The Chosen Instrument
by Marylin Bender and Selig Altschul
Buy on AmazonIt’s not only a biography, it’s a corporate history. All kinds of industries attract historians who want to tell the story of the great firms and businesses. There have been corporate histories of Delta; a couple of United, but this one of Pan Am is also a biography of its charismatic leader Juan Trippe. He was a handsome man, a Yale man, who knew everyone, fraternised with occupants of the White House, but also flew. He starts the airline on a shoestring in 1927 – you could say Lindbergh made it possible. His first route connected Florida with Cuba. Very quickly he’s operating routes crisscrossing North, South and Central America. Trippe wanted to develop an airline to serve all of or as much of South America as he could, that was his first goal, and then he reached out to the Pacific and eventually to Africa. He realised to achieve that goal he needed bigger and better airplanes. Trippe was one of the first airline executives to grasp the importance of better technology. He saw that better airplanes could make the business of carrying passengers more profitable. No airline made much of a profit before 1936-38 when an airplane finally existed – the Douglas DC 3 – that could earn a profit carrying just passengers without a subsidy from the US postal service, which was what airlines before then depended on to survive. But to reach all of South America, Trippe developed a series of seaplanes, multi-engine aircraft that could land and take off on water, which made sense in parts of the world where there was no airport infrastructure yet. Eventually he became the prime mover in getting Boeing to build the 747 for transpacific routes in the sixties. So he and Pan Am pushed along aviation innovation. I would not say that Pan Am was a leader in democratising flight. Trippe was not an innovator in cheap fares or anything like that. Pan Am tended to make its money on routes that were not served by anyone else and charged what the traffic would bear. Flying Pan Am was a first-tier experience. In 1960 I took my first airplane flight from the US to Brazil. I so wished I could have flown on Pan Am. I flew on propeller planes, while Pan Am was flying long-distance jets. My flight was 28 hours total – flying Pan Am would’ve taken about nine hours. Democratisation and Pan Am don’t go together. “The chosen instrument” was a phrase he used that became accepted in the airline industry after WWII. What it means is that a particular airline became the chosen instrument of a nation’s foreign policy through its transportation contacts with other nations. Other countries developed state-subsidised airlines – KLM, Air France, British Airways, the Arab countries all have their own airline. Having your own airline as a country was a mark of having arrived. But in the United States, Pan Am became the chosen instrument of the State Department, easing dealings with South America in many ways. Trippe and his executives were chummy with the State Department and Roosevelt himself. So that’s what Chosen Instrument means. I’ll start with the negative. Knitting the world together spoiled some of the more fragile parts of the world. Today if you have money, and it often doesn’t cost much, you can fly almost anywhere. Very few spots remain untouched by tourism. That fallout from mass flight is negative. On the positive side, I always thought it would be neat to write a book, a sort of sequel to The Winged Gospel , about the dramatic changes that occurred as a result of what you called the democratisation of air travel. One example is international rock concerts raising funds for causes like famine relief. You couldn’t have that if the rock stars couldn’t as easily flit around the globe on private jets. Sports – the Super Bowl or the World Cup – wouldn’t be what they’ve become without the ease with which you can gather 100,000 people in one corner of the world. Shuttle diplomacy – the whole phrase itself suggests flight. We didn’t have shuttle diplomacy when we were stuck with ground and water transportation.