Could Pan Am Be Saved?
- cepmurphywrites
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
By Colin Salt.
Pan Am Airlines is a cultural icon of an airline that nonetheless went out of business decades prior to this article. This naturally brings up the question people ask about any firm or organization remotely similar: could it have been saved?
The answer is "almost certainly not."
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I'm not going to say a formal undeniable "No" because you never know and there are more ASB things out there than having one company in a notoriously up-and-down industry get turned around. But the odds were very much against it almost from the beginning of the jet age, in other words from its (genuine) glory days. It actually surprised me at first to see how early and total its decline was.
First, it was not the Lockerbie bombing that doomed it. In fact, the incident involving a Middle Eastern dictator that finished Pan Am off for good wasn't even that, it was the Gulf War. By the time of Lockerbie, when airlines in the newly deregulated American market were engaged in ferocious battles for the fickle market, Pan Am appears as an also-ran that was increasingly less relevant by each day. It was already reduced to burning the furniture in 1985 when it sold off its genuinely profitable Pacific routes to keep its day-to-day operations going. Whenever Pan Am was doing well (in the sense that it wasn't losing piles of money, however temporarily), it was almost always just piggybacking on a better economy for airlines in general.
Which brings me to the next mistaken culprit. It was not the 1978 deregulation of airlines that destroyed or even started the decline of Pan Am. In fact, and this may be a controversial opinion and I'm sticking to it, what the airline deregulation act did was give Pan Am another chance. Yes, it failed completely to take advantage of that, but Pan Am was in slow-motion collapse during the days of the Civil Aeronautics Board regulation cartel. How, why, and could a divergence avert it?
The most specific problem Pan Am had from start to finish was that its internal American routes and infrastructure were hopelessly underdeveloped. In its glory days it made up for that by being the international airline, flying across the sea with giant boats (it wasn't until WWII that sufficient runways were available for large land-planes, so if you wanted a big long range plane in the 1920s-1930s, it pretty much had to touch down on what covered 3/4th of the world's surface). But this was a bigger and bigger problem postwar. If anything, the locked-in regulated routes hurt Pan Am by shutting it out of any chance to fix it. Which is a good enough place to go to the next reason, and likely the biggest overall.
Pan Am had what I call first-mover disadvantage. It's a very common phenomenon for the first successful entrants into something to struggle long term as they face other people innovating around them, obsolescence, and much more. All this happened to Pan Am. The biggest political problem they faced was that upstarts even under regulation were able to get the government to pry away Pan Am's previous advantages. Why? Because it was viewed as a huge incumbent where being brought down to size was no cause for tears.
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There were classic and obvious economic ones too - being the first to use jumbo jets meant said planes wore down and aged the fastest. But it was safety where this was most tragic and costly. From 1968 to 1974, Pan Am airliners suffered eight fatal crashes, a staggering amount even at the time. The simplified answer for this is that their crews simply weren't prepared for what high performance jets actually meant.
The impression I got from reading on the fall of Pan Am was that from the late 1960s onward, it simply was to airlines what Harley Davidson is/was to motorcycles: something with bad fundamentals kept aloft far more by brand image and cultural relevance than any real success in its technical product. It's pretty hard to get a good fix-everything divergence in that case, and even harder to keep it as a big titan of its industry. If Pan Am survived as a much smaller, de facto regional airline (which it possibly could have done) it wouldn't be Pan Am of legend any more than the fact that elements of Studebaker (most notably STP Chemical) survive to this day means that a major car company lives on.
A soft (not focused the most on technical plausibility) alternate history or one that just didn't go into details could easily have Pan Am live on. But to me a poignant diversion is what if it lived on as a stable but nondescript shadow? Instead of dying and being remembered, the divergence is that it lives yet in its own way is much more forgotten.
 Colin Salt is an author who, among other works, wrote The Smithtown Unit and its sequel Box Press for Sea Lion, and runs the Fuldapocalypse Fiction review blog.