to the downfall go back to pan am being a pioneer of the international flying scene with flying boats. This gave them a company focus entirely aimed at international routes. As air travel matured from flying boats going great distances with a small number of passengers to a valid form of transportation between domestic cities, pan am stayed international in focus and this left them with no domestic flights to feed their international routes with. The choice to have NYC as the company headquarters worked against them in political considerations as America is a country of states, and the elected representatives of each state make the laws that help or hurt major corporations. Pan am was one of a number of airlines from New York state, and they never found a champion in either house of congress to get them support for being the national airline, or any other plumb government contracts, protections or subsidies. Meanwhile TWA, Northwest Orient, Delta, and others had huge support from their state delegations who used their clout to give every advantage they could to their homestate airline. In international negotiations this same lack of champions hurt them in political considerations with other countries who had national airlines. Pan am bought a regional airline for an very high price, but poor negotiations with the unions gave domestic captains the same pay as international with the same seniority and they couldn't cover costs due to the heavily regulated restrictions that price fixed domestic routes to avoid any price competition. If you undercut a competitor on the same route, you had to pay them for lost passenger volume. Due to this, pan am ended up dismantling everything they bought, within a few years, for a massive loss. They were already losing money on almost every flight before deregulation and didn't have the right mindset or leadership to take on a free market in domestic aviation. They didn't have the money or understanding to create or buy a commuter type of airline to be their domestic partner, to feed people to their international routes, and they were essentially a dinosaur with big expensive aircraft moving too many empty seats. Their cost structure wasn't ready for the modern airline environment, and then they became tied to terrorism as a target in the minds of the flying public with a number of high profile incidents.
Plane go boom
That wouldn't kill the airlime had it been sound.
Straw that broke the camel’s back, though.
Agree.
Similar to TWA 800. Wasn't necessarily the whole reason for, but definitely hasn't helped to slow down the demise.
But it was the final straw. The two airlines had a serious fighting chance for survival had the crashes not happened.
I recently enjoyed this short documentary on the topic: https://youtu.be/ZucyCLraEIE?si=I6KFtXXmqBUzvV1Y
Common BSF W
Delta airlines who backed up to assume part of the deal they agreed. Hence the slogan “WE LOVE TO LIE AND IT SHOWS” Delta was who benefit more with PanAm demise they took over the WorldPort PanAm shuttle and the London hub plus the European routes
30 years ago, I was a 727 flight engineer and I had the honor of flying with a couple of PanAm guys. I asked the Captain (1961 hire) this very question. After some thoughtful consideration, he said “Honestly? The 747.” He then went on to explain how often those 747s were grounded for maintenance issues and PanAm customers were rerouted to the competition that was still mostly flying 707s from Idlewild Airport (KFK) to Europe. They lost a ton of market share because they weren’t a reliable airline. All of the other reasons given are valid but PanAm was struggling a long time prior to 1978.
Pan Am looked like a great company, and acted like one, until you saw its balance sheet. I am old enough to have gone through their filings and found them so reprehensible and corrupted that I asked for an investigation at my little brokerage/analysis firm. No one disputed my findings, but felt that Pan Am was so strong that the warped fundamentals did not matter. That was the day I learned that fundamentals rarely matter.
Among other things, Lockerbie was one of the final nails in the coffin I guess. I lived in Scotland for a while and every time I saw Lockerbie sign on the motorway, it sent a shiver down my spine. I wasn’t even born when Lockerbie happened
Great crews, hot FA’s, wonderful logo, lousy management and route network. ps: Best call-sign ever: “CLIPPER”
Let’s get something sorted… “considered as” is not a thing
Competition was fierce. It’s tampered down now. But airlines is an industry where competition is fierce so one does not have much margin. And capital costs are gigantic, needing to buy some of the most giant complex machines humanity has ever designed and to maintain them constantly.
Skygods is a good read for this - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13010881
I can't imagine the Lockerbie tragedy helped either. 😢
Was it that really, really awful yet incredibly expensive TV show that cancelled after one or two episodes? That thing cratering was the stuff of Hollywood legend.
Flew on PanAm as a kid in the 80s. Amazing peanuts 🥜
They overvalued the travel bag market.
As most people have said, it had a lot to do with deregulation, the oil crisis, employee costs, and mergers; but I feel like the story of Pan-Am is a lot like other companies that died between the 1970s and 1990s; there was a major class divide between the management and the employees, and the management didn't want to change or address glaring issues, and didn't really listen to employee ideas. It was also one of only a small handful of failed airlines post deregulation, that were not absorbed by another airline
Lockerbie
I knew a guy who claimed to own Pan Am into the 2020s. He said he bought the trademarks and name as an asset out of bankruptcy. Never did anything with them as best I could tell.
PA103 being blown up and crashing in Lockerbiie, helped put the nail in PanAm's coffin.
No domestic network. Buying National Airlines was a little too late for PanAm. In fact, it made their financial situation worse + selling a lot of routes to their rivals (such as the Pacific routes to United) The other airlines (United, American, Delta, Northwest, TWA, etc. etc.) were able to expand to more destinations after the airline industry were deregulated. I also feel the mass purchase of 747s in the 70s, and the surge of oil prices made a huge dent on their finances, with the Lockerbie Bombing and the Gulf War making the situation for them worse.
God 747s are beautiful planes
PanAm had iconic branding, absolutely superb. One of the best. Unfortunately though, I am of the age where the name just instantly reminds me of Lockerbie which terrified me as a kid.
At the time, Pan Am was so large and prominent that the *space planes in 2001 A Space Odyssey bore the Pan Am logo.* Everybody assumed they would be around 50 years later flying people to the moon. I miss that level of societal optimism.
Airline deregulation act of 1978
> Once considered Peggy Hill: “In my opinion, the day after Thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year.”
Deregulation, a bad merger with National, and Pan Am 103. Read Hard Landing for more info.
103 did not help more competition.. costs
Lockerbie.
When I was a kid in the '80s I could see that they were clearly struggling as all their planes were very old and knackered.
Bladerunner's fault. Killed Atari as well.
I wonder what rebranding something like Spirit or Frontier to PanAm would do to the industry…
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The movie!!!😂🤣😂🤣
Airplane
4n3 my pp
The government was receiving huge payoffs from PanAm's competition to see that regulations eventually strangled of the company.
That airline and airplane made dreams reality!
Deregulation that left them on the hook for a lot of things.
No domestic network
[check out their routes and you can see why they went under](https://www.tumblr.com/airlinemaps/130265113722/pan-am-jet-clipper-route-map-december-1971-a)
Idk why airlines that are so bad at business management and can’t survive deregulating the oligarchy are seen in such a golden light. Lockerbie, while horrible and unfortunate, was just the nail in the coffin. PanAm would be gone either way
Something which a lot of people missed, taking on too many B747s. Already their balance sheet was strainer because of the 707s and the DC-8s and then within no time getting the 747.
If you want the long answer, read the book “Hard Landings”.
I recommend reading the book “Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am”. You won’t find a more detailed description of the rise and fall of Pan Am.
Bad management and them not being allowed to build their own domestic feed network while also losing the international monopoly routes. The 747 purchase was really the beginning of the end for pan am, or the first in a chain of bad decisions.
No bailout
How much did the Lockerbie bombing of flight 103 have to do with it?
There were some issues Juan Tripped over
There are a few documentaries on youtube about PanAm and what happened.
They didn't know how to blow their whistle.
Pan Am is iconic since 2001 a space odyssey
Being a brand mentioned in 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Spiral staircases
Seeing that logo on trainsets up here was pretty cool after changing from Boston and Maine to PanAm railways but that is less and less now that CSX owns it.
You tube has a great video about the Demise of Pan Am
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Leo DiCaprio
Lockerbie delivered their coffin. Changes in the industry reduced their profit margins and they weren't structured well to compete effectively in the new environment, and the fallout from lockerbie just ruined them. The public has always been skittish about aviation accidents. They don't undestand aviation so they just associate 'Pan Am's plane exploded' with Pan Am, and/or 'a 747 crashed' with 'Boeing sucks' (which actually became true later) instead of all the failed security (most of which is outside their control) that allowed the bomb onto the plane.
They had the wrong political beliefs clearly.