The Sky Rider

Juan Trippe: 1899-1981

He was a reclusive man who for years paid himself the spartan salary of $10,000. Yet Juan Terry Trippe, the patriarch of Pan American World Airways, was also quite a gambler. He pushed Pan Am into the jet age and in 1966, foreseeing a market for jumbo planes capable of carrying nearly 500 passengers across a continent or an ocean, sealed a $ 150 million deal for six Boeing 747s with a handshake.

Starting with a borrowed single-engine Fairchild FC2, Trippe built an airborne empire that was the acknowledged flagship of U.S. aviation for more than three decades. He also sent masses of air travelers around the world by inaugurating tourist-class fares in 1947. Last week this pioneer of world aviation died of a stroke at 81.

The son of a Manhattan banker, the stocky Trippe left Yale to become a naval aviator during World War I. In 1921 he became the manager of tiny Long Island Airways. Three years later he put together Colonial Air Transport with help from friends, including Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney and William H. Vanderbilt. That airline won the first Post Office contract to deliver U.S. air mail on a route between New York City and Boston.

By 1927, however, the domestic field had become too crowded to suit Trippe, so he abandoned air transportation within the U.S. and formed Pan American. The new company concentrated on international routes; its earliest Key West to Havana run carried just eight passengers in trimotor Fokkers. The airline quickly expanded its routes throughout Latin America and the Pacific. Charles A. Lindbergh, fresh from his solo flight across the Atlantic, soon became a key Pan Am adviser. "Lindbergh," Trippe always maintained, "was our greatest pilot and navigator."

For the next 40 years, Trippe and Pan Am played a central role in nearly every major development in commercial aviation. He pioneered the use of the great amphibian "clippers" used on transatlantic and transpacific flights prior to World War II. In 1955 Pan Am was the first U.S. company to order the commercial jets that would cut flying time in half and make air travel the most popular form of mass transportation. Eleven years later, Trippe bought the first wide-bodied jets, now the workhorses of long-distance aviation.

Last year, when Pan Am bought National Airlines for $393.6 million, the company for the first time added a full range of domestic routes to its international network. Even so, at Trippe's death, Pan Am no longer resembled the airline of its glory days. Since his retirement in 1968, the company has faced serious problems because of declining passenger revenues, rapidly rising costs (particularly for fuel) and tough competition from subsidized foreign carriers. Yet for nearly half a century and in everything from Sikorsky amphibians to Boeing jumbo jets, Juan Trippe made the going great.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.