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Mr. Trippe: "Stand by for station reports."
The loudspeaker blatted five sets of code numbers, each from a different base across the ocean. Each was interpreted by a "Voice": "Pan American Airways Mid-Ocean Air Base No. 3. Wake Islands. Standing by for orders!"
Mr. Trippe: "Stand by, stations! Postmaster General Farley, I have the honor to report, sir, that the transpacific airway is ready. . . ."
Postmaster Farley: "It is an honor . . . to hereby order the inauguration. . . ."
Mr. Trippe : "Captain Musick, you have your sailing orders. Cast off and depart for Manila in accordance therewith!"
With the National Anthem playing, the crowds cheering, Pilot Musick opened the throttles of his four Twin Wasp motors, roared thankfully away into the haze over the Golden Gate. Sluggish with its 21-ton load, the plane rose heavily, narrowly missed the catwalks of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, over which it was supposed to fly. At the last instant, Pilot Musick saw he could not clear the cables, dipped underneath in a swoop which brought a roar from the crowd, who thought the maneuver intentional, were unaware that it broke the law.
Pan Ambitions. As he settled back in his comfortable leather seat for the 2,400-mi. stint to Honolulu, Capt. Musick might well have remembered a similar situation in which he found himself on Oct. 19, 1927. On that day, as the first pilot hired by a new company called Pan American Airways, he was at the controls of a trimotored Fokker for the first scheduled flight over the tiny company's sole airway—Key West to Havana, 90 miles.
Since that humble beginning, Pan American and Capt. Musick have risen together. Ambitious to make the young company into the U. S. merchant marine of the air, Founder Trippe set out on an astonishing accretionary process which in four years made his company the greatest airline in the world (TIME, July 31, 1933). In each case, as smart President Trippe picked up a doddering airline or expanded his own, capable Pilot Musick was chosen to inaugurate the new service. By 1931, they had done this so effectively that most of the airways in South & Central America were in Pan American's fold, were operating at 99%, efficiency, were beginning to make money. At this point, ambitious President Trippe pounced on "Lindbergh's dream."
"Lindbergh's Dream." Since 1929 Pan American had been paying Colonel Lindbergh $10,000 a year as technical adviser. Since 1927, ideas on transoceanic flying had been fermenting in his agile mind, taking gradual shape on paper. To substantiate them, he spent long hours coursing back & forth over the Caribbean, made an exploratory flight to China via Alaska. One day in 1931 he and Juan Trippe sat down with Chief Engineer Andre Allart Priester at a drawing board in the Pan American offices then on the 42nd floor of Manhattan's Chanin Building. With pencils and maps they plotted out two such daring airline schemes as the world had never before seen. One involved a great circular route across the North Atlantic by way of Labrador, Greenland, Iceland. The other turned into a zigzag line across the Pacific by way of tiny, desolate islands which belonged to the U. S.