Pan Am - Icon of an Era Trivia Quiz

Answer: Cuba

While plans for Pan American Airways, as it was called at the time, called for a service to Panama in an attempt to keep a German-owned airline out of the region, it actually entered service with a mail and passenger flight from Key West in Florida to Havana in Cuba.

The original company structure was rather convoluted, with several subsidiaries each holding one key asset for operation such as landing rights, and, of course an airplane. The first Pan Am aircraft was a seaplane and for its early years, the company would exclusively rely on this kind of craft to provide its services.

Answer: Clipper

The first three Clippers were the American Clipper, Caribbean Clipper and Southern Clipper, all Sikorsky S-40 flying boats able to carry 38 passengers on South American routes. The Clipper fleet would quickly expand to 28 seaplanes, serving all of South America in the 1930s and 1940s. During this era, Pan Am quickly became the world's leading long-distance airline, mostly due to its extremely well trained crews who handled the complex navigational issues of the time with unmatched competence.

Answer: Rainbow was all tourist class, President was all first class

Can you imagine an air service in which classes were not just different cabins but flown by entirely different planes? That's exactly what Pan Am did.

The new, faster but relatively small aircraft would be used in an all-tourist configuration while first class passengers continued to be served by Boeing 377 Stratocruisers, a propeller aircraft noted for its comfort but also lack of reliability. Both services could fly the eastbound route nonstop; on the westbound leg, they had to refuel once.

Thankfully, there was no such thing as racially segregated flights.

Answer: Pan Am's main terminal at New York's John F Kennedy Airport

Built in 1960, the Worldport's design was revolutionary for its time. It consisted of a circular main building with an overhanging roof providing shelter for the plane parking positions, allowing passengers to board and deplane sheltered from the elements before the advent of jetbridges.

The building, constituting JFK's Terminal 3, was altered and retrofitted many times over the course of its existence to accommodate ever larger planes. It became rather impractical and, in spite of a campaign calling for its preservation as an architectural treasure and historic icon, was demolished in 2013 with no replacement.

Answer: One of the first computerized airline management systems

Occupying a whole floor in Pan Am's headquarters, 1964's PANAMAC was a huge computer system designed by IBM. It not only handled the airline's own booking and ticketing, but also contained scheduling and technical data as well as airport information and capabilities to book additional services such as hotels and restaurants at the airline's hubs and destinations.

The headquarter building, at its time the world's largest office building, still survives as the MetLife Building in Manhattan.

Answer: Boeing 747

The first revenue flight of a Boeing 747 was originally scheduled for January 21, 1970, but the plane intended for it - the first Boeing 747 delivered, named Clipper Young America - suffered an engine overheat before takeoff and had to be replaced with Clipper Victor, delaying the actual takeoff for six hours past midnight.

The same plane would go on to make history a second time, in a much less joyous way, seven years later in the Tenerife air disaster.

Answer: The KLM pilot, and, to a lesser extent, Tenerife Control

The Tenerife air disaster was the deadliest aviation accident of the 20th century. After a bomb scare at Gran Canaria airport, many planes were diverted to Tenerife which was unable to park them all in an organized fashion, clogging all the taxiways. When Gran Canaria reopened, planes had to use the runway in the opposite direction of takeoff to reach the departure point. At that time, dense fog had enveloped the airport. A Boeing 747 from Dutch carrier KLM was to be the first to depart, followed by the Pan Am plane.

They both taxied down the runway; the KLM was supposed to follow it to the end, turn around and hold, while the Pan Am would exit it halfway and then continue along a free section of taxiway while the KLM took off. However, the KLM pilot, partially confused by ambiguous wordings from air traffic control and a crucial missed message, started his takeoff run early, without clearance. His plane struck the Pan Am one just as it had reached the exit it was to take. Neither a last-second attempt of the Pan Am pilot to clear the runway nor an emergency liftoff by the KLM could prevent a collision. The undercarriage and wings of the KLM struck the upper deck and tail of the Pan Am and both planes immediately caught on fire with the KLM crashing back onto the runway.

All 248 on board the KLM jet were killed on impact, 70 out of the Pan Am's 396 passengers and crew, mostly seated near the front, escaped but nine of those died of their injuries later.

Answer: Above the town of Lockerbie, Scotland

All four of these sites were actual aircraft bombings that led to the loss of all aboard. However the one that affected Pan Am was the Lockerbie bombing, for which Libya, represented by Muammar Gaddhafi, later accepted responsibility and paid substantial reparations.

The bomb, hidden in luggage, destroyed a large section of the fuselage wall with the damage aggravated by the sudden depressurization of the aircraft which broke into at least four sections in midair. The wing section impacted whole on the street of Sherwood Crescent, obliterating several houses in a fuel explosion and killing 11 on the ground. According to witness and coroner reports, at least three people in the nose section briefly survived the impact, but all were dead by the time help arrived.

Answer: Delta

In a quite spectacular acquisition valued at almost half a billion dollars, Delta became owner of Pan Am's entire European landing rights and routes, its Frankfurt hub, 45 airplanes and the Worldport terminal. Delta also invested into a minority holding of what remained as an independent Pan Am, based in Miami.

Answer: Bridgetown, Barbados to Miami, Clipper Goodwill (Boeing 727)

In a final symmetry, 64 years after Pan Am had started operations with a flight from Florida to a Caribbean island, it would close with one coming back from the Caribbean to Florida, landing less than 150 miles from where it all began. Between then and 2012, five attempts have been made to resurrect the name as an airline, all of them quickly marred by legal troubles.

The longest lived "new" Pan Am on US soil was a regional carrier in the Northeast, operating from 1998 to 2004. A subsidiary of that company operated in the Dominican Republic until 2012 and then again, under the name PAWA Dominicana, from 2015 to 2018.