Hot Route in the Cold War

Flying some of the cold war's hottest routes, Pan American World Airways meets political turbulence as often as the natural kind. Pan Am hardly inaugurated its new thrice-weekly New York-Berlin service before Moscow thundered that the nine-hour jet flights violated four-power agreements on Berlin and warned darkly that it could not be responsible for any dire consequences. Predictably, the airline kept right on flying last week, and the Communists did nothing.

Although the Russians have long harassed Pan Am's flights from eight West German cities through the 110-mile air corridor to Berlin, its Berlin run has become one of the most traveled, most curious and most profitable air services in the world. Pan Am's internal German service is the biggest of three flown into Berlin by the Western allies (the West Germans are banned by the four-power treaty); British European Airways and Air France also operate into the divided city. The U.S. flag carrier gets 60% of the business, largely because it has the most flights. Currently, Pan Am has 44 round trips daily, hauls 2,000,000 passengers a year. The load factor is an airman's dream: 70%.

Tourists & Tinsel. Business generates itself. To demonstrate West Berlin's viability, the West German government encourages festivals and scientific seminars there; and to stimulate travel, it pays the airline subsidies up to 30% on each ticket. West Berlin businessmen, doing 80% of their business outside the city, shuttle continuously by air to West Germany. For foreign tourists in Germany, the Berlin Wall has become a sightseeing must. Pan Am, flying 15 older DC-6Bs that are more economical than Air France's Caravelles or BEA's Viscounts, profits handsomely on yearly revenues of around $15 million.

There are lumps in all that gravy.Pilots descending toward Tempelhof airfield at night have been deliberately and dangerously blinded by East German spotlights. Their navigational aids, essential in a political corridor only 20 miles wide, have been knocked out by tinsel strewn from Russian planes. Worst of all, MIG fighters have 3 buzzed the commercial planes or escorted them wing tip to wing tip in an effort to un nerve pilots. "Crisis," sighs one Pan Am executive, "is a way of life."

Beards & Banns. To keep morale flying high in that way of life, Pan Am operates its "airline within an airline" with reckoned informality and a tolerant disregard for some rules that bind most other air crews. The 166 flight crewmen, some of whom have flown the Berlin run for more than a decade, have a certain derring-do, and Pan Am even allows them to cultivate combat-veteran beards. The 109 German stew ardesses are permitted to fly after they marry. Indeed, many are married to their own pilots.

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