Trippe

NAME:  Trippe, Juan Terry

ACHIEVEMENTS:  Major founder of Pan American Airways 

NICKNAME/ALIAS:  None

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH:  June 27, 1899, Seabright, NJ.

DATE/PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH:  April 3, 1981, New York, NY.  Aged 82

DISCIPLINE:  Aviation pioneer

FIELD:  Business

LANGUAGE:  English

PARENTS:  Charles White Trippe; Lucy Adeline Terry

SIBLINGS:  Catherine Louise

SPOUSE:  Betty Stettinius

CHILDREN:  Charles; John; Edward; Betty

EDUCATION:  Bovee School, New York City?; Hill School, (??? where ???) Pennsylvania; Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

MAJOR WORK:  None

LIFE AND TIMES:

In 1922, at 23, Trippe graduated from Yale University and took a job as a bond salesman in New York's Wall Street financial district.  After one year, he quit, believing that more profits could be made by buying and selling First World War surplus "flying boats" from the Navy.  He was right.  He bought some planes, resold them, made a profit, bought others, and set up Long Island Airways, an air-taxi firm.

 (Aviation in America in the 1920s lagged behind that of Europe, but the Kelly Air Mail Act of 1925 changed that.  The Act allowed the U.S. Post Office Department to contract with private operators to carry airmail over designated routes.)

Trippe got his old friends from Yale to put up money for an airline to carry mail from Boston to New York.  When he learned that another private company, Colonial Airways, was about to do the same thing, Trippe suggested a merger.  The result was Colonial Air Transport.  The new firm won its first contract under the Kelly Act in 1925, and  began flying mail in December of that year.

Trippe foresaw a bright future for air transport.  When Dutch engineer <used planes by> Fokker* arrived in the U.S. with plans for a large three-engined plane tucked under his arm, Trippe ordered two. (Trippe had heard of Fokker, who had been forced to work for the German military in the First World War.) 

Trippe's idea was to get planes that would fly as least 10 passengers on flights of up to 250 miles distance.  But the Colonial board did not have the same vision.  It saw the Fokker plane as being too costly and it worried about the fact that private planes were uninsurable.  The board felt vindicated when, during a test -- with Trippe aboard -- one of the Fokkers crash-landed near Key West, Florida.

In 1927, Trippe heard that Washington was looking for a company to fly mail between Key West and Havana.  When he got to Florida, he found <helped set up> PanAm*, that already had a contract from  Cuba to carry mail between Havana and Key West, but had no money and no planes. 

This company and Trippe's merged under a holding company he established, and the operating subsidiary, Pan American Airways Inc,  won the contract for the Key West-Havana run.  Problems marred the first few weeks of operation.  The Fokker transport planes did not arrive until more than a week after the flights began, in October, 1927, and Pan Am was obliged to charter a seaplane.  Further, although the Fokkers each had three 200-hp. engines, meaning there was room for passengers, the public was still wary of flying and the planes sometimes flew with no passengers at at all.

Trippe was General Manager of Pan Am, working without a salary, but to be paid in stock.  He sometimes paid the rent for Pan Am's headquarters in New York out of his own pocket. He was believed by many employees to be at best slightly mad.  In fact, Trippe had no trouble finding backers for his schemes among his wealthy friends and fellow flying enthusiasts.

After Charles Lindbergh's historic flights at the end of the 1920s, the prospect of long flights seemed within grasp.  Trippe got new mail routes to South America and set about getting the most proficient planes.  He hired Andre Priester, a Dutch engineer who knew Fokker's planes and had worked as an airline operations manager. 

Trippe bought planes from Russian aviation expert <used planes of> Sikorsky*, who would help develop the helicopter. Over the next 10 years, Trippe won more and more contracts for his company and continued to check out prospective routes.  He often flew by himself in single-engine surveyor plane.

By 1930, Pan American was the largest air transport company in the world.  In 1935, Trippe directed the first trans-Pacific airmail flight from San Francisco to Manila, in the Philippines. 

In 1939, Pan American made the first scheduled commercial flight across the Atlantic.   During the Second World War, Washington put Pan American under contract to run an airline across Africa to Khartoum and Cairo.  

In 1955, under Trippe's direction, Pan American was the first commercial airline to order commercial jets.  It also was one of the first to buy the Boeing 747.  Trippe retired from as President and Executive Director of Pan Am in 1968.  Pan American went out of business in 1971. 

ASSESSMENT:  Made Pan American Airways the number-one commercial aviation company in the United States.

EXTRA CONNECTIONS:  None

ONELINER: Juan Trippe, founder of PanAm Airways

BIBLIOGRAPHY: 

Josephson, Matthew, Empire of the Air, Juan Trippe and the Struggle for World Airways, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1944