Long-gone Pan Am jets back to distinction via new museum

Former Pan Am flight attendant Inger Hojfeldt poses for a portrait as part of the Pacific Aviation Museum's current Pan Am Airlines exhibit at Ford Island. Hojfeldt served as a flight attendant from 1972 to 1986. —Jamm Aquino / jaquino@staradvertiser.com

Pan American World Airways, “Pan Am” for short, went out of business in 1991. But the airline, once the largest U.S. international air carrier, lives on for many of its former employees and customers, and a new ABC television show has revived interest in the romance and glitz that overseas travel once represented.

The Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbor is celebrating Pan Am’s legacy, and particularly its significance to Hawaii, with a permanent exhibit, “Come Fly With Me,” opening Saturday. The display will commemorate to the day the 75th anniversary of the first commercial passenger flight from the mainland to Hawaii.

“(The flight) put Hawaii on the map,” said Jim Goodall, associate curator of the museum. “It went from an exotic ‘in the middle of somewhere’ to a destination. Instead of taking seven to 10 days to get here, now you could do it less than a day.”

The flight was on a Boeing 314 Clipper, which took off from San Francisco Bay and landed on the West Loch of Pearl Harbor. The “flying boat” had sleeping berths for its 74 passengers, who dined on filet mignon and lobster tails served on fine china. The 10- to 14-hour flight cost about $1,000, which in today’s dollars would be about $15,000.

The flight was the first leg of Pan Am’s island-hopping route across the Pacific to Asia, which included stops in places like Guam and Wake Island. The airline already had established itself as the main carrier to Latin America and was making deals with European carriers.

ARTIFACTS from Pan Am’s history will be on display, including trinkets emblazoned with the airline’s distinctive blue logo.

“The branding was huge,” Goodall said.

Other items will include equipment used on planes, such as a sextant used for navigation and a Morse-code key that was used for communications.

A display on “The Early Years” includes a section on Juan Trippe, founder and president of Pan Am. Trippe developed safety procedures, navigation routes and inflight services at a time when “it was still loosey-goosey,” Goodall said.

Kenneth DeHoff, executive director of the museum, said Pan Am played a key role during World War II in the battle for Pacific supremacy.

“In the 1940s, they turned around and trained the military how to fly across the Pacific and how to use celestial navigation,” he said. “Most of the pilots became Naval Reserve officers and flew for the Navy.”

It has taken about three years for the museum to collect artifacts for the display, DeHoff said. Some are from an exhibit at the Honolulu Airport that was disbanded after the Sept. 11 attacks, while others came from former Pan Am employees, who have formed social clubs around the world.

One such former employee is Darlene Laster, a member of the Pan Am Association’s Aloha Chapter who worked at various Pan Am ground locations for 25 years. She is proud of Pan Am’s legacy in the airline industry, noting that it instituted things like R & R (rest and recuperation) flights for military families during the Korean and Vietnam wars. Hawaii was key to these flights, serving as a meeting ground for service members flying in from Asia and their spouses coming from the mainland.

“We’d work like heck to get them on those flights,” Laster said. “If a connecting flight was delayed, we’d go pick them up with our van and move heaven and earth, sometimes even delaying a flight for a few minutes, in order to accommodate them because you didn’t want them to lose one whole day with their loved ones.”

Laster said ABC’s television show “Pan Am” is “very authentic as far as the background is concerned.” She said the flight attendants’ uniforms, though made a brighter blue than the original to show up better on the screen, are accurate in style, and that Pan Am’s hub at John F. Kennedy Airport was reproduced for the show. (One departure from reality, however, is that the pilots were not as young as those in the show, Laster says.)

The show, starring Christina Ricci, follows a group of Pan Am flight attendants as they travel the world in the 1960s. Intrigue is woven into the TV plot, with one of the flight attendants recruited to be a CIA courier. Laster said she didn’t know whether that scenario was based in reality, but she noted that for decades, Pan Am employees’ bags were not searched by customs.

Now, as the exhibit is revealed, Laster said she is “ecstatic” about it.

“We’ve been working on this for years,” she said. “We had to convince the younger military guys (of Pan Am’s importance). Now they realize that the whole history needs to be told.”

—Steven Mark / smark@staradvertiser.com