With the sweep of its wings the first China Clipper ripped out weeks of slow surface travel to the rich markets of the Far East. By 1936 a trip from this country to China was measured by a matter of sixty or seventy flight hours instead of by weeks.
It was not the big clipper planes alone that built the far-flung Pan American Airways. Juan Trippe visualized his world airways system and then picked the finest experts in every field to carry out his plans. Former diplomats covered the proposed routes long before the Clippers flew them. There was, of course, no freedom of the air. No plane could fly over a foreign country without permission. Trippe’s emissaries had to get franchises. Germany, France, Britain, and Holland were after franchises in South America too. There, as in the Far East, they got the rights to fly, not by government pressure, but by selling aviation as a valuable business asset to any nation.
Once Trippe had his franchises, he sent experts to explore and lay out routes. They carved airports out of jungles and Arctic wastes, and in places where no white man ever had penetrated. The supply problems overcome and the engineering marvels performed by Trippe’s advance men would furnish plots for a dozen movie thrillers. In laying out the bases at Wake and Guam on the Pacific route, more than one million separate items were bought, shipped, and installed before the first China Clipper took off from San Francisco.
Pan American’s map added another blue line after the Pacific route was under way. This time it was to Alaska, and another distant travel time could be reckoned in flight hours rather than ocean days.
Then came the Atlantic and the giant Boeing 314 Pan American Clippers.
Boeing achieved such excellent results with its two-engined planes that its engineers went on to plan four-engined super-planes. When Juan Trippe wanted a plane for his Atlantic service, Boeing was ready with the 41-ton Boeing 314. The 314 Atlantic Clippers carried 74 passengers and boasted of compartments that could be converted into berths, dressing rooms, a dining salon, and a real kitchen for serving hot meals aloft. On May 20, 1939, just twenty years after the first transatlantic flight of the Navy NC’s, the Atlantic Clipper took off on the trip that inaugurated Pan American Airways service to Europe. Juan Trippe’s dream was reaching around the world.
