Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Originally published by Wm. Morrow in 1995, SKYGODS is the story of Pan American World Airways from its meteoric ascent to its plunge to extinction. Pan Am blazed the way across the world's oceans with its magnificent Clipper ships, launched the first international jet service, was the first to fly the behemoth 747, was the lead customer for America's SST and the Concorde, and was even taking reservations for the first commercial flights to the moon.
SKYGODS is the true story of an American legend.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pan Am and its founder Juan Trippe were major players in the creation of the commercial airline industry. Pan Am, founded in 1927, was the first airline to fly across the Pacific, across the Atlantic and around the world. It was also the first U.S. airline to fly jets. Pan Am's early success in aviation allowed the company to expand into other areas such as ownership of the Intercontinental Hotel chain and the Pan Am Building in New York City. In the mid-1970s, however, Pan Am began to lose money and Trippe's successors were unable to turn the airline around. The company's last years were punctuated by attempts to find a buyer as well as the piecemeal divestiture of the company. Gandt peppers his recounting of the decline of Pan Am with anecdotes from former employees, mainly pilots. And while this is an involving account, Gandt, an aviation freelance journalist, does not provide much analysis of the root causes of Pan Am's failure, attributing its demise in 1991 to bad management and bad luck. At the end of this tale readers will likely ask themselves-as apparently did most Pan Am employees-why did Pan Am die?
