YVR Cockroach

For those too young to remember, it was to the then Pan Am Building (later renamed to Met Life). All went well until one of the helicopters rolled over on the pad.


I also went to Key West in 1990 and saw the original PA office before it had been converted into a bar. Looked very different when I went back 10 years later (but so did Key West).

tuapekastar

I flew MEL-LAX (pretty sure via AKL) on PA in 1978 (and return). It was a 747 of some variety. I recall on the outbound there was a reasonably large contingent of Australian men who were going to attend an annual aviation-flavoured event at Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I was just a young (ish) fella at the time and we congregated (I don't think that is allowed now?) at an exit/galley type area and drank that particular galley dry...drinks were subsequently fetched from the F galley. There was one chap (Murray was his name, no idea why I recall it) who overdid it and felt the need to lie down on the floor and rest, right in the exit/galley area...an FA passed us and said "Is he OK?" to which we responded "he's fine, just resting". Just cannot see any of that happening these days (not necessarily a good or bad thing).

YVR Cockroach

Thaks for reminding me. PA SYD-AKL-SYD in late '84. Like you don't remember which flavour of 747 except it wasn't an SP.

RichardInSF

I remember a Pan Am 747 SFO-SYD flight on which we got a flat on take-off. They continued on to Sydney never once telling the passengers anything.

Other than the BANG on take-off, they never did tell us anything until after we saw a huge lineup of fire trucks waiting for us on landing 15 hours later!

The tradition of keeping the passengers in the dark about things that go wrong has, I think, continued to the present day.

BearX220

My dad was a globetrotting LIFE magazine editor who instilled in us a deep affection for Pan Am. After he died I found in his papers a memo to the LIFE London bureau admin, written in the early '60s, asking to have his F class booking to Idlewild changed from TWA to Pan Am.

“Every time I have been caught in some oddball part of the world some Pan Am chap has turned up and volunteered to be my travel agent and I am beginning to appreciate this,” he wrote.

As both Pan Am and Henry Luce's Time/LIFE magazine empire had interesting US intelligence and State connections, I often wonder what they got up to together on the side.

My own favorite Pan Am memory is from the late 1980s. I traveled for awhile with the White House press corps on overseas trips and an aging PA 747 was the charter plane.

We would follow, or sometimes precede, Air Force One around Europe.

The cabins were a complete zoo -- 200+ reporters, producers, and network techs, no seat belts on takeoff, with the more adventurous photogs playing "Eddie the Eagle" -- standing on a laminated safety card in their stocking feet at the front of the Y campaign and attempting to ski all the way to the rear galley as the plane rotated, slamming into the rearmost lavs at about 15mph if they made it.

This glorious mess was presided over by the most fun Pan Am cabin crews on God's green earth, who kept everyone fed and -- more importantly -- liquored up from takeoff to touchdown, reporters sometimes shouldering them out of the galley so they could commandeer the alcohol. Sometimes they sat the FAs down and fed them.

On one spectacular evening I wandered up the spiral staircase with a big tumbler of Scotch as we were beginning a descent across the English Channel and into LHR, through the open flight deck door, and sat in the cockpit jumpseat. The engineer smiled and passed me a set of cans so I could hear the Heathrow approach chatter. We shot a perfect westbound approach into the setting sun, the Thames glinting orange-silver at dusk, with me drinking whisky between the pilots' shoulders. Perfect landing. The network correspondents in the F class lounge behind us, some standing up, roared their approval, and the captain clasped his hands over his head, victorious-boxer style as the FO guided the thing to a halt. I'll never forget that moment.

My saddest PA memory came a couple of years after that when the airline, post-Lockerbie, was clearly breathing its last and selling panic-discount $149-each-way winter 1990-91 tickets from Washington DC to London. My girlfriend and I bought a couple, but even at that rate there were fewer than 100 takers each way aboard clapped-out, creaking, jouncing, scorched and battered 747s. I remember there was duct tape holding broken bins together, the whole rear economy cabin was closed off and dark, and the FAs looked like they were about to cry. Pan Am was gone from LHR very shortly after that trip, and of course shut down in December '91.

hfly

Yes the choppers stopped from the Pan Am building after the crash in 1977 (and the tops of all buildings in Mnahattan for that matter), however Pan Am did revive the chopper service in the mid-80's from the heliport on 61st and the East River for a couple fo years. I took it several times in 85-87.

jrl767

one more story ... technically it was a Delta flight, but a Pan Am jet
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...l#post26659248

sadly N739PA was the Lockerbie aircraft

FlyingUnderTheRadar

Sadly my lasting memory of PanAm will be of a friend:

YVR Cockroach

My recollection is faint now but didn't PA sell off its LHR/U.K. route authorities to, IIRC, PA in the late '80s? TW sold the same authorities to UA at around the same time.

I do remember PA selling its trans-Pacific routes to UA and trans-Atlantic except U.K. to DL in the mid/late '80s (which made DL the biggest (or biggest U.S.) airline TATL) . I think the only bits of PA to survive liquidation were the shuttle (which IIRC DL bought) and the name (been at least one attempt at resurrecting an airlines with the name).

Here's something on PA's golden era.

BearX220

PA sold its LHR rights to UA, which took over the routes in early April 1991.

articles.chicagotribune.com/1991-04-05/business/9101310272_1_united-chairman-stephen-wolf-pan-am-flight-united-airlines-flight

hfly

Pan Am sold off Intercontinental hotels, then its headquarters, then its Asian Routes, then its flight school, then the London routes, then the IGS services (although that would have been done no matter what due to German reunification) It then sold off off/reorganized and sold off the Shuttle and almost all Transatlantic routes to DL, and restarted as a Latin American focused carrier which Delta had a minority interest in. DL refused to put more money in and it folded.

haa

I had my only experience on Pan Am was in 1989.

Flew Helsinki-Stockholm(I think)-New York-Boston on Pan Am for a conference. Still remember the big "PAN AM" livery on the plane. This was one of my first long-haul experiences.

The plane landed at a military base 30 mins before New York due to fuel shortage (probably combined with airport congestion).

After refueling they could not restart the engines and suddenly the plane lost all power and they evacuated the plane to the tarmac.

We had to wait some hours until they flew another plane to pick us up, but we got to wait inside in a hangar full of cool state-of-the art helicopters which were pretty interesting to look at as I'm an aviation buff.

Then they flew us the very short hop to JFK, no queues at immigration at 3am, and put us up in hotels in Manhattan. First time in Manhattan, I'm sure everyone remembers their first time there. We went to a nearby Radio Shack (which used to be great, too, in those days) before heading to the airport again.

Back at the airport for the Boston flight, the next day as instructed, we had problems checking in until the staff figured out "Oh, you were on that flight yesterday" after which everything was sorted out OK.

The lesson from all this, which has served me well during later travel-heavy years, is: If you get there eventually and safe, all is well, don't sweat any small issues. And try to find the silver lining in an IRROPS situation. And always fly long-haul one day before you need to be there, for much less stress in case something happens.

I think nowadays as flying is so much commonplace and cheaper, the glamour is not there any more. I still find do flying a remarkable experience, sit down in a reasonably comfy (Y) chair for a few hours relaxing and arrive on the other side of the world. Maybe it's partially thanks to a Pan Am experience ;-)

flyupfrnt

When I was about 10 I flew a Pan Am 747 out of seattle to Europe. Our final destination was Frankfurt. I do not recall if we had a connection along the way. It was neat for kid.

jrl767

the PA flights operated SEA<-->LHR

I moved to Seattle in 1978, and my then-girlfriend (now wife) and I took the "tag-on" segments of those trips for ridiculously low prices (SEA<-->LAX for $69 or $79, SFO for $49 or 59) on several occasions between 1981-1987

iirc each one only ran 3x/week so it usually wasn't possible to do weekend RTs

BearX220

Costly, money-losing tags flown on an erratic basis by big, mostly empty aircraft. Just goes to show how wasteful and inefficient the PA route structure and timetables were in the airline's last decade. They bought National to get a robust domestic system, then put all those assets at the service of feeding the international flights.

If you look at a PA timetable from the '80s you'll see all these odd 727 services from stations like MSY, PIT, CMH, etc. to JFK once or twice a day -- often with intermediate stops -- to feed pax to the evening TATL bank. It's like they thought it was still 1955.

During this period the ETOPS twins were coming in and suddenly all kinds of B-tier cities were getting their own nonstops to Europe, and their residents no longer had to transit JFK. Just another of the 50 nails in Pan Am's blue-and-white coffin.