The Clouded Crystal Ball

CXXIV

Though by 1933 Juan Trippe had become something of a portly armchair traveler he liked to be photographed thoughtfully puffing his pipe as he studied the world he was remaking day by day

At the dawn of the New Deal Pan American Airways seemed to bestride the aviation world like a young Colossus. The airline had the world’s most extensive route “system”, covering more total miles than any other. It had the most advanced flying boats available. It flew more passengers than any other airline, and had greater receipts than most other airlines combined. 

Regardless, Juan Trippe was unhappy. He knew just how much the airline spent to develop new aircraft and purchase new routes and to promote itself. He knew that the building of new infrastructures like the Dinner Key Terminal --- necessarily elegant --- was costly. And he was aware that as long as Pan Am remained within its Western Hemisphere cocoon the airline would always be a marginal concern. 

The British Indian Empire ('The Raj') in 1930. Imperial Airways’ destination of Karachi is along the coast of the Arabian Sea. Today it is one of the largest cities in Pakistan, established after the Partition of India in 1947. Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), to the south, was a separate British colony

He looked across the seas in alarm. Britain’s Imperial Airways (soon to be B.O.A.C. and ultimately British Airways) was flying its majestically inefficient Empire-class flying boats from London to Karachi, India (today Pakistan) on a regular basis. Trippe had hammered on the British Air Minister’s door ineffectually for years in order to acquire a transatlantic route. The Air Minister, as annoyed with Trippe as FDR was soon to be, told the leader of Pan Am that such air routes were a matter for treaty discussion between the Powers and had sent him packing --- to Washington, where the transatlantic route had become one of Pan Am’s repetitive issues that so vexed the President. In truth, the problem was much larger than Trippe understood. Right up until the Depression years, the United Kingdom’s Foreign Office persisted in treating the United States with an Imperial disdain reserved only for obstreperous former colonies. Roosevelt was working hard to decalcify U.S.-British relations, and Trippe’s jack-in-the-box approaches to the Oval Office on behalf of a U.S. company that was thriving in the worst of times seemed insufferable. Had Trippe been on the square with the President, advising him that he saw his airline on the edge of a precipice, maybe Roosevelt would have used Pan Am as an effective tool to improve the Anglo-American condition. But Trippe, always secretive, let nobody know --- not even his Pan Am partners --- what he saw in his clouded crystal ball. 

The French also seemed to be gaining on Pan Am. Using Latecoere flying boats Air France had instituted a regular but infrequent air service from Paris to Saigon, in French Indochina (today’s Vietnam).

The provinces of French Indochina in 1930. The Air France destination of Saigon lies just within Cochinchina. Formerly the capital of the Republic of South Vietnam (1945-1975), Saigon is now officially known as Ho Chi Minh City and is the largest city in Vietnam

The Dutch were clearly ahead of Pan American. KLM provided efficient biweekly flights from Amsterdam to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies (today’s Djakarta in Indonesia). 

The Netherlands East Indies in 1930. Batavia (now Djarkarta) lies along the southern coast of the island province of Java.  When KLM began regular service so far from the Netherlands the world was certain it would fail, but it didn’t. Seized by the Japanese in 1941, the local inhabitants of the Netherlands East Indies rebelled against the reimposition of Dutch colonial rule in 1945. After a violent rebellion, the colony became the independent nation of Indonesia in 1949

 

The Dutch were using German-designed and Dutch-built Junkers, Heinkels, Focke-Wulfs and Dorniers (although the Do. X turned out to be a dramatic failure, other Dorniers were not). Within the United States itself, Douglas was developing what would become the venerable DC-3, and Boeing had designed the revolutionary Monomail, soon to transform into the Boeing 247, the first truly successful commercial passenger landplane.

The Boeing Monomail began as a single-pilot plane, Model 220. A rear cockpit was added, creating Model 221, and then an eight passenger cabin (Model 221A). The Monomail was exceptionally advanced for its time. It lacked, however, a controllable-pitch propeller and a large enough powerplant to make it an effective long distance airplane. The open cockpits were also an anachronism

The Boeing 247 was the successor to the 221A and was used by United Airlines, among others. It had all the advantages the Monomail lacked, and it was obviously the close ancestor of the B-17 and B-29 bombers of World War II fame

Over 16,000 Douglas DC-3s were produced between the 1930s and the 1950s, including the military C-47 version. Every airline of every nation in the world, or their predecessors, have used DC-3s at some point. They are rugged  and dependable planes that influenced the design of every subsequent aircraft model ever built. Nearly 700 still fly today in diverse roles, including passenger services on tertiary routes

It was only a matter of time before somebody hopped the Atlantic and the Pacific both, and Trippe wanted it to be the United States --- in the form of Pan American Airways.  

Juan Trippe had a huge globe in his office. He often used it to chart new air routes using push pins and string, measuring real-world distances against the globe’s mileage scale. He enjoyed posing for photos with his globe. In private, he had a habit of setting the thing a-spinning and then slapping his hand down randomly, Zeus-like, to discover what place on earth was beneath the shadow of his reach.  

He also minutely studied its features for hours on end as a form of meditation. It was during one of these meditative exercises that he noted a feature he had not noticed before, a virtually infinitesimal speck in the blue vastness labeled Pacific that covered half the world.  

  

The speck had the word Wake alongside it. And more importantly, in parentheses, (U.S.).   

  

Tiny Wake Island lies at the center of the red circle about halfway between Hawaii and The Philippines. In 1930, all three areas were American territories. Japan lies to the northwest