Glamorous Pan Am back from the dead, and it's coming to Australia

The Age

17-07-2025

'You can't really bring Pan Am back … and honour it well with those iconic routes in the era we are in,' he said in August, citing the many difficulties facing airlines in these current turbulent times.
As of the 'inaugural' flight last week, however, he has changed his tune. Having announced a partnership with AVi8 Air Capital – a merchant bank and consultancy firm which specialises in the aviation industry – Carter is now talking of timetabled services and distant horizons.
'Pan Am remains a cherished name in aviation,' he comments. 'Through this collaboration, we aim to assess a sustainable, forward-thinking approach to reintroducing scheduled commercial service under the Pan Am name; one that not only honours [the airline's] legacy – but also makes the Pan Am experience more accessible.'
If Carter is able to accomplish this not inconsiderable feat, he will have succeeded where several others have failed. Because this month's re-emergence of the 'blue meatball' logo is not the first attempt to restore Pan Am to the present tense. It is actually the fifth rekindling of the airline's embers since the original fire burned out in 1991.
There was the low-cost carrier which flew from the US to the Caribbean between 1996 and 1998. There was a short-haul operator, based at Portsmouth in New Hampshire, which offered flights in the American north-east between 1998 and 2004, and a sister company which had another go at repolishing the holy grail, from the same base, between 2004 and 2008. All of them had the Pan Am name. As did Pan Am American Airways Incorporated, which picked up the baton in 2010, running cargo planes out of Brownsville in Texas, with the promise of passenger services to come. It collapsed in 2012, in a haze of scandal.
While each of these failed projects had their issues, they all, ultimately, struggled to compete with the weight and the mystique of a beloved brand. Because, for more than half a century, Pan Am was the biggest – and most shimmering – fish in the global pond.
The airline first emerged in Florida in 1927, as the brainchild of Henry Arnold, Carl Spaatz and John Jouett – three US Army Air Corps officers who began offering flights between Key West and Havana. But it began to bloom in the 1930s, under the astute leadership of Juan Trippe, an American entrepreneur who understood that the future of travel had wings.
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That decade saw Pan Am lead the way with its Clipper planes – doughty flying boats that, come 1931, were whistling their way down to South America. Within eight years, Europe was in focus. On March 30, 1939, Harold Gray piloted the first ever transatlantic flight with passengers; a Pan Am service aboard the Yankee Clipper which made the oceanic crossing from Baltimore to Lisbon – via a refuelling pause at Horta, on the island of Faial in the Azores – in a total flying time of 24 hours, 39 minutes.
By the dawn of the Jet Age in the early 1950s, Pan Am was the US flag-carrier in all but name, flinging itself into the new arena of international travel with flair, finesse and a reputation for luxury. Its state-of-the-art hub, trademarked as 'Worldport', was inaugurated as JFK's Terminal 3 in 1960, its futuristic 'flying-saucer' design suggesting trips to space as much as to Paris.
Ten years later, it was playing host to the jumbo jet. Pan Am was a key player in the advent of the Boeing 747. Its desire for bigger, better, faster and more – and, specifically, its placing an order for 25 of these revolutionary giants in April 1966 – kickstarted the production line in Seattle. The first commercial flight of a 747 was a Pan Am endeavour – from JFK to Heathrow, on January 22, 1970.
It was all so fabulous that you might wonder how so feted an airline could have ceased to exist. But behind the roar of engines and the clink of champagne glasses, Pan Am was starting to flounder. It had risen via its protected status – granted an effective monopoly as America's international airline by the US government. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 pulled down that ring-fencing, leaving Pan Am blinking uncertainly at issues it had never had to face.
Suddenly, it had American rivals in foreign skies, but no domestic network to help keep it competitive. The acquisition of Florida-based National Airlines in 1980, for an eye-watering $US437 million (about $US1.5 billion [$A2.3 billion] today), was a bid to redress this imbalance – but only loaded the company with a debt that would prove to be its undoing.
In the end, there were two fatal blows. The Gulf War of August 1990 to February 1991 would stamp on a suffocating Pan Am's throat, sending oil prices soaring just as demand for air travel fell sharply with a nervous public; the airline would file for bankruptcy on January 8, 1991, seven weeks before the guns fell silent in Operation Desert Storm.
In truth, though, Pan Am had not recovered from the Lockerbie Disaster. The bombing of Flight 103 on December 21, 1988 sent 270 people to their graves, tragedy crashing down onto the shocked Scottish town in the week before Christmas. The image of Clipper Maid of the Seas, its broken cockpit disembodied on Tundergarth Hill, would become as inerasably linked to the airline as any sepia photograph of first-class fizz and 1960s style.
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Maybe, just maybe, this latest comeback will be for good. In the meantime, Pan Am's newest reincarnation will offer another sophisticated adventure next year – a grand jaunt out of San Francisco, slated for take-off in April 2026, with landings in Japan, Cambodia, Singapore, Australia (in Sydney), New Zealand and Fiji. The cost – a mooted $US94,495 – will not be to everyone's tastes, or pockets. But perhaps you cannot put a price on history.