The Airplane - Jay Spenser [115]
Prohibition was then in full swing in the United States, and so in addition to carrying international airmail, this airline did land-office business carrying partying passengers headed for Cuba and the Bahamas, where restrictions on alcoholic beverages did not apply. This airline went by the wayside later in the Roaring Twenties when the U.S. government withdrew its airmail subsidies.
Buoyed by heady investment following Lindbergh’s 1927 flight, Pan American Airways began operations late that decade on a growing network that encircled the Caribbean and Central America. By 1930, these land-plane services had been extended down the west coast of South America.
Pan Am’s aggressive chairman, Juan Trippe, acquired the New York, Rio, and Buenos Aires Line in 1930. NYRBA had just pioneered services down the east coast of South America with large metal-hulled Consolidated Commodore flying boats. This acquisition and other business ventures consolidated Trippe’s hold on Latin America and put Pan Am into the flying-boat business.
As the American government’s “chosen instrument” for international aviation, Pan Am enjoyed lavish government subsidies as well as protection from competition. In this favorable climate, the most influential and powerful airline the world has ever known spread its wings across first the Pacific and then the Atlantic.
Pacific passenger services were inaugurated in 1935 on an island-hopping route from San Francisco to Hawaii, Midway, Wake, Guam, and finally Manila. Two years later, Pan Am extended this pioneering route all the way to Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland.
While the Atlantic presented fewer challenges in terms of range, Pan Am operations there started later because of political delays in negotiating operating rights. Only in June 1939 did the airline begin serving Southampton, England, via Newfoundland and Ireland, as well as Marseilles via Bermuda, the Azores, and Lisbon.
By then, Pan Am was operating the Boeing 314 Clipper, the largest and most capable commercial airplane in service at the time. Spanning 152 feet (46 meters) and 106 feet (32 meters) long, this flying whale weighed 42 tons (38 tonnes) and was powered by four Wright Double Cyclone engines, each producing 1,500 hp.
Traveling by Boeing 314 was as exotic and redolent of romance as scheduled air travel has ever been. Adding to the overall experience, the airline adopted luxury ocean travel as its paradigm. Subtle nautical motifs and décor graced its Art Deco facilities. Flights started with ceremony worthy of a real ocean liner as the Pan Am flight crew, resplendent in full uniform, marched across the gangplank in advance of the passengers.
Embarking on the most romantic air travel of all time, passengers cross the gangplank of a Boeing 314 Clipper, the largest and most capable of Pan Am’s flying boat airliners of the 1930s.
Museum of Flight, Seattle
Inside, comfortably appointed compartments offered up to seventy-four seats, which converted at night to thirty-eight curtained berths. Weight considerations generally kept passenger counts below twenty-five, with occasionally as many as thirty, so there was ample space for sauntering, chatting, or settling down to read books selected from the Clipper’s library.
At mealtimes, the central salon converted to a dining room where attentive stewards served gourmet meals developed by four-star hotels and prepared onboard by chefs. Fine linens, china, cutlery, and crystal completed the elegant atmosphere. Male and female passengers even had their own dressing rooms, and at rear was a special state-room called the bridal suite.
All of this was strictly