Pan-America Service

XCI

After the Pan Am guppy swallowed the NYRBA whale, Juan Trippe felt free to explore the air mail routes he’d collected for himself. With a virtual monopoly on U.S. air travel to Latin America, Trippe began buying up every marginal airline he could find operating anywhere below the southern frontier. 

If the United States’ own air mail service was disorganized in the early years of the Twentieth Century, most Latin American air mail service was chaotic. But where the operations of the estadounidenses were becoming more organized, the operations in other American lands thrived on disorder. Many were the airplaneless airlines paid by the government for delivering nonexistent mail to a wide spot in the road in some remote area based on a bribe and a share of the profits with some local official. 

Juan Trippe was hell on organized small routes. He bought out West Indian Air Express (WIAE), the line that had saved Pan Am right at the beginning by leasing Trippe La Niña. He bought up most of the struggling inter-city carriers operating with one airplane or two, and all very cheaply, for cash or for a few shares of Pan Am stock.  He even bought up a few of the nonexistent routes just so nobody else could wiggle their way in. If he had to call on help from the resident Latin American dictators to keep order, he did. They loved Trippe to a man. He was making them ever more wealthy.

He even captured the malign SCADTA. 

In 1929, Dr. Hugo Eckener, the head of DELAG, had begun regular airship service between Germany and South America via the Graf Zeppelin, and it was a massive success. Needing an airline to transport theGraf Zeppelin’s passengers from the big zeppelin’s coastal ports of call to cities in the interior, Eckener joined forces with the German-owned SCADTA. The two oldest airlines in the world began a joint venture in airline transport, which Doctor Eckener very intentionally named his Pan-America Service. 

Juan Trippe was enraged. He went to court to enjoin DELAG-SCADTA from using the name “Pan-America” but nobody had sufficient jurisdiction over both Pan American Airways and DELAG-SCADTA to stop Eckener from using the term. For once, Trippe couldn’t even sway the American government, which had issued an earlier stamp commemorating the Graf Zeppelin’s 1927 “Pan America Flight.” 

Eckener's "Pan-America"  played havoc with Trippe's "Pan American" for a while. Air mail meant for Pan American Airways was misdirected to DELAG-SCADTA. Passengers were confused. People found themselves going to the wrong destinations. Some became angry because they had intended to fly on the airship. Passengers complained that Trippe's staff was not multilingual. DELAG-SCADTA staff spoke German, Spanish and English. Trippe put multilingualism on his To-Do list for Pan Am employees (most did speak some Spanish). Pan American began to lose revenue. 

Trippe finally found an answer to this Teutonic nightmare. In 1931, he approached two of SCADTA’s largest shareholders and expensively bought them out on the quiet. Although the shares remained in the men’s names, Juan Trippe controlled them and their votes. He didn’t even break the agreement with DELAG, but kept carrying passengers and mail under the SCADTA banner and making profits. It wasn’t until the Nazi government nationalized DELAG (it became DZR in 1935) that anyone realized that Dr. Eckener had had an American partner.