The Birth of Boeing’s Biggest Baby,
and the Midwife Who Made it all Happen:
Juan Trippe, Pan Am and the Genesis of the 747
Ask anyone, even today, to name an aircraft and the chances are high that they’ll say 747, or at least Jumbo Jet. For a very long time, from the late sixties really up to the 1990s, the Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet was king of the skies. It was the largest American airliner in the world, and its distinctive hump-cockpit shape was instantly recognisable, even by those who had only the most rudimentary knowledge of or experience with aircraft. At one time, it seemed every airline in every country flew 747s, and though mostly retired now, it’s still the aircraft of choice for the most powerful man in the world. I personally never got to fly in one - I only flew twice in my life - but I would imagine of the people reading this, a very large percentage would have travelled on a Jumbo Jet to or from their destination. It really was the most popular aircraft in the sky for decades.
But it was almost never built. The main driving force behind the effort to ensure it was, the man who set up and ran one of the most successful and recognisable airlines in the world, Pan American (known as Pan Am) was Juan Trippe, and his story is an interesting one.
And here it is.
Born in New Jersey into a tradition of naval service, Juan Trippe enlisted as a pilot in the US Navy Reserve in 1918, but by the time his flight training was completed the First World War was over, and he returned to college. After graduation he got a job in Wall Street, but although he soon realised the life of a trader was not for him, this experience would stand him in good stead for his later entrepreneurial life. He set up his own airline, Long Island Airways, in 1923, using surplus aircraft from the war to provide a “luxury air taxi” for wealthy clients, but the airline folded after two years. He then invested in Colonial Air Transport, then called Bee Line, which had been in operation since 1923. A year after Long Island Airways ceased trading, Trippe took over Bee Line and renamed it Colonial Air Transport, moving its headquarters from Boston to New York, and reoganising its fleet of mostly German Fokker biplanes. Colonial secured a contract to carry the US airmail, one of the first commercial airlines in America to do so. Three years later, Trippe would basically form Pan American Airlines.
It may seem odd, to those of us who grew up seeing the giant blue-and-white-liveried 747s fly into our city airports, that the airline which was for decades to become the unofficial flag carrier of the USA began in the Caribbean, and its first official flight was to Cuba. Worried that the German-owned Colombian airline, SCADTA, was likely to get the lucrative contract being offered by the US Postal Service to fly mail from Key West, Florida to Cuba, two US Army Air Corps officers teamed up with Trippe, who had just set up the American Corporation of the Americas (ACA) to enable him operate in the Caribbean and had acquired American International Airways, which had the all-important holy grail, the landing rights in Havana. The executives from Pan American, ACA and a third investor, Atlantic, Gulf and Caribbean Airways all combined then under the banner of Pan American Airways, and won the contract. Pan Am had been born.
From the beginning, the airline was championed and protected by the US government, which saw it as the unofficial official US Airline, giving Pan Am an edge over the other emerging American airlines such as TWA (Trans World Airlines), Northwest Orient, Delta, Braniff, United and of course American Airlines. Pan Am’s all-but-monopoly on overseas routes must surely stand as one of the first instances of antitrust in America, and surely one of the few actually aided by the government. This unprecedented support by the White House helped Pan Am grow to become one of the biggest and most successful airlines, not only in America but in the world, and soon allowed it to use its tagline “the world’s favourite airline.”
Somewhat like a Mafia mobster wiping out or absorbing the competition, and in the vein of later mega-corporations swallowing up smaller companies, Pan Am bullied and bought its way across South America, sewing up routes across the continent as smaller airlines were bought out, forced to merge, or put out of business altogether, and all of this with the weight of the US government behind it. By the end of the decade South America had been divided between Pan Am and United Aircraft and Transport Corporation (UATC), which would later give birth to the Boeing Company, essentially meaning that in effect the continent was controlled by Pan Am and Boeing. It would not be the last time the two companies worked so closely together.
1937 saw Trippe gaze across the Atlantic Ocean, as he eyed destinations in Europe, and his “Clipper” Sikorsky flying boats began services to the UK and Ireland, soon afterwards heading east towards Asia. Pan Am did its bit in the war, ferrying troops and supplies through the port of Foynes in Limerick to the battle zones from 1941 onwards, their clippers being the only aircraft at the time capable of intercontinental travel, and so very much in demand. After the war though, Pan Am’s protection dwindled and then ceased, as new regulations made such monopolies illegal, and the airline had to face competition from a whole host of new airlines all vying for its routes. In 1955 Trippe began his long association with Boeing when Pan Am passed on the chance to purchase the world’s first jetliner, the De Havilland Comet. As related elsewhere, this might have had something to do with the poor - almost abysmal - safety record the aircraft had. Whatever the reason, Pan Am became the first customer to order, receive and fly Boeing’s first ever jetliner, the immensely popular Boeing 707.
I suppose it would only be fair though to say that Trippe wasn’t putting all his Pratt & Whitneys in one basket (oh ho ho: aviation in-joke for nerds!) as he also ordered a fistful of Douglas DC 8s, the perennial rival to the 707. Trippe would be the man who all but single-handedly ushered the jet age into America, as, when other airlines were wary of taking a chance on the new jet aircraft, Pan Am’s maverick president boldly inked orders for Douglas DC-8s and Boeing 707s. More, as noted in the introduction above, it would be he who would all but force - and certainly partially bankroll - the development, building and launch of what would become the world’s favourite airliner, to go with the world’s favourite airline, but before we get into that, we should perhaps look into the man behind the company that would build it.
William Boeing was almost twenty years older than Juan Trippe, and like him, also attended Yale, but unlike the founder of Pan Am he did not graduate, dropping out in 1903 (as Trippe would have been crawling around, or possibly just learning to walk upright) to go into the lumber business. It’s interesting - hardly startling but still interesting - that both these men, who would go on to be absolute titans in the world of aviation, initially tried far different careers, Trippe on Wall Street while Boeing shipped wood, though in his case his business did involve transport, if by canal rather than by air.
Born of an Austrian mother and a German father, Boeing’s family name was originally Böing, which I suppose he thought was the kind of name that could get you laughed at, though I can’t so far find out where, when or how he changed it. It does explain though why the surname is one I have never heard applied to anyone else, though of course it may have done, but I’ve never come across it. Okay well this is interesting. I read that the Boeing name came about when William’s father (also called William, but the German spelling, so Wilhelm) decided to Anglicise it (not quite sure how adding an “e” Anglicises it, but there you go), somewhere around 1880, so possibly before his son was born. More to the point, Wilhelm also worked in lumber, so whether his son ended up in the family business or not I don’t know, but he was following in his father’s footsteps. Okay no he did not: Wilhelm worked for a lumber concern in Detroit, whereas William moved to Washington to seek his fortune and set up his own lumber company there. Boeing’s father died when he was only eight years old, so I guess he would not have known him that well.
A trip to an aircraft show in 1910 shifted young William’s focus from ships and boats to planes, and indeed he had caught his first sight of a “flying machine” the previous year. He soon took delivery of his first aircraft, a Martin TA Hydroaeroplane, and when it crashed and parts were not going to be available for months, he decided he and his friend Commander George Westervelt would build their own, which they duly did, coming up with the B&W seaplane, which would become the Boeing Model 1. This had an almost epiphanic effect on Boeing, and he decided his future lay in the manufacture of airplanes.
Just like across the water, where aircraft were being looked down on (something of a paradox, but you know what I mean) by the military, the US Navy did not see any future in the flying machines, considering them not worth the time, slow and cumbersome, and as America was not at the time involved in World War I - and even when it did enter it, sent no aircraft for obvious reasons - there was little enthusiasm and less support for the idea of airplanes. A staunch advocate for his beloved aircraft, William Boeing did all he could to convince the government, the military and the populace of the importance of aviation development, even going so far as to fly over a football field and drop cardboard bombs on the spectators, with notes attached to them pointing out that had these been enemy bombs they might all very well be dead.
I must say, I’m a little baffled as to why, at this point, the relatively few aircraft built in the USA were all seaplanes. Perhaps it was because there were as yet no airports or landing strips, or maybe it was because flight was kind of still in its infancy, certainly in America, and if you had to crash I suppose it was better to do so on a lake than onto the ground. Also, maybe the isolated nature of water landings kept people from complaining about noise? I expect we’ll find out when we go deeply into the early history of aviation again, but for now, it seems to me to be a bit of a mystery.
At any rate, at a time when one of the bloodiest battles of World War I was raging as the word Somme was to be carved forever in blood and death into human history, William Boeing inaugurated his new aircraft company, the Pacific Aero Products Company, and began making aircraft. Less than a year later, he changed the company name to the Boeing Airplane Company. With the end of hostilities in 1918, demand dropped for aircraft as a surplus of used military airplanes hit the market, and Boeing kept his company going by diversifying into manufacturing furniture and speedboats, which sold well, until 1921, when the US Post Office, having lost all but nine of its forty pilots flying the US Air Mail route, decided to give it up and Congress tendered for the contract. Boeing won it, and with it came the opportunity to run passenger aircraft, as the nascent American aviation industry began to gather steam.
This did not last, however, as in 1934 the US government, in what must surely be seen as both a hypocritical move, considering the patronage they had given to Pan Am, and surely an attempt to placate voters, decided Boeing had too much of a monopoly on air travel, and cancelled the air mail contracts they had. After appearing before a Senate hearing in 1934, William Boeing retired, to concentrate on horse breeding and land development. Something that is often glossed over though is his overt racism, as the land he bought after retirement was only leased on condition that only whites could settle there. Wiki tells me that “the Boeings placed racially restrictive covenants on their land to enforce segregation, forbidding properties from being "sold, conveyed, rented, or leased in whole or in part to any person not of the White or Caucasian race." Non-whites could only occupy a property on the land if they were employed as a domestic servant "by a person of the White or Caucasian race.” Lovely.
Boeing of course continued and thrived without him, as he surely had known and expected it would, becoming the premier aircraft manufacturer in not only America, but the world, and more or less remains so today. After losing a contract for the US military to build a new transport aircraft, Boeing used the plans they had drawn up, and the basic frame of their bid to later develop the aircraft which would become the largest passenger airliner in the world at the time, and would also be the most successful ever built.