Trippe, Juan Terry

TRIPPE, JUAN TERRY

Juan Trippe (1899–1981), a pioneer of the jet age, made Pan American World Airways the world's largest airline in the mid-twentieth century. Trippe, who introduced commercial air service across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in the 1930s, made Pan American Airways the first airline to offer affordable tourist class air travel. By the early 1960s Pan Am planes were flying into 86 countries on a route network covering some 80,000 miles.

The son of an investment banker, Trippe graduated from Yale University in 1921. He worked briefly as a bond salesman on Wall Street, intending to enter the family business, Trippe and Company. But his heart was set on planes and flying. Learning that some World War I (1914–1918) surplus single-engine pontoon Navy biplanes were available for sale, he used an inheritance and help from some wealthy Yale classmates to purchase seven of them. With his small fleet of planes he organized Long Island Airways, a sightseeing and charter service. In 1924 he put together Colonial Air Transport, which flew between Boston, Massachusetts, and New York City with the first U.S. air mail contract ever awarded.

When Trippe tried to expand the company's route beyond the Northeast to Florida and Havana, Cuba, Colonial's stockholders refused. He resigned from the company and, again with the financial help of friends, organized Pan American Airways, Inc. in 1927 from a merger of three rival flying services. He began airmail service from Florida to Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Central America. By 1929 Pan Am had 11,000 miles of routes, and passenger flights had been introduced.

After Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) became an international hero as a result of his solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, Trippe hired him as a consultant to advise Pan Am on creating ocean-going routes. The two men often traveled together over the proposed routes, with Lindbergh as the pilot. Trippe's first great success was the "China Clipper" route to China, inaugurated in the early 1930s. Atlantic routes to Europe followed. During World War II (1939–1945), the company acted as a contract carrier for the U.S. government, ferrying U.S. troops all over the globe.

After World War II, Trippe lobbied Congress unsuccessfully to establish Pan Am as the United States' exclusive international carrier. At the same time, believing that the future of air travel lay with the ordinary tourist, he introduced "tourist class" travel from New York City to London, England. In a 1944 speech he said, "The average man's holiday has been the prisoner of two grim keepers, money and time," and he sought to change that equation. He cut the usual round-trip fare in half and promoted his air travel campaign in a widely discussed article, "Now You Can Take That Trip Abroad." At first the major international air carriers resisted the idea of two classes of air service (first and tourist), and Great Britain even closed its airports to Pan Am flights with tourist seats. But the concept of low-cost airfares proved to be extremely popular, and, by 1952, all major airlines had posted competitive rates.

Trippe had the vision to see that the next advance in airline travel would be with the big 707 Boeing and the Douglas DC-8 jets. In 1958 Pan Am launched its first 707 route to Paris, France. The big jets flew almost twice as fast as the propeller-driven planes they replaced and carried many more passengers. Trippe ordered as many jets as the airplane manufacturers could produce, and, by the early 1960s, his airline dominated U.S. international air travel. In 1968 Pan Am had assets of over $1 billion.

Trippe, always the visionary, still wasn't satisfied. He became interested in development of the 747, the "jumbo jet" that would carry even more passengers than the 707. Pan Am ordered 25 of the huge planes, at a cost of $450 million and inaugurated their use in the 1960s. Unfortunately, Trippe, this time, was ahead of the curve. A world oil crisis in the early 1970s was particularly hard on airlines, and Pan Am, which had not streamlined its operations to meet increased competition at home and abroad, was no exception. Juan Trippe died in 1981, as his company was still struggling to recovery from the oil crisis. Pan Am continued operations for ten years after its founders death, until it was dissolved in 1991.

See also: Airline Industry

FURTHER READING

Bender, Marilyn and Selig Altschul. The Chosen Instrument: Pan Am, Juan Trippe, The Rise and Fall of an American Entrepreneur. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.

Branson, Richard. "Juan Trippe: Pilot of the Jet Age." Time, December 7, 1998.

Daley, Robert. An American Saga: Juan Trippe and his Pan Am Empire. New York: Random House, 1980.

Josephson, Matthew. Empire of the Air: Juan Trippe and the Struggle for World Airways. New York: Arno Press, 1972.

Newhouse, John. "A Hole in the Market." The New Yorker, July 5, 1982.

Current Biography 1955. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1955, s.v. "Juan Terry Trippe."