The Cranky Flier » Pan Am

Africa Then Versus Now, In the Eyes of a Pan Am Vet (Guest Post)

CF — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 10:45:04 +0000

Cranky is on a much-needed vacation and won’t be responding to emails this week. Fortunately, before I started drinking too heavily, I put some posts live. Today, we’ve got a guest post from a guy who helped open up Africa for Pan Am and is now doing the same for Delta.
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People often ask me what has changed in Africa over the last 25 years to make it possible for Delta Air Lines to fly to a continent that my former employer, Pan Am, largely abandoned in the 1980s. How could it be financially prudent for a major airline to invest large aircraft and resources in a continent with a gross domestic product equal to a fraction of U.S. GDP, they ask?

Vastly improved technology, stronger, consolidated global airlines and accelerating economic growth across Africa are the simple answers.

When I began my aviation career with Pan Am in Johannesburg in 1973, Africa was still a wild frontier for Western-style commerce. Phone lines were unsecure and unreliable. Computer systems were not connected. And airport infrastructure was generally not available unless you bought it or built it yourself.

To illustrate this point, Pan Am owned Intercontinental Hotels and constructed new properties around the globe to provide appropriate crew and passenger accommodations in many of the new cities it served.

And even after 30 years of air service development, in the 1970s many flights arrived from points across Africa with little advance notice of how many passengers were on board or how many customers would be making connections. Reliable data services simply were not available between the opposite coasts of Africa in those days.

Today, many of the age-old African political and infrastructure challenges remain. But new technology, improved communications and intra-Africa geopolitical improvements are making it possible for air travel to advance the pace for expanding global commerce on the continent.

As an example, this month Delta is returning to Monrovia, marking the first time U.S. airline service has existed in this market since the mid-1980s. When Pan Am served Liberia in the ’70s, we had to physically drive between the airport at Robertsfield and our commercial office in Monrovia to transfer information because we had no reliable way to communicate between the city and the airport.

Now, it is possible to use a Blackberry to stay connected to the world as we zig zag across Liberia or any country in Africa developing service. Improved intra-Africa airline service by the likes of Kenya Airways also make it possible to do business in many parts of the continent without making circuitous flight connections back through Europe as we had to do in the early days.

Advances in aircraft also have made Africa a more attractive theater for global aviation. When I started with Pan Am we never imagined the possibility of a Boeing 777-200LR aircraft flying nonstop in both directions between Atlanta and Johannesburg. And, in 1941, my predecessors certainly couldn’t have imagined these types of advances when they launched Pan Am’s first scheduled commercial service from New York to Senegal with intermediate stops in Bermuda, the Azores and Lisbon. Operated with Boeing 314 Flying Boat aircraft, the total travel time on this route exceeded 60 hours. Yes, 60 hours.

Today, Delta operates the same New York-to-Dakar route nonstop using Boeing 757 jets with a flight time of just over eight hours – not the three days required for the original Pan Am flight.

Pan Am served more than a dozen cities in Africa at its height, but the trail blazed to reach that point took more than three decades. In three years, Delta has grown to serve seven destinations in Africa with plans to grow to at least 10 once additional government approvals are received.

As our example shows, airlines that reach the market first, make lasting investments in infrastructure, customer service and pan-regional partnerships will create the most value for their customers and, most importantly, the African nations that so badly want to boost their economic outputs.

Growing relationships with carriers like Air Nigeria and Kenya Airways are indicators of the investments we must make beyond the airfields we serve. And the relationships the industry is building with governments across the continent mark a critical step in advancing the growth of Africa’s own aviation infrastructure in the years to come.

While I won’t be here to see the next 40 years in Africa, I’m sure they will be even more exciting than the last. There are very few places left on the globe with such promise of development as Africa. And this bodes well for airline managers everywhere.

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Jimmy Eichelgruen is Delta’s regional sales manager for Africa. He is based in London but spends most of his time on planes flying to and from points across Africa. He began his aviation career in 1969 with South African Airways and in 1973 joined Pan American Airways as a sales representative advancing to Director of Sales – Africa with assignments in Johannesburg, Nairobi, Monrovia and Abidijan. He became part of Delta’s London office when the airline acquired Pan Am’s trans-Atlantic routes in 1991.

Images are from the author

Your Chance to Fly Pan Am’s First Class

CF — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:56:36 +0000

If you never had the chance to experience Pan Am’s first class service, you might finally have your chance. No, Pan Am is not coming back, and no I’m not talking about riding on a Pan Am freight train. Anthony Toth has recreated the front cabin of a Pan Am 747 in his garage, and I had the chance to go visit.

Walking up to his house in the South Bay area of Los Angeles County, you wouldn’t know that anything was different about this place. But once you walk in, and head to the garage, it’s a different world. Anthony, who is the Director of Global Accounts at United these days, has painstakingly reassembled the nose section of a Pan Am 747 over the past 20 years, and he’s not done yet.

Take a look at some of these pictures. He built a frame in the garage and then bolted the panels on to the frame. (These are actually DC-10 panels, something he hopes to upgrade when he finds better ones.) Due to space constraints, he has cut out one row at the back of the cabin, and the nose is somewhat wider than in reality, but everything else is incredibly accurate.

Anthony has found real first class seats, and he has all the galley items you could want. I was treated to a 7-UP in a Pan Am glass with a Pan Am napkin. He even has peanuts in Pan Am packaging that he created himself.

He has inflight magazines, safety cards, and even old elegant menus from the bygone era. He put a flat screen TV at the front so he can relax and watch videos in there. He even wired the seats to work with headsets (Pan Am originals, of course).

This is truly a step back in time, and it’s just an incredible recreation. Anthony is always looking for some help here, and he has a wishlist of items that he needs. Here is his top 5:

First Class pneumatic headsets from the early 80′s…picture at right … I want like 14 of them…one for every seat!
Swatch of the clipper class fabric (you can also see this at right).
Upper deck screen with the ship etched in gold on it.
Clipper class headrests
Trays. The fullsize ones used for Clipper and First meals.

If you can help, or if you’d like to donate to the cause, please email Anthony directly at ajtoth@earthlink.net. If you’re lucky, he might even take you on a tour.

See all my photos on Flickr

Airlines We Lost in 2008

CF — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:25:30 +0000

It’s time once again for the third annual edition of “Airlines We Lost.” This was a pretty active year, as you can probably imagine. Sadly, my wish last year for Alitalia to be on this year’s list has not come true. That airline soliders on while others have not been so lucky to have a government behind them to prop them up. As I said, last year, let us hope that all the former employees of these airlines find new jobs with ease. I’m probably taking Friday off, so I’ll be back again Monday. Happy New Year!

AlpiEagles – January 3, 2008

We were barely into 2008 when AlpiEagles became the first airline of the year to shut down. To be honest, I don’t know much about these guys, but if I couldn’t include Alitalia, I had to at least find one Italian airline. A Google search found some references that make me think it wasn’t much of a surprise that these guys went under. In fact, I’m somewhat amazed they lasted as long as they did.

Boston-Maine (Pan Am) – February 29, 2008

It’s not often that I’m happy to see an airline go out of business, but this is most certainly one of them. When the Pan Am name and colors were slapped on this two-bit outfit flying old 727s into backwater airports, it was an embarrassment. To make things even worse, this airline was effectively a union-buster that was given the Pan Am name and routes when the previous version of Pan Am was shut down by the parent company. Earlier this year, the DOT put out a scathing report that the airline was financially unfit, lacked proper management oversight, and didn’t follow rules.

Big Sky – March 8, 2008

Big Sky was a sad loss, at least for those who relied on the airline to get around the upper Midwest for years. Big Sky was acquired by Mesaba’s parent, but when Mesaba was sold to Northwest, the parent company wanted out of the airline business. The 19-seaters weren’t making much money, so it was time to call it quits. I remember when I was at America West and we signed a codeshare with Big Sky. There were very few airports they served that I’d even heard of before, but they were the lifeline for the people who lived in those places.

Adam Air – March 18, 2008

If anyone is actually surprised by this one, you must not pay much attention to aviation accidents. Adam Air came out of Indonesia and did a good job of convincing people not to fly it. There were a number of accidents and incidents over its relatively short life span, and ultimately the Indonesian government mercifully shut them down. We should all be able to sleep easier at night knowing that this airline is gone from the scene.

Aloha Airlines – March 31, 2008

For me, this is the saddest failure of the year. If this were the Academy Awards when they show the people who died in the last year, Aloha would undoubtedly get the loudest applause. The oldest airline to fail last year, Aloha succumbed to a brutal competitive environment thanks to the entry of go! into the Interisland Hawaiian market. Lawsuits have dragged on, but it appears they have recently been settled with the understanding that go!, the very airline that killed Aloha, will rebrand as Aloha. This was so unpalatable that even the judge put a temporary stop to it.

ATA – April 3, 2008

Though ATA was an airline that many people hated, I actually never had a bad experience flying them. In fact, I always had good experiences. They reached their zenith in the early 2000s as they grew their Chicago and Indianapolis hubs under now-United drone John Tague but collapsed mightily soon after. Southwest picked up the remains, and the airline limped along for awhile, but ultimately, the owners bought a couple other airlines and shut down the original. A sad end for an airline with a long history.

Skybus – April 4, 2008

Ah yes, remember Skybus? It seems like it was only around for a few minutes, so you may have forgotten them by now. The idea was to offer ultra low fare flights originally only from its Columbus hub. Columbus? Yeah. That might go a long way to explain why it didn’t work. But this airline called it quits before it actually had to. In fact, there was money left in the bank, but the management decided it just wasn’t going to work in the end. By this time next year, we’ll probably have forgotten completely that they ever existed.

Skyway – April 5, 2008

Poor little Skyway, better known as Midwest Connect, died because of Midwest’s insistence on not actually flying any airplanes itself. Skyway was Midwest’s wholly-owned regional subsidiary, but Midwest decided it would rather have SkyWest operate the routes instead. So while Skyway lives on as a ground operations company, it no longer has any planes. Then again, Midwest doesn’t have many of its own planes left either.

Oasis HongKong – April 9, 2008

Like Skybus, Oasis HongKong had a meteoric rise only to come crashing down hard. The airline was running long haul, low fare flights between Hong Kong and both London and Vancouver. Apparently, it’s fares were too low, because one day it just disappeared. Many have argued that the long haul, low fare model doesn’t work, though Air Asia X is currently going to do its best to prove that hypothesis wrong. (Nonexistent labor costs help, by the way.)

Eos Airlines – April 26, 2008

There’s a special place for Eos in my eyes, because I interned with the airline during business school, long before it got started. In fact, it was just me and David Spurlock in a Palo Alto office working on getting funding for the airline back in 2003. The experience was great, but high fuel prices, a very small niche market, and, according to others, weak management, did the airline in. With fuel at today’s prices, it undoubtedly could have held on longer, but it’s not clear that it would have survived.

Nationwide Airlines – April 29, 2008

I’m sure there were a few thousand airlines in Africa that failed this year, but none had a higher profile than Nationwide. This airline, based in South Africa, grew to have a fairly sizable operation that even served London. In 2007, Nationwide was shut down for regulatory non-compliance, but it briefly came back. Of course, a temporary shut down like that is just as bad as being shut down for good, so it did just that and decided to call it quits.

Far Eastern Air Transport – May 12, 2008

I don’t know really know a ton about Far Eastern Air Transport except that their tails had FAT spelled out in big block letters. That’s good comedy. I was surprised to find that this airline was actually around for fifty years, primarily as a very strong domestic carrier in Taiwan. Increased competition (in the air and on the rails) put this airline into financial trouble, and it finally called it quits after struggling to the right the ship for awhile.

Silverjet – May 30, 2008

Like Eos, Silverjet tried to do the all-premium airline model and failed miserably. I’m told Silverjet had a very nice facility at London’s Luton airport, but that wasn’t enough to make it successful. Locating the airline at Luton probably didn’t help much either. Toward the end, there was all kinds of drama. It was said that a Middle Eastern firm would pump money into the airline and refocus it, but that never came through and the airline ran out of luck . . . and money.

Champion – May 31, 2008

Though Champion flew charters with its 727 fleet toward the end, its 2 letter code “MG” alludes to its roots as MGM Grand Air. MGM was a luxurious airline flying between LA and New York, but Champion did a lot of sports charters and some leisure work as well. In the end, the aging fleet wasn’t competitive in the charter market and the airline simply opted to shut down and go quietly into the night. Fortunately, it didn’t go away until after delaying the Spurs to a playoff game against the Lakers. Thanks, guys.

Air Midwest – June 30, 2008

Little Air Midwest was another casualty in the 19 seat aircraft market that really took a hit this year. This airline had been owned by Mesa for several years, and ultimately Mesa opted to completely shut down its 19 seat operation. I had the chance to fly Air Midwest on one of its little Beech 1900s from Yuma to Phoenix, and I certainly had no complaints. Then again, the weather was good that day. Were it not, I might have had a different opinion of the little airline.

ExpressJet (branded service) – September 1, 2008

Let’s get one thing clear. ExpressJet still exists and is still flying around as Continental Express and as a charter airline. The piece that died was the “branded” ExpressJet operation that was set up to fly point-to-point between smaller cities; sort of a Southwest Express in my mind. If Aloha’s failure tugged at the heartstrings, this one bothers the brain. This model still looks interesting to me, especially with lower fuel prices and a different aircraft type. I just think ExpressJet was ahead of its time on this one.

Zoom – August 28, 2008

This quirky airline had a very strange setup. The original airline was Canadian and began flying Transatlantic from Canada. Then they wanted to fly back across the Atlantic to the US from the UK so they set up a UK subsidiary to do the work. Flights went from London to places like San Diego, where no other nonstop service existed. The idea may have made sense in someone’s head, but it didn’t work at all. They collapsed under their own weight.

XL – September 12, 2008

You knew XL was set on being a low cost carrier when it decided that letters were too expensive and shortened its name from Excel. The British low cost charter operation focused on shuttling pasty white Brits to sunspots, but apparently it wasn’t concerned about getting them back when it stranded fifty thousand travelers after its shutdown. Another 200,000 had future bookings so this was likely a more expensive winter than many had planned.

AeroCalifornia – October 4, 2008

Wait, didn’t these guys already shut down? You know it, but somehow the Mexican airline didn’t make my 2006 list. AeroCalifornia operated aircraft so old they were actually flight tested by Charles Lindbergh (um, maybe not), but they were considered airworthy enough to fly to the US until 2006 when it first shut down. The airline made a brief comeback with only domestic Mexican operations, but that again ended abruptly when they ran out of money.

Sterling – October 29, 2008

Sterling quickly rose to be a massive low fare airline in Scandinavia and Europe in general, especially after acquiring Maersk. I flew Maersk once and loved the product, but Sterling had plenty of ownership shifts and never fully found its groove. It didn’t help that its most recent owners were Icelandic, not exactly a good place to be from a financial perspective these days. Cimber Air says it’s going to resurrect the airline, but, well, we’ll see about that.

European – November 30, 2008

Oh man, am I finally done? European wouldn’t get a mention here except for two things. First, it was one of the last operators (if not the last) of the 737-200 in Europe. And second, it operated for Palmair, an airline I really enjoyed learning about this year. Palmair was surprised by the failure of European, but it has found an aircraft from Jet2 to pick up the slack for now. Meanwhile, European will probably disappear quietly without any fanfare at all.

[Airlines We Lost in 2007]
[Airlines We Lost in 2006]

Pan Am 103 Crashed Twenty Years Ago Today

CF — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 08:01:14 +0000

I know I usually don’t post on Sundays, but this is no usual Sunday. It’s December 21, and that means it has now been 20 years since Pan Am Flight 103 exploded in flight and the remains rained down on Lockerbie, Scotland. Two hundred fifty nine people died in the air and eleven on the ground.

This picture below is one we’ve all seen many times. The nose section lay there on its side, looking deflated. It was certainly symbolic of Pan Am’s future. The airline had been in trouble for a long time, but the dramatic disappearance of bookings following this accident was something from which the airline could never recover.

It might be surprising to know that the remembrances today are very low key. At the Lockerbie Cairn in Arlington National Cemetery, there will be a memorial service beginning at 115p. In Lockerbie itself, there will be a wreath-laying ceremony at the Lockerbie Air Disaster Garden of Remembrance at 2p followed by a memorial service at 630p. At Syracuse University, where 35 of the victims were enrolled, there will be a memorial service at 2p. All three of these will be in progress at 203p Eastern/703p GMT when the aircraft went down.

80 Years Ago

CF — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 22:12:00 +0000

I’m not quite sure how such an anniversary slipped by so quietly, but a friend of mine just sent me an article that reminded me that this month celebrates 80 years since Pan Am’s inaugural flight.

It was October 18, 1927 that Pan Am’s first flight departed Key West for the short hop to Havana. Of course, Pan Am died in 1991 after a long illness. This shot summarizes my memories of Pan Am.

That’s ship N740PA, Clipper Ocean Pearl, at LAX in May 1988. (Copyright © AirNikon) I can remember two trips on Pan Am. One on 747s the whole way from LAX to JFK to Zurich and then back. The second trip was even more exciting as I flew again on a 747 from LAX to JFK and then JFK to Berlin on an A310. The return London to LAX on a 747 was my first time on the upper deck.

It’s sad that such a pioneering airline wasn’t able to survive deregulation. All we can do now is remember and recognize all the incredible contributions the airline made over the years.