Alameda to Auckland

CLXX

A Shorts flying boat built for Imperial Airways

No sooner had Pan American Airways opened the Orient Express route from California to Cathay than Juan Trippe began casting about for new worlds to conquer. He seemed constitutionally incapable of maintaining any kind of status quo for any period of time. If he had a plane in operation --- the Martin M-130 --- he had one on the drawing boards --- the Boeing 314. If he had a newly-opened route to Hong Kong he pressed to open yet another route to somewhere else.

The plum, of course, was the Atlantic Ocean, where Trippe dreamed of regularly-scheduled passenger service at least twice a week. But though the British government had knuckled under to the economic concerns of the Tai-pans of Hong Kong, allowing an exception to the Air Ministry’s Provision H, they still refused to allow Pan Am to cross the Atlantic. Arguing that they had no aircraft equivalent to the M-130 on the Atlantic route, they kept the door firmly shut. 

Imperial Airways routes of the 1930s

To no small degree, Downing Street refused to acknowledge the equivalence of their own Short flying boats to Pan American’s Martins for the simple reason that there was still lingering resentment among the British upper crust toward its one-time Colonials; but more critically, Britain, with its Maritime traditions, was trying to keep alive the dying Cunard-White Star Line, infected as it was with the enervating disease of the Great Depression.

Spinning the great globe in his office in frustration, Juan Trippe believed he had found an acceptable short-term alternative project to develop --- Australia.

The Great Depression nearly broke the Atlantic passenger trade. Cunard and White Star, once bitter rivals, merged in 1935, as a matter of simple survival

 

The great continental Commonwealth lay at the end of a long and mostly overland air route that led from London to Malta to Suez to Karachi to Singapore and then on to Melbourne. Flown regularly by the big Shorts, it was obviously exempt from Provision H, and by tying England to California by way of Victoria, Trippe could actually make the argument that he was benefitting British interests --- and so he did. 

His argument, like Pan American, didn’t fly with the Australians, who categorically refused to counter the trade policies of the Mother Country, but Juan was nothing if not persistent. Damn the British, he was going to give them Pan American Airways one way or another, and whether they wanted it or not.  

Early advertisements for Pan American’s New Zealand service featured the ordered but not-yet-built Boeing 314

His shadow State Department swung into action, finding a good-sized chink in the otherwise-impenetrable British armor --- New Zealand. Lying 1,500 miles off the coast of Australia, the Commonwealth was both geographically isolated and yet dependent on the vagaries of Aussie policy to maintain itself.

Flights to New Zealand would be something of a dead end for Pan American as far as passenger service went, but Trippe calculated that an airmail route, charging at $2.00 per mile, would pay for itself. 

Australia (left) and New Zealand (lower right) have close cultural ties but are politically distinct. Although New Zealand is generally considered an outlier of the continent of Australia, the New Zealand archipelago lies some 1,500 hundred miles off the Australian coastline --- a distance as far as New York to Miami.

  

When approached, the Kiwis were enthused. By accepting Juan Trippe’s offer to fly Pan American aircraft the 7,000 miles from Alameda to Auckland, New Zealand could assert much more independence of action than ever before. 

Now Juan just had to figure out how to do it.