In the history of American commercial aviation, there is no airline more influential, important, and better known than Pan American Airways. It was not the first American passenger airline, nor did it ever meet with much success in the domestic market, but Pan Am (as it was more commonly known), represented a new adventurous image of the United States to the world. When filmmaker Stanley Kubrick produced his landmark vision of the future in the 1968 movie â??2001: A Space Odyssey,â? he envisioned Pan Am as the space carrier that would take men and women regularly into space.
Pan Am's history is inseparable from the life and career of Juan Trippe, the company's founder and guiding visionary for five decades. Trippe, a former navy pilot, had shown early interest in passenger aviation with an aborted attempt to start a charter service for wealthy socialites in New England in the early 1920s. Within a few years, Trippe's primary focus, like many other entrepreneurs, shifted to the Caribbean and Latin America. With the help of financiers such as Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney and William A. Rockefeller, Trippe formed the Aviation Corporation of America on June 2, 1927, to offer air services into the Caribbean.
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