The Most Important Airplanes In History

Why 160 mph over 3,200 miles meant the world in 1933,
but 1,400 mph over 4,100 miles means nothing in 2003

How much ink has been spilled over the demise of the supersonic Concorde, which will make its last flight for British Airways on October 31? Certainly more than such a raving dipsomaniac of an airplane deserves, regardless of how fast or famous it might be. No matter that the needle-nosed poster child for government subsidies flew more than twice as fast (1,400 mph versus 650 mph) and almost twice as high (60,000 ft versus 35,000 ft) as modern widebody passenger jets feet, the airplane of the future could not outrun old-fashioned economics. Even at 22 times regular coach fare across the Atlantic ($6,300 one way versus $300) for the 100 seats, all first class, neither British Airways nor Air France could make money on Concorde because they were so frightfully expensive to operate and maintain.

Also, no matter how exhilarating it might be to hurtle from London to New York in only three hours, that is only a nominal improvement over the six hours it takes in a 747 or any of the newer intercontinental widebodies. The Anglo-French consortium that built Concorde anticipated orders by all of the major international carriers to bring down the cost of production. But that never happened. To be sure, there have been plenty of pop stars

Sleeping berth on a flying Clipper

and billionaires willing to splash out for a Mach 2 joyride. But even in 1976 when the planes went into service—before the World Wide Web, before video conferences, even before the fax or international overnight delivery—the business travelers upon whom airlines make their living were unwilling to pay two to 10 times as much as for subsonic business class to save a mere three hours. Time is money, but not that much money, especially when you could sit in traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway into New York or on the M4 into London for an hour or two anyway.

That was the ultimate irony. For all the billions of pounds sterling and francs of subsidies Concorde consumed in design, construction and operations, for all the speed and altitude and technological innovation—to say nothing of sex appeal—Concorde only represented a marginal increase in transportation effectiveness. In marked contrast, the great flying boats of the 1930s, which flew at about one-tenth the speed of Concorde, represented a huge leap in effectiveness. Even as the glorious steamships of the day raced each other across the oceans, it took a week to cross the Atlantic and about three weeks to cross the Pacific. On a Pan Am Clipper—the name airline founder Juan Trippe chose for his flying boats to evoke speed and adventure—you could get from New York to Southampton, England in two days and San Francisco to Hong Kong in less than a week.

That was a huge difference, especially across the Pacific, where the Clippers began their assault on time and distance, and where they became famous. In an era when almost all serious business was done face-to-face, an American merchant could get to the Far East, hold a week

Pan Am's South American route map, 1940s.

of meetings, and get home in the time it used to take him just to get there.

Only 28 clippers were built—three Sikorsky S-40s, 10 S-42s, three Martin M-130s, and a dozen Boeing B-314s—all of which went into commercial service. That is roughly similar to the 20 Concordes built, of which 14 went into commercial service. But in either case the production run pales to a rounding error compared to the best-selling commercial aircraft of all time, the Boeing 373, of which 4,379 were delivered from 1967 through the end of last year; a further 800 are still on order.

Pan Am Clippers are so compelling because they recollect the sepia tones of the interwar years, and because the players are all the great names of business and aviation history. Igor Sikorsky was a Russian émigré who dreamed of building giant airliners and developing a practical helicopter. His firm, now part of United Technologies (UTX), still makes civilian and military helicopters. Martin stayed in the flying boat business longer than any other manufacturer, and a handful of its massive hulking Mars military aircraft are still in service as fire-fighting water bombers. It became Martin Marietta and today is part of Lockheed Martin (LMT). Boeing, (BA) of course, is the largest aircraft maker in the world. Only Pan Am is gone. The original airline went bankrupt in 1991.

But from its founding in 1927 through the Clipper era and into the introduction of the Boeing 707 jetliner in 1957 and the B-747 jumbo jet in 1974, Pan Am was the prime mover of the airline industry. Of that long and prosperous run, the Clippers served in passenger carriage for just a decade, from the delivery of the first S-40 in 1931 to 1941 when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ended trans-Pacific service. The expansion of Imperial Japan also gave aviation one of its great epics, the 31,500-mile escape odyssey of the B-314 Pacific Clipper from Auckland, New Zealand across the Indian Ocean and over Africa to Brazil and finally New York.

Most of the Clippers were even busier in wartime military service than in civilian trade, and a fair number survived to peacetime, but by 1951 all were lost or scrapped. It is strange to think, however, that the last days of the Clippers overlapped with the dawn of the jet age: de Havilland’s Comet had its maiden flight in 1949, and entered service in 1952. In contrast to the Clippers’ golden decade, the Concordes have served three times as long, and British Airways says the only reason it is taking them out of service—Air France grounded its planes in May—is that Airbus Industrie, the successor of British Aircraft Corp. and Aerospatiale, will no longer provide maintenance and support.

But how much has changed in aviation in Concorde’s 27 years? In 1976, the B-747 had already been in service for a decade, and is still in production. The 100 model had a range of 7,900 miles with 350 to 450 passengers. Today’s 400 model has a range of 8,300 miles, a nominal 5 percent increase, with 400 to 550 passengers. Airbus’s own breakout subsonic airliner, the A-300, first flew in 1972, and is still in service; range is 4,700 with 250 to 350 passengers. According to the Air Transport Association international departures from the U.S. doubled from 17 million in 1976 to almost 53 million in 2002.
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Compare that to the 28 years from the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight at Kill Devil Hill, NC, on December 17, 1903 to 1931, the year the first S-40 American Clipper entered service. That year, 59,000 intrepid souls left the U.S. on international flights, versus zero in 1903. The S-40 carried 40 passengers over 500 miles at 110 miles per hour.

Only eight years after the S-40, Boeing launched the B-314. It could carry 72 passengers 3,500 miles at 180 mph. That represents an increase in speed of 64 percent over the S-40, an increase in capacity of 80 percent, and an increase in range of 600 percent. And by 1941, the height of Clipper service reaching six continents, international departures from the U.S. had quadrupled over the previous 10 years to 229,000.

Lindbergh himself was at the controls on November 19, 1931 when the American Clipper, christened by Lou Hoover, the wife of President Herbert, made its first commercial flight. Igor Sikorsky was a passenger, and after the flight the designer and the aviator began discussing a bigger flying boat that could carry a comparable number of passengers 2,500 miles—this only three and a half years since Lindbergh’s heroic solo flight from New York to Paris on May 20, 1927.

The S-40 was a bizarre looking contraption, even by the standards of the day. While later Clippers looked more or less like what we would consider an airplane, the S-40 really looked like a cabin cruiser with wings bolted on. The boxy hull was entirely separate from the rest of the craft. The single large “parasol” wing was high on struts above the hull, with the four stubby engines slung in between. Lower struts held small pontoons for balance, and the kite-like empennage perched high over the tail. It looked more like a science project than an airliner, but it proved both the technical and the commercial feasibility of the type, and with its successors Pan Am would conquer the world.

Juan Trippe, a former Navy pilot, founded the airline that became Pan Am as the Aviation Corporation of America in June 1927, after several false starts. Backing came from Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney and William A. Rockefeller, among others. Over the next few months Trippe courted, cajoled, and cowed several other fledgling competitors into combining or cooperating, including one called Pan American Airways. It was launched by Henry H. Arnold, who, known as “Hap,” would lead the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II.

By the end of October ’27 the combined Pan Am, under Trippe, was flying regular mail service between Key West and Havana. With Trippe’s velvet glove and iron fist style of business expansion, and the financial and psychological backing of federal airmail contracts, Pan Am expanded throughout Latin America. The key deals were the acquisition of the New York, Rio, and Buenos Aires [Air] Line, and a joint venture with steamship company Grace Lines. S-40s brought significant improvements in capacity and comfort to Caribbean and Latin American routes, but Trippe already had already cast his eyes across the oceans. Based on the discussions between Lindbergh and Sikorsky, the designer went to work on the expanded, streamlined S-42.

The first, Brazilian Clipper, was delivered in May 1934 with a range of 1,200 miles. Most of the 32-passenger S-42s were used on South American routes, but the last three built in ’36 and ’37 were used to develop Pacific routes, on the Baltimore to Bermuda run, and to develop early central Atlantic routes. The S-42 still had a single parasol wing, but it was connected to the hull by a short single spar, and the engines were mounted in the leading edge of the wing.

Martin had also pursued the original Pan Am bid, and the airline ordered three M-130s in 1933 before the first was even built. They had the cleanest lines of any of the Clippers, with a high wing running along the top of the hull and a single T-tail. The M-130 carried 46 passengers 3,200 miles at 160 mph, and with them Pan Am began service across the Pacific.

The first M-130, China Clipper, left San Francisco over the half-built Golden Gate Bridge, on November 22, 1935. Pan Am had already established bases at Hawaii, Midway Island, Wake Island, Guam, and Manila. China Clipper touched down in the Philippine capital six and a half days after she set out, covering more than 8,000 air miles in about 60 hours of flying. Regular scheduled service began in October 1936, with the M-130 usually carrying its sleeping capacity of 18 passengers through to Hong Kong.

China Clipper became the name for all the Pan Am flying boats as a result of the eponymous 1936 film, with Humphrey Bogart playing the leading role. The moniker lives on, but Time Warner has not seen fit to re-release the movie.

The following year an S-42 surveyed the central Atlantic route to Europe via the Azores and Lisbon to Marseilles and Southampton. With the route set, Pan Am ordered the massive B-314 and began trans-Atlantic service in 1939. Bill Boeing’s first aircraft, built in 1916, was a two-seat floatplane, but the B-314 was a flying palace. Its speed and range were only slightly better than the M-130’s, but its daytime capacity was half again as many, 74, and its sleeper capacity was close to the Martin’s seating capacity. The B-314’s four Wright Double Cyclone engines were rated at 1,600 hp each, compared to the M-130’s Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasps rated at 830 hp and later upgraded to 950 hp.

Of the dozen B-314s built, three were sold to British Overseas Airways Corporation, the predecessor of British Airways, and Pan Am split the others about evenly between trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic service. The brief pre-war years of the B-314 are remembered as the golden age of the Clippers, but the world was mired in depression and on the brink of war. In an eerie and tragic foreshadowing of Pan Am’s demise, two accidents shook the airline in 1938: an S-42 exploded in midair after leaving Samoa, killing all aboard including Edwin Musick, the senior pilot who had pioneered many of the Clipper routes; and an M-130 crashed between Guam and Manila, again killing all aboard.

War, depression, and safety concerns about the older Clippers put Pan Am in straightened circumstances, but just as peacetime airmail contracts had helped launch Pan Am, wartime airlift contracts saw Pan Am and most of the Clippers through the war. Those that survived resumed service, but by 1945 advances in engines, airframes, pressurization had made the Clippers obsolete. More importantly, large concrete runways had been built all over the world. Pan Am sold its seven surviving B-314s to World Airways, and scrapped all the others.

In the post-war boom of the 1950s, Pan Am worked closely with Boeing to develop the first commercially successful jetliner, the 707, and then the jumbo 747. Ironically Pan Am’s globe-girdling grandeur was its ultimate undoing. Without a domestic network to provide a discrete profit center and to feed its international business, Pan Am began to lose passengers and money in the recessionary 1970s and as domestic carriers launched international routes.

The acquisition of National Airlines in 1980 was the right move, but far too late. The terrorist bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 did not finish Pan Am, but it was the beginning of the end. The seminal Pacific and Asian routes were sold to United Airlines and the Atlantic and European routes to Delta Air Lines, but by the end of 1991 the last-ditch financing schemes fell through. The Pan Am name has been revived twice, currently by Boston-Maine Airways of Portsmouth, NH, which flies from New England and Atlantic Canada to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, in effect bringing the name, if not the same company, back to its origin.

Clipper travel quadrupled the number of international passengers from the U.S. in 10 years, as compared to doubling in the three decades of the Concorde era. When Lindbergh took the first S-40 into the air, commercial aviation was still a local and rather chancy venture. By the time all dozen B-314s were in service in 1941, aviation was well established as a global business and transoceanic travel times would be measured in hours or days, not weeks. The planes may be 10 times faster today, but they operate in the business created by the Clippers.

The vision of Juan Trippe, the dedication of Pan Am employees, and the sturdy machines of Sikorsky, Martin, and Boeing changed the way the world thought about time, distance, business, and travel forever. The New York Times front-page feature from June 29, 1939, reported on the first B-314 departure for Europe from Port Washington, on Long Island—not from LaGuardia’s Marine Air Terminal as commonly believed. The Times reported that a young girl called after her mother, “Write me a letter!” as the woman walked to the plane. “I’ll be back before the letter,” the mother replied, laughing.

Gregory DL Morris is a freelance journalist and a member of Financial History’s editorial board.