Juan Trippe was born into a wealthy banking family, descended from English seafarers who settled on the Maryland coast in the 1600s. He was educated in the finest schools (though he was, at best, an average student) and was graduated from Yale in 1919 after an active collegiate and extra-collegiate career that included playing on the football team, a brief stint as a navy flier in the war, reporting for the Yale newspaper on the NC flights of 1919, and starting a flying club.

As a businessman, Trippe regarded competition as an annoyance—he either joined forces with his competitors to create an even more powerful corporation or brushed them aside. Trippe was very comfortable in the world of high finance and the government movers and shakers, yet he did not hesitate to use the Spanish flavour of his name (even though he hated the name)—given to him by his mother who had expected to give birth to a girl whom she had wanted to name after a favorite Aunt Juanita— to open doors for him in Latin America.

In 1927 Trippe won a contract for an air mail run from Florida to Havana, even though he had no planes to fly and two other airlines already operating in the Southeast were run by respected airmen like Eddie Rickenbacker and H.H. “Hap” Arnold. Trippe accomplished this magic by convincing the Cuban dictator Garado Machad to allow only his airline to land in Havana. Industry observers thought it particularly cheeky of Trippe to adopt the name of Arnold’s operation, Pan American, when he forced that flier’s company out of 71 business and took over the company’s airplanes. Over the next decade, Trippe expanded farther out into Latin America and into the Pacific.

At each step, he cultivated a friendship with aircraft builders and encouraged them to build better, more powerful, and more luxurious aircraft. He would make large purchases, for which the manufacturers were grateful. Yet Trippe dealt with a variety of manufacturers and kept all of them guessing (along with his Board in which direction he was going to go. He viewed with alarm the inroads LuftHansa and its parent company, Condor Syndicate, were making in Latin America, and overtly made his efforts to establish commercial air dominance in the region a geopolitical matter. Many flights and activities of Pan Am during the prewar period were nothing short of espionage or diplomatic missions carried out for the State Department.

Trippe first used Fokker Trimotor F-7s, equipped with the best Wright engines, for the Key West—Havana run in 1927. In 1928 these planes were joined by Sikorsky S-38 amphibian planes with Wasp engines. When Pan Am opened routes to Mexico and Central America in 1929, it used a fleet of Fort 5-AT-B Trimotors, the most expensive and advanced commercial plane of its day, and when Pan Am acquired Ralph O’Neil’s New York—Rio de Janeiro—Buenos Aires Air Line (NYRBA, and known popularly as “Near Beer”), the new owner commandeered its fleet of fourteen Consolidated Commodore flying boats and flew them on the first Pan Am routes to South America beginning in 1930. Trippe’s “secret weapon” in all the development of air routes was his chief pilot, Edwin C. “Eddie” Musick, a veteran Navy flier who built a training, communication, and weather forecasting and reporting system that was unmatched in aviation for decades.

Eyeing the  Japanese expansion into the Pacific as yet another threat to the United States, he expanded Pan Am into the Pacific in 1935. For this, he needed yet another new Clipper: the M- 130, built by Glenn Martin (who took Sikorsky’s S-42 as his starting point). This aircraft was even larger than the S-42 and was more luxuriously appointed. Its main advantage, however, was that it more than doubled the nonstop range of the S-42—three thousand miles (4,827km) com- pared with twelve hundred miles (1,931km). It was an M-130, the China Clipper, that became the most famous of the Pan Am flying boats in the 1930s. Pan Am ordered several smaller Clipper aircraft— some from Sikorsky, who manufactured the twin-engine “baby clippers,” and others from Donald Douglas, who built the Dolphin, an eight-passenger flying boat that saw a great deal of service in the routes from the United States to China.

The grandest Clipper was still to come in 1939, in the form of the Boeing B-3 14, the largest and most powerful of the Clipper aircraft, and the one that proved most profitable, with a passenger capacity of more than seventy (plus a crew of up to sixteen). The B-3 14, of which only a dozen were built, represented the pinnacle of flying luxury. It contained sleeping quarters, fine dining rooms and bar lounges, deluxe suites and powder rooms, and a walkway inside the wings that allowed engineers to make in-flight repairs.

Another famous Pan Am aircraft, the Yankee Clipper, was a B-3 14. The Europeans were hard pressed to keep up with Pan Am’s aircraft builders. England’s Short Company built the Empire, a clipperlike aircraft and a flying-boat—mail- carrying-seaplane combination that was intended to carry both mail and passengers across the Atlantic; it saw limited service in Europe and in the Atlantic before the late 193Os, when Pan  Am finally turned its attention there.

The Germans built ever larger flying boats, beginning with the Dornier Wals flying boats of the early 192Os and culminating in the gigantic Dornier Do X, an aircraft that dwarfed anything else then in the air. This plane had  twelve engines mounted in six pairs atop a 157-foot (48m) wing. It carried 169 passengers in unparalleled luxury. The maiden voyage of the Do X in the spring of 1931 took so long and was plagued by so many problems that support for the plane among investors dried up amid jokes the media made of the plane. Claude Dornier, builder-designer of the Do X, was forced to donate the plane to a museum.