The Last Pioneer

Back in 1927, the same year that Charles Lindbergh made his heroic solo flight across the Atlantic, a young Yale University graduate named Juan Terry Trippe founded a modest air service that shuttled mail between Florida and Cuba. Both events have loomed large in the history of aviation. Lindbergh's flight pointed up aviation's expanding potential, and Trippe's little business eventually grew into Pan American World Airways, the world's largest international airline. Last week in Manhattan, when Trippe, now 68, finally bowed out as Pan Am's boss, it seemed altogether fitting that Lindbergh, long a Pan Am technical consultant and now one of its directors, was on hand for the occasion.

A commercial-aviation pioneer cut from the same mold as Eastern Air Lines' Eddie Rickenbacker, United's William A. Patterson and American's C. R. Smith, Trippe was the last of them to relinquish command. And the manner of his departure was typical of the reticent executive. Presiding over Pan Am's annual shareholders meeting, barely 24 hours after the airline's other top brass first got the word themselves, he casually dropped the news at the end of a 45-minute speech on company finances. When 62-year-old President Harold E. Gray, his hand-picked successor as Pan Am's chairman and chief executive officer, began to praise him, Trippe abruptly ruled him out of order. Sighed Gray: "I seldom defy the boss."

Up & Down. Few ever did. A man of both vision and vigor who honed his boyhood interest in aviation as a Navy pilot during World War I, New Jersey-born Trippe ruled his airline with a firm hand. After establishing Pan Am as the first carrier to offer regular international service, he engaged in what amounted to a one-man diplomatic mission in order to negotiate landing rights in South America. In the 1930s, with his line's South American routes already well established, he became the first to introduce scheduled airline service across both the Pacific and the Atlantic. Under Trippe's innovative direction, Pan Am was also the first airline to serve meals aloft, the first to make use of radio communications, the first to employ multiple flight crews.

As the popularity of air travel went up and fares went down, Trippe's early prediction that aviation would make neighborhoods out of nations was largely fulfilled. Today, Pan Am flies into 86 countries on six continents along a route system covering over 80,000 miles. A privately run line that draws much of its competition from government-owned foreign carriers, Pan Am has grown from an original stake of $300,000 into a company with assets of over $1 billion and revenues that last year reached a record $950.2 million.

Like other U.S. airlines, however, Pan Am has been caught in a price-cost squeeze brought on in part by the switch to costly new aircraft; typically, Trippe's company was the first airline to order the Boeing 747 jumbo jet (25 of them due, starting in 1969) and the first U.S. carrier to order a supersonic transport (first of its French-British Concordes is due in the early 1970s). Lately, Pan Am and other carriers have been particularly hard hit by a dip in international air travel caused in large part by the U.S. balance of payments crisis and the Johnson Administration's efforts to discourage travel abroad. As a result, Pan Am, which last year registered profits of $65.7 million, suffered a loss of $1,468,000 during 1968's first quarter.

Jeeb & the Captain. Trippe leaves the company--and its recent troubles--in the hands of two experienced fliers. Gray, the new chairman, joined Pan Am in 1929 as one of its earliest pilots, was at the controls for the first scheduled transatlantic flight in 1939. An inveterate tinkerer, he has developed navigational and desalination devices; he is still called"Captain" around the office. He will be succeeded as president by another ex-pilot, Senior Vice President Najeeb E. ("Jeeb") Halaby, 52, a onetime Defense Department aide who joined Pan Am in 1965 after a five-year stint as administrator of the Federal Aviation Agency.

Halaby appears to be in line for Pan Am's top job when Gray steps down. As for Juan Trippe, he assumes the title of honorary chairman, otherwise has kept his plans secret from even his closest associates. Beyond doubt, he found retirement a painful step. But he gave every sign of taking it in stride. "It is," he told a colleague last week, "done all the time."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.