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After service as a World War I Navy pilot (he did not get overseas), he returned to Yale's Sheffield Scientific School. He organized a flying club and an intercollegiate air meet, which he helped to win in a souped-up Jennie. He also became fast friends with a rough-cut classmate named Samuel F. Pryor, now his right-hand man. The old school tie is strong at Pan Am: Vice Presidents Howard B. Dean, Franklin Gledhill and David S. Ingalls were all Trippe contemporaries at Yale.
Three years out of college, he helped organize Colonial Air Transport, which won the first U.S. airmail contract. But when he daringly proposed that little Colonial's Boston-New York route be stretched all the way to Florida, his staid New England backers were alarmed. Trippe pulled out, having learned a lesson: never to take a board of directors into his confidence until his plans were all set.
Though the U.S. had no international air policy in the early '20s—and did not even know that it needed one—Trippe did. In 1927, while Sonny Whitney lined up $300,000 capital, Trippe merged three aviation firms into what eventually became Pan American Airways, and started flying the 110-mile Key West-to-Cuba route.
He lost no time in donning his seven-league boots. Working hand in glove with the post office, he won contracts to fly to San Juan and the Canal Zone, and overnight was assured $2,500,000 a year in mail revenue for ten years. Pan Am began the year 1929 with no miles of routes; at year's end it had 11,000. By 1930, at the age of three, Pan Am was the world's longest airline, and still is.
Birdmen in Serge. From the start, Trippe's was a seagoing airline. His "captains" and "first officers," dressed in blue serge, talked in knots instead of miles per hour. On long overwater flights they flew by celestial navigation. While they piled up experience on the short Caribbean hops, their boss, with vast energy, got ready to send them across the oceans. He worked with planemakers to turn out the flying boats he needed, sent Charles A. Lindbergh, a consultant to Pan Am, on Great Circle survey flights to the Orient. Trippe's agents roamed south, east and west lining up the exclusive landing franchises that paved the way for mail contracts. In island chains and jungles, his crews hacked out airports, strung together radio and weather networks. The better to feed his mushrooming lines, he formed a brood of subsidiaries and affiliates, of which he still has 18; the biggest are Pan American-Grace Airways and Panair do Brasil.** Whenever competitors tried to horn in, quick-thinking, quick-moving Juan Trippe managed to outfly them, outflank them or simply outlast them.
Across the Seas. If frontal attacks failed, Trippe was ready with an end-around play. In 1930, he made a deal with the British for landing rights so that Pan Am could fly the Atlantic. But he agreed to wait till the British were ready to fly too. By December 1934, when his Martin 1305, the first clippers, were ready, the British were not. Trippe.called in his staff and said: "We'll fly the Pacific instead." When the balky British refused him entry into Hong Kong, Trippe sent his planes to nearby Macao. Hong Kong merchants raised such a howl that the British backed down and let Trippe in.