CARRIERS: New Flights

To highly trained, matter-of-fact Pan American Airways crews, flights from such far-flung bases as Hong Kong, Lisbon and Barranquilla have become routine—no more glamorous than domestic airline operation from St. Louis or Camden, N. J.

But last week, as war in the Mediterranean sliced across the Orient route of British Overseas Airways, globe-girdling Pan Am announced the opening of two new frontiers, and the glamor of new runs was back in the business again.

>CAA announced granting Pan Am a new run across the Pacific: from San Francisco (via Los Angeles) 6,540 miles to Auckland, New Zealand, with stops at Honolulu, Canton Island and Noumea in New Caledonia. Pan Am began surveying the New Zealand run in 1935, in 1938 was ready to start mail and express service.

But disaster struck the first commercial flight just out of Pago Pago when Pan Am’s No. 1 pilot, weather-beaten Ed Musick, dumped gasoline for a forced landing, burned up his Samoan Clipper with all hands (no passengers were carried). To resume service Pan Am had to apply for a new certificate, in the meantime (last August) made another exploration run via Canton Island and Noumea with a new Boeing 314 flying boat.

For fortnightly passenger service to Down Under, to start late this summer, Pan Am will pull one of its B-314s off the Atlantic run, reinforce its hull for Pacific operation. The American Clipper will make the run in four and a half days (steamship time: 17 days), may well be filled with westbound mail formerly shipped eastward over British Overseas Airways via Karachi and Singapore, to Britain’s Australasian colonies. With six new B-314s on order, Pan Am can step up service on the New Zealand run next year when new Clippers are to be delivered.

>Last week Pan Am’s Bermuda Clipper (Betsy to her crews) flew north from Seattle with a new name on her tidy hull—Alaskan Clipper. Lugging deadhead passengers from CAA, Army and Navy, she sat down at Ketchikan, Alaska, soon whisked off, finished her run at Juneau. This week Betsy—a four-motored Sikorsky S-42—will go into regular twice-a-week service, lugging passengers and mail from Seattle to Juneau in seven hours, bringing the vast, untapped riches of the Territory within 24 hours of Manhattan. At Juneau, Betsy will have scheduled connections (via Pan Am’s Pacific Alaska Airways) to Fairbanks and Nome, three hours farther west on the Bering Sea.

With war’s spread cutting down the number of lands visited by U. S. vessels, European mail to and from the U. S. has piled up. To help lug it, Pan Am this week will step up its transatlantic service (New York to Lisbon) from two to three runs a week. Bolstered by an extra plane crew, transatlantic pilots, radiomen, mechanics will lie over between trips at Lisbon, may there hobnob with British, French and Italian airline men, all operating across Europe from neutral Portugal.