Pan Am

For most of the twentieth century, Pan American World Airways was less an airline than an idea of American reach. Founded in 1927 by Juan Trippe, it became the de facto flag carrier of a country that had no official one, the company that taught the United States how to fly across oceans. The blue globe on its tailfins was a corporate logo doing the work of a national emblem, and for decades the assumption that Pan Am went wherever it wanted was, more or less, true.

It earned that stature by being first at almost everything that mattered. Pan Am pioneered transoceanic passenger flight with the Clipper flying boats of the 1930s, launched the commercial jet age as the launch customer for the Boeing 707, and ushered in the wide-body era as the airline that talked Boeing into building the 747. By the time Stanley Kubrick put a Pan Am shuttle into the orbital sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the brand had become cultural shorthand for the future itself.

And yet Pan Am carried a structural flaw that its glamour disguised: it had built a magnificent international network on top of almost no domestic one. As long as overseas flying was tightly regulated and Pan Am held the routes, that did not matter. After the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 turned US aviation into a brawl, it mattered enormously. Pan Am had no domestic feeder system to fill its international seats, and no easy way to build one.

The end came in pieces — an oil shock, a ruinous acquisition, a fire sale of the company’s best assets, and finally the December 1988 bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie, which killed 270 people and broke whatever confidence travelers had left. Pan Am filed for bankruptcy in January 1991 and shut down for good on December 4, 1991, the most famous name in the history of commercial aviation switching off its lights in a single afternoon.