Bankrupt - Pan Am

one claims it's the company's only chance for survival [Music] Atari is mild for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection 31-year vwn prison kodak is filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy at [Music] what's up guys my name is Jake and welcome to the pilot episode of my brand new show bankrupt and abandoned and sometimes cancelled I often like to break down the corporate side of topics I'm on honestly that's because it's something I genuinely am passionate about that very interest has led me to this brand new series where I wanted to take a deeper look into some of the most fascinating company bankruptcies in history so in this very first episode I wanted to take a look at one time the world's largest international airline an absolute iconic global brand and one that eventually met its demise in the early 90s let's take a look at Pan American World Airways in 1927 two Air Corp majors formed a small mail carrier service called Pan American Airways after successfully raising enough capital obtaining landing rights and u.s. mail contracts their first historic flight from Key West Florida to Havana Cuba became America's first scheduled international flight this instantly accelerated Pan Americans notoriety and put the company on a path to success as it began a new era for American aviation after some mergers in the Pan American visionary Juan Trippe took the helm of the company and immediately began appointing pilots to start scouting air routes in the Caribbean and this became the basis for all other aircraft to follow other key executives were hired to ensure the airline's quality and care with major changes like prohibiting pilot smoking and since the majority of Pan Am's fleet were flying boats pilots were assigned nautical captain uniforms which have carried through to this day the company continued to expand and grow with new routes and more aircraft with what they called the Clipper fleet a collection of larger aquatic airplanes which now offered routes as far as South America their newly built airport in Miami where these planes were based became the busiest marine terminal in the world by 1935 the airline became the first to fly across the Pacific to China a feat heavily commended the airline's innovations continued to excite each passing month with brand new aircraft routes and major game changers like the innovation with lanta air radio navigation Pan Am also developed long range aviation weather services new aircraft with more efficient propellers and enormous leaps in the industry like being the first American airline to establish airport to plane air traffic control systems but perhaps most notably Pan Am became the first airline to fly around the world following World War two competition grew much stronger with emerging airlines like TWA and United however this didn't slow down the airline's innovation and growth domestic and foreign flights were added along with the company continuing to order new planes helping popularize Boeing's DC 4 which made flying a little more affordable with the new aircraft through the coming years Pan Am continued to be competitive in the airline markets still gaining value and continuing its presence of quality and comfort by early 1950 the company changed its name officially to Pan American World Airways in the same year they ordered more planes and developed their first economy only aircraft to fly transl antic from New York to London by 1955 Boeing had been developing an all new type of aircraft with Pan Am signed on to order 20 and in October of 1958 Pan Am flew the inaugural flights of the very first American jet-powered passenger aircraft this is when Pan American Airways saw an explosion of innovation and growth by 1960 Pan Am had signed a one hundred and fifteen million dollar lease with a development company to occupy a brand-new office building in midtown Manhattan this became Pan Am's new corporate office with their enormous logo at the top the now iconic New York skyscraper was a symbol of how enormous Pan American was becoming the airline didn't stop with its desire for innovation though as Concorde was being developed in Europe Boeing famously tried their hand with their own supersonic jet which Pan American had expressed deep interest in however that project by Boeing was killed off due to budgetary issues and for the development of a new wide-body carrier this was actually partially born from Pan Am and as a result the company was already placing orders finally on January 22nd 1970 the twin deck Boeing 747 took its commercial flight for the first time once again with Pan American World Airways this is where Pan Am really peaked with its new tagline the most experienced airline in the world and it really was in just one single year the airline had carried more than 6.7 million passengers and had a fleet size of over 150 aircraft flying to 86 countries this was a key point in American aviation and Pan Am so what was it really like to experience this firsthand well I wanted to find out so I got the very exclusive opportunity to talk to Steve Brisky a former head flight attendant who had been flying with Pan Am for a decade well it was absolutely spectacular I had actually grown up flying when I was 6 weeks old I took my first flight on Pan Am when we moved to Brazil and then later on we moved to Australia so I was very familiar with 10m as a passenger I'd actually logged about a half a million miles before I got hired by Pan Am I am really was a family airline you know a lot of big companies you sort of get lost in the shuffle of the companies really large you're just a number Pan Am was a family airline it was started by Juan Trippe and he and his wife used to fly the airline all the time and they treated all of us employees like we were family and I think that's one of the reasons that people loved flying with Pan Am so much not just the way the corporation treated us but all of us employees treated each other as family that's the way we felt about each other and I think that's why people loved working for Pan Am so much Pan Am was the international airline it became an iconic brand not just in the United States but around the world during the company's peak Pan American World Airways was a billion-dollar corporation and really seemed like nothing could stop this massive airline but then 1973 rolled through and with it the United States oil crisis I've talked about this before on how severe the economic impact was in the country basically oil supply to the United States was limited and because of the demand vastly overwhelming the supply prices shot up dramatically this was a problem for consumers as fuel was in very short supply and extremely expensive but companies who relied on fossil fuels were severely affected by this jet fuel prices were estimated to multiply by four which meant operating cost for just one flight skyrocketed this was obviously a problem for every airline at the time but for Pan Am it was a nightmare while other Airlines in the States flew domestically with smaller aircraft because Pan Am only flew international on high demanded routes the company invested heavily in 747s adding more and more to their fleets the thing is though these four engine first iteration aircraft were by no means efficient this meant the already enormous amounts of fuel these jets ate up would be four times as expensive as it used to be the enormous aircrafts were also barely ever full during this time just adding to the substantial losses this coupled with the older less efficient smaller planes raised operating costs through the roof the slowing economy also resulted in less people traveling and Pan Am's gigantic infrastructure was starting to become a little too bloated to financially sustain cuts began to be made in the Airlines workforce in a company-wide turnaround effort while the oil crisis took its financial toll on the airline with around three hundred and sixty four million dollars in losses and over a billion dollars in debts by 1977 Pan Am regained its profitability however it would be permanently scarred by what happened by the late seventies competition was growing on the company as new airlines creeped in with market share and Pan Am was attempting to gain it back after a poorly handled merger in 1980 Pan Americans financial situation had worsened the company CEO had decided it was time to sell off some of the airline's assets to stabilize their finances and get the company back on track Pan Am sold their lease and their Manhattan head office to Metropolitan Life for around four hundred million dollars and the company sold off their hoods he'll chain the intercontinental while their core financial situation didn't recover as well as they hoped the airline was making an effort to grow and stay competitive with the order of new Airbus a300 s in a three tends to replace their aging and costly 727s the idea was that this investment would reap long-term improvements now that operating costs are decreasing in 1985 Pan Am CEO made the substantial decision to sell their entire Pacific division which encompassed 25% of Pan Am's routes to United Airlines for 750 million dollars this of course was a further attempt to recover their increasingly dire financial situation and to pay off some of their debts however to gain back some of its market share the airline licensed out its name to smaller regional airlines and even acquired one to service out of their New York hub however the airline had been plagued by several terrorist attacks and in the Ukraine the Chernobyl disaster had just taken place this among other factors deterred much of the public from traveling to Europe not great for Pan Am now that they were focusing heavily on translating flights by 1988 the company's CEO had been replaced and immediately began refurbishing the older aircraft this was until December of 1988 when another very public setback would haunt the company Pan Am flight 103 a Boeing 747 was flying at 31,000 feet over the town of Lockerbie Scotland when a bomb concealed inside a suitcase towards the front of the aircraft exploded the blast penetrated the fuselage causing the enormous aircraft to break up mid-flight and rain down over Lockerbie the disaster killed all 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground I was dating a new hire stewardess named Jocelyn Rena that was based out of London and on December the 22nd 21st I was laying over in San Diego I was doing West Coast shuttles and when we went out to the airplane the next morning we're sitting in the terminal waiting for our plane to boarded gage and comes over to us with this long list and he says one of our planes just went down and so of course we're all crazily pursue perusing the lists looking for names of people that we might know and of course it was panic one of three that had just gone down there's supposed to be 12 flight attendants on an airplane on a 747 10 steward stewardesses and two Purser's the screw had 13 names on it the last name was added in pencil and it was my fiancee Jocelyn ring this wasn't the first time Pan Am had been involved in a major accident either back in 1977 while in the Canary Islands a KLM 747 struck a Pan Am 747 on the runway the disaster killed 583 people which still to this day remains the deadliest aviation accident ever however this time with flight 103 Pan Am would be a blame for the accident the US government found the airline guilty of willful misconduct with lacks security screenings the FAA charged the airline with 19 accounts of security failures and a civil lawsuit was filed from the families of those who died in seeking 300 million dollars in compensation from the company obviously this very public horrible disaster did not reflect well on Pan American and given their already rocky financial situation there now tarnished safety record was a crucial blow by now the company was struggling along looking for a possible merger or a buyer to bail out the company of its ever increasing debts in August of 1990 the final blow to the company came with the start of the Gulf War this completely deterred Americans desire to fly internationally and especially now with Pan Am focusing heavily on transl antic only routes this was an enormous blow to their profits Pan Am was losing money drastically the airline immediately cut back on all non-essential costs to outweigh the enormous losses and the company's long battle with debt reached a long-feared point Pan American World Airways was no longer able to sustain itself and finally on January 8 1991 the company filed for bankruptcy with all of these major hits the corporation Pan Am just couldn't recover it's estimated that the airlines financial situation had been so awful that they had been losing up to three million dollars a day so as Pan Am attempted to reorganize Delta Airlines stepped in and purchased a huge chunk of their remaining profitable assets totaling around four hundred and sixteen million dollars they also took 45% control of the company as the restructuring plan was going to allow Pan American to operate at a Miami at a much smaller capacity with a fleet of only 60 aircraft however by the end of the year Pan Am was still sustaining heavy losses and Delta as the majority shareholder had decided to pull the plug on December 4th 1991 Pan American World Airways ended all operations well when I started flying in 1979 it was a rumor that you heard all the time we're going broke yeah I've heard that from day one when I was hired in semi not you know the company had been struggling as you mentioned financially for a couple three years before the very end and so what they were trying to do is entice a bunch of us a scalers to quit and they were hiring be scared flight tenants people for less than half they were what they were paying us to replace us so a whole bunch of us took advantage of the early out as they call it and so many of us retired in 1989 1990 of course we are all counting on getting flight benefits medical benefits and our retirement pay right so one morning everybody wakes up in 1991 and nothing everything came to a grinding halt a retirement paid gone really all of the course of all of her flight benefits medical benefits all gone just instantly so it was a pretty devastating event when it happened not only for the people still flying but for many of us that went already retired expecting that the company was probably going to continue in business even though it was struggling it was quite a shock to everybody the 64 year old company the icon of international aviation and the world's most experienced airline was finished by the mid to late 90s all the Pan Am's assets had been sold off including perhaps most iconic and valuable they're named the brain and since has been brought back a few times as airlines none of which still exist today the name does however live on as Pan Am railways which still does operate today Pan American World Airways really was just caught in the wrong time while negligence and mismanagement did contribute I think a former vice-president to Pan Am says it best what could go wrong did no one who followed one trip had the foresight to do something strongly positive it was the most astonishing example of Murphy's Law and extremists the airline was just plagued by one disaster after another every financial hit it took brought it further and further into debt while still continuing to provide the service and quality Pan Am was known for though the airline is certainly not forgotten we did get ABC's Pan Am which in itself didn't really work out either however while I was doing research on this company I discovered an enormous community of aviation enthusiasts and former employees who build communities and events to meet and reminisce you don't really ever see that kind of passion towards a corporation anymore and I think that stands today as a true element of how powerful and iconic Pan Am was to the world's pan-american was the Golden Age of aviation the company arguably did more for the industry than any other airline and it was the first to bring forward new and exciting forms of travel that are commonplace today well obviously I never flew on Pan Am well honestly I have only started flying last year I think it's absolutely incredible that such a well-respected enormous company could see a fate like it did it was truly the final flight for the most experienced airline in the world if you want to help support and fund the show and my other projects please consider donating to us on patreon a link will be in the description below anyway guys follow us on Twitter Instagram and snapchat and thank you very much for watching leave the train on the track take the boss of the gang in a bike out of sight [Music] go makes it going [Music]

Channel: Bright Sun Films

Views: 3,199,727

Keywords: BANKRUPT EPISODE 1, flying in the pool, Pan Am, Boeing 747, the beatles, Pan American Airways, bankruptcy, CEO, Flight 103, interview, new, 2018, airlines, Delta, family, PG, aviation, commercial, documentary, what happened?, death, american company, United Airlines, Airbus, story, decline, Juan Trippe, BrightSunFilms, Jake Williams, ABC, new york, westjet, flight, footage, movie, 1991, 1927, history, flight attendant, pilot, florida, miami, worldport, airport, steve priske, purser, vintage, defunct, abandoned, HD

Id: ZucyCLraEIE

Length: 18min 33sec (1113 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 13 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

i decided that i don't like pan am after watching the aviator

[u/Guysmiley777]

OP, why did you link to 604 seconds into the video?

[u/threewolfmtn]

"wow" - amazing cut

Great vid though, really enjoyed it

[u/midnightrambler108]

Crazy that airlines used to be in charge of their own security...

[u/monotoonz]

The World Is Yours (Unless You're Us) - Pan Am