SPEAKER_08 0:15

Welcome to the Pan Am Podcast, brought to you by the Pan Am Museum in Garden City, New York. This podcast and our museum are dedicated to celebrating the legacy of the world's most iconic airline, Pan American World Airways. My name is Tom Betty and I'm the host of this program. Thank you for joining us. The Pan Am Museum Foundation is a nonprofit organization. Our mission statement is to educate, celebrate, and inspire present and future generations by preserving historical and diverse personal stories of Pan American World Airways. Please visit our website for more information at the Pan Ammuseum.org. Again, our website is the Pan Ammuseum.org. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If you are using Apple Podcasts, please consider leaving a review. It will help others discover this program. If you're not familiar with Pan Am, welcome. We are honored to have you here, and for you to learn about what we're all about. If you already know of Pan Am, worked for, or flown on the airline, or just love our history, it's good to be with you again. So with that, let's get this episode in the air, so to speak. Welcome aboard your Pan American jet clipper. Then we will welcome back Pan Am captains Paul LaChapelle and John Marshall. Captain La Chapelle is featured in episode six, titled Hijackings and the Dawn of Global Terrorism. Captain Marshall is featured in episode two, titled The First Presidential Flight and the Last Pan Am Flight. If you haven't heard these episodes, we encourage you to take a listen after you finish this installment. Both captains will share their boyhood dreams of becoming a pilot and other stories from the flight deck. But first, the Pan Am International Flight Academy.

SPEAKER_02 2:58

We'd like to introduce you to an airline. It flies to more cities around the world than any other U.S. airline. Its pilots are so well trained they train pilots from other airlines. Its transatlantic fleet is among the youngest in the air. And its frequent traveler program is the richest in the world. Pan Am. We're flying better than ever.

SPEAKER_08 3:25

You just heard one of the last commercials of Pan Am from the year 1990. You may remember we played this in episode 9, covering the Pan Am Worldport with guest Wendy Sue Connect, but we decided it would be perfect for this episode too, because it specifically mentions how Pan Am had the most experienced flight crews and trained pilots from other airlines. The Pan Am International Flight Academy can trace its instruction heritage to the earliest days of airline flight training in the late 1920s. Pan American World Airways led the way in commercial aviation for most of the 20th century by setting the standard in luxury air travel, flight operations, aviation innovations, aircraft development, and safety procedures. As an early pioneer of commercial aviation, Pan Am developed and perfected many of the flight operations that are still evident today in and out of the cockpit and in airports around the world. Although technology has greatly evolved, Pan Am's contribution to the aviation industry is still apparent by the many rules, laws, and requirements pilots must adhere to. In fact, Pan Am's contribution goes beyond commercial aviation. For example, during World War II, many military pilots were trained directly by Pan Am, and the airline helped the U.S. government throughout the war with technical assistance, the development of air bases in over 14 countries, missions transporting VIPs, warplanes, equipment, and soldiers, all playing a vital role to the vast resupply network that provided a sustainable lifeline for Allied forces. Pan Am, as an airline, always had a long history of providing industry-leading training to its own flight crews and pilots of competing airlines, as well as government employees and in some cases, even the U.S. Air Force staff of presidential aircraft. After Pan American World Airways ceased operations on December 4, 1991, the company's assets were seized in the bankruptcy liquidation process to pay the airline's many creditors. However, Pan Am's training division was identified by the bankruptcy court as a valuable asset that could emerge as a profitable enterprise intact. Under the terms of the bankruptcy, the airline's main flight academy in Miami was permitted to remain open and became an independent company in 1992 with the name Pan Am International Flight Academy. The Academy has been an industry leader ever since and at times had locations in multiple states and countries. Much like its former parent company, the Pan Am International Flight Academy has earned its own place in American history. In 2001, a little less than a month before the September 11th terrorist attacks, the Flight Academy contacted the FBI with serious concerns about one of their students enrolled in a 747 training course. The student met none of the usual qualifications for Pan Am students and told the instructor that he had no intention of obtaining a pilot's license and that he only wanted to learn how to fly a plane, but not how to take off or land. The instructor immediately recognized that something wasn't right, informed his supervisors, and stressed his concerns. The two Pan Am supervisors contacted FBI agents and stressed the severity of potential criminal intent. They told the FBI, quote, do you realize that a 747 loaded with fuel can be used as a bomb? End quote. The student, Zacharias Massawi, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, is now widely known as the 20th would-be 911 hijacker. Fortunately, he was arrested in August of 2001 on immigration charges shortly after the Pan Am instructors contacted the FBI and was already in jail when the attacks occurred. After the September 11th attacks, more charges were added, and he was charged with conspiring to hijack planes and crash them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Congressman James L. Oberstar of Minnesota, ranking member of the House Transportation Committee in 2001, described the Pan Am employees as American heroes whose actions resulted in Massaui's arrest and probably prevented another suicide hijacking. Masaui pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to conspiring to kill citizens of the United States as part of the September 11th attacks. He is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole at the federal Supermax Prison in Florence, Colorado. Unfortunately, Masawi is the only person ever convicted in U.S. court in connection with the September 11th attacks. In 2013, the parent company of Japanese carrier Al Nippon Airways purchased the Pan Am International Flight Academy for $139.5 million and remains a part of that company. Today, the Pan Am International Flight Academy continues to be the leading provider of training support for aviation professionals of regional, national, and international airlines, including pilots and flight attendants. The Aviation School is headquartered in Miami, Florida, in the very same building where Pan American World Airways opened an innovative flight training educational facility in 1980 that provided the best aviation training program in the industry to Pan Amployees and other airlines at the time. In December of 2021, the Academy announced the expansion of their facilities to a new facility, located in the heart of Miami, with 22 new full-flight simulator bays. That means the Academy will have a total of 36 simulators at three Miami locations once the new building opens. The Pan Am International Flight Academy is the only surviving part of Pan American World Airways that survived the bankruptcy and is still in operation today. To learn more about the Academy, check out their website, Pan AmAcademy.com. Let's take a listen to a short promotional clip and then on to our interviews.

SPEAKER_13 10:04

Welcome to Pan Am International Flight Academy, leading provider of training support for airlines and aviation professionals.

SPEAKER_10 10:11

Pan Am offers uh services very unique.

SPEAKER_07 10:15

We offer uh airline level training.

SPEAKER_10 10:18

If you're wanting to seek a career in aviation and you come to us with zero experience, we can take you from zero hours through a commercial type rating here at Pan Am International Flight Academy.

SPEAKER_13 10:30

Our facilities include the most up-to-date technology, top-of-the-line instructors and equipment, offering more courses and services than any other airline training company.

SPEAKER_12 10:40

We have more than 125 different courses, 10-s, 10-minute pilots, dispatchers, and air traffic controls.

SPEAKER_11 10:53

We have the best facilities, we have the best training devices, we have the best flight simulators, the airlines trust Pan Am to train their pilots to very high FAA standards.

SPEAKER_13 11:05

As the sole living division of the renowned Pan American World Airways, our instruction heritage can be traced to the earliest days of airline flight training.

SPEAKER_11 11:13

Pan Am's legacy has been around for over 60 years. In fact, I walked this building as a young teenager.

SPEAKER_13 11:22

Our reputation for sea test and is a badge of honor we wear proudly every day.

SPEAKER_07 11:27

We're very proud that Pan Am International Flight Academy, we've built a career pilot academy that we believe will set the standard for aviation training.

SPEAKER_13 11:38

Our goal will always remain the same. Provide clients with the highest quality training solutions and services at the best value.

SPEAKER_09 11:48

And then we've got to death at least the highest standard training.

SPEAKER_08 12:57

He joined Pan Am in 1955 and worked for the airline until 1985 when the Pacific Division was sold to United Airlines. He retired from United in 1992 due to mandatory retirement. Welcome back to the Pan Am podcast, Captain LaChapelle. Well, thank you. So let's talk about your Pan Am career. Let's go back to 1955 when you first joined the airline. Tell us about that experience.

SPEAKER_14 13:29

Well, it was great. Um it was quite an experience. Uh I don't think many people got hired on the way I did. First of all, I had gone through the Air National Guard. Um I had been in school learning how to fly an F-84G, which is a straight wing jet fighter bomber. And this was during the Korean War. I thought I was going to the Korean War. Well, it ended while I was there. So I was sent back to the Rhode Island Air National Guard uh where they were flying those airplanes, F-84s. I had the use of uh of airplanes, I had the use of flying these jets when I wanted, and also a T6, which is a single-engine low-wing propeller-driven airplane. It's really a trainer, and uh, I know you're wondering where this is going. Well, it is interesting. Um I have a very good friend, Walter Adamowitz, who who we've been friendly for since we were 11 years old, been in scouting together and whatnot. And he was in the at Boston at Providence College at that time in the ROTC, and he had a military uniform. And I called him and I said, Hey, I I I can take you for a ride in this G6 if you want. Okay, good. So to make a long story short, I gave him all the briefings. Uh we were allowed to take the airplane up. And I said, You know, my parents read are on the beach, I think, at Pointer Ridge Beach in Connecticut, Old Lime, Connecticut. Uh they usually go this time of year. I knew they were there, and I knew they'd be on a blanket on the beach, and I said, Let's let's just fly by. I said, We're not gonna fly low, we're not gonna do anything. But I said we'll fly by the raft and whatnot, because my brothers probably slived uh swimming off the raft. And well, with my parents was believe it or not, a captain for Pan America. His name was Ray Egan. And of course, my dad is waving, and uh, and so Ray must have somehow said, Who's that? You know, who's that flying by? And of course, my dad probably of course we were perfectly legal, there's nothing wrong. Uh nice, beautiful airplane, and uh he said, Well, it's probably my son. So, anyway, Ray asked my dad, Well, what we what was he doing? So my dad told him all about so he said, Why don't you have them call me? He says, They're hiring at Pan Am where I'm working. And he says, uh get them to call me. Well, anyway, I called Ray that night and he said, Listen, if you're interested in a job at Pan Am, I'll drive here to Pointer Woods in Old Lyme, and I'll take you to Kennedy and I'll introduce you to Chili Vaughan. Not Kennedy, it was Idlewild in those days. Uh uh Kennedy Airport later. Uh and and I'll introduce you to Captain Vaughn, Chili Vaughn. Oh, well, I was delighted. If of course, here I was 22 years old, uh, the prospects of flying with an airline and uh drove me to Idlewild. I was interviewed by Chili Vaughn. He wanted to know everything about me. I told him all about my life and whatnot, and uh when I told him I was an Eagle Scout, he said, You're an Eagle Scout? I said, Yep. And he says, You have jet fighter training? I said, Yep. He says, You're hired. He says, pending, of course, our examinations and whatnot. Believe it or not, I was hired that way.

SPEAKER_08 16:53

That's great. So, what aircraft did you fly in European career?

SPEAKER_14 16:57

Okay. You gotta remember that when when we started, we had two options when we started a reserve copilot slash navigator or flight engineer. That those were the starting positions in 1955 at Pan Am. Well, I soon learned that the flight engineer slot, you never flew. You were a flight engineer no matter what, no matter where you went. As a copilot flight navigator, you had to learn how to be a navigator, right? Hey, that was a whole license. Uh but on flights where you didn't need a navigator, for instance, uh in Africa where uh you needed a navigator in the middle of Africa, but in some places there were beacons and VR stations and whatnot where you didn't need a navigator. So and the captain would give the reserve co-pilot a landing. Now I heard all about that and realized I'm gonna be a reserve co-pilot. That's the option I'll take. So that's what happened there. And they sent us to school at LaGuardia Airport for just about a year to learn to be a navigator. Believe it or not, that's a lot of took. We learned to because we had to get the FAA navigator license, which was a lot harder to get than I thought it was gonna be. Very difficult for me anyway. But I passed, and I can remember nights you're gonna laugh, I can remember nights shooting the stars to determine where I was standing on the roof of the terminal building at LaGuida airport. All of us, the whole class was doing that. Then there were many, many flights, uh training flights, and and then finally the FAA check ride, and then I was a flight navigator. So that's how it started. And uh I flew as a navigator uh on DC sixes. He lost what airplanes I was I was when I say qualified, that's using the word loosely, I was qualified a navigator, but not qualified as a co-pilot. I was qualified as a reserve co-pilot on the DC six, but it was on the DC six. We got all our instrument training in a DC three in those days. The year I was hired, as I recall, uh yeah, the year I was hired, the Boeing 707 was uh first constructed, the first model came came out. Uh that was 1955. Uh in 1957, it became operational with Panama. Now that's when I wound up navigating the 707 also. Now when the GC six, you know, navigating in those days, uh folks today have no idea what it was like across the North Atlantic. GC6 was slow. The navigating uh it required mostly celestial navigation because over the middle of the Atlantic there were no radio beacons, uh, there was console land. I don't even think they had Loran at that time, I'm not sure. Anyway, I don't think we could reach we could uh Loran signals reached us all the way across the ocean anyway, because they were land-based signals. But anyway, uh you had to use a sextant to shoot the stars, and you had to do the same thing over deserts, uh over the middle of South America. Then when the 707 came into being, uh I navigated that, and that was a whole different ball game because it was going twice as fast as the GC6. It was a lot more difficult to navigate, but the sextant they they they put an orifice in the ceiling of a 707 through which uh a periscopic octant could be pushed through. Uh so you could you could take a celestial fix right through the ceiling of a 707. DC8 was the same way. And of course, it took a long time to work up a fix. Uh, you need all kinds of manuals to do that. But anyway, we're getting into navigation, and that's that's a long subject of its own. But I worked at on a 707 for quite some time. And then at one point in time, Pat Levix, uh, who I was friendly with then, uh convinced uh well, first of all, Pan Am ran out of instructions. Um now here I was a navigator dying to fly. Pat Levix was doing the same thing, and and a small group of other fellows were doing the same thing, uh may uh about 13 of us. And Pat spearheaded uh a drive to convince Pan American World Airways since they needed so many flight instructors and they were having trouble finding them. Why not use some of us peons, so to speak, at the bottom of the totem pole? Why not train us? Most of us had jet experience. Uh a great deal of us did. And uh not on a sweptwing four-engine transport, but hey, we'll learn. Well, he convinced the company, and that changed my life completely. Pan American decided they would use us under one caveat that we had to fly the line, a 70-hour line every month, and do all the studying and all the simulator work necessary uh for us to get out type reading. They would pay for everything, they would pay for the flight training, which would be in their own 707s, obviously. They would pay for the instrument simulator training uh on the ground, and the simulators those days, you know, were not full motion, and in fact, they could not be used for flight training, and that's why they needed flight instructors, because flight instructor instruction at that time had to be accomplished in the real airplane, it could not be done in a simulator. So, anyway, make a long story short, we had to study for a type rating in the 707, instructor certificates, FAA ratings, and we wound up as flight instructors for Pan M. And uh I did that for a long time. I loved it, I absolutely loved it. Um, I spent so I never flew as a co-pilot, I flew as a flight instructor until I was senior enough to be a captain on the 707.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

How long was it until you were promoted to the 747?

SPEAKER_14 23:47

Uh I flew from 1965 to 1975 or 19 uh 78, it looks like 65 to 78 on the 707. And uh in 1978, I got a 747 air transport rating, and that's when I started flying a 747 in 1978. Now, this was a long in my life at this point. Uh I had flown many years a 747 for Pan M. I loved it. Uh, this is a this is some kind of airplane, let me tell you. It it it flew like a baby carriage. Uh the the the comparison between the 707 is quite amazing. Uh the 707 was heavy on the controls, um, a wonderful flying machine, but the 747 was very light on the controls. You could fly it with your fingertips. That huge piece of equipment you could fly with your fingertips. It was an amazing thing. Anyway, um, problems were happening with Pan Am. Uh, I still had children in college. This was uh seven, seven years, seven and a half years before I was age 60. Age 60 in those days was the mandatory retirement age. So I must have been 53, something like that, uh, 52 and a half. Uh, when um Pan Am was really in bad straits. Uh they were losing money hand over fist, and they decided to sell the Pacific Division of Pan American World Airways to United Airlines. The Pacific Division included everything west, uh, Tokyo, China, and Pan American had the exclusively at that time, I think Kennedy Narita. That's New York Tokyo route non-stop. And they were flying it with with the special performance airplanes, the 747 SP. If you're not familiar with that, it's a little bit shorter, but and lighter, it carries fewer passengers, but had a much greater range than than the its larger brother, and it could fly higher. Anyway, uh United um to make a long story short, uh shorter. Um they decided, or Pan America decided to sell the whole Pacific Division to United Airlines. Well, United did at that time did not have, I don't think had any 747s. If they did, they only had a few, but they didn't have the crews to fly them either. So they took Pan Am, any Pan Am crews who would go to United could go with the airplanes. Well, I came home to my wife one day, told her about that, and I said, we just don't have any choice. As much as I love Pan America, and I did, and I had we we have three, we had children in college, we just couldn't couldn't do this. We couldn't, if we had the chance to go to United, I have no choice. I gotta take it. I did. I flew the rest of my career with United Airlines on one route and one route only. Kennedy to Tokyo. And that's about it.

SPEAKER_08 27:19

Well, thank you very much for your time, sir.

SPEAKER_14 27:22

You're welcome.

SPEAKER_08 27:23

We're gonna take a quick break with a 1986 commercial from United Airlines after the purchase of Pan Am's Pacific Division. Pan Am 747 SPs and employees like Captain La Chapelle were transferred to United with that sale.

SPEAKER_03 27:57

United is the first blue least, Australia and New Zealand.

SPEAKER_08 28:12

Captain John Marshall is featured in Episode 2, the first presidential flight and the last Pan Am flight. He joined Pan Am in 1964 and was with the company until the end in late 1991. Afterward, he continued flying 747s for Korean Airlines until 1996 due to mandatory retirement. Since 1996, he's worked for the Federal Aviation Administration in St. Louis, Missouri. Welcome back to the program, Captain Marshall. Thank you. Nice to be here. Let's go back to the beginning of your career. What inspired you to become a pilot?

SPEAKER_15 28:57

That's a pretty good question. Uh, I think I've uh been interested in airplanes since I was a little kid, uh seven or eight years old. I uh we moved next door to a guy who a family who had a um a son who was just about a year older than I am, and he was nuts about airplanes, and he was all he did was build model airplanes, and I just got caught up by association, and then I realized it was pretty darn cool stuff, and as I got further and further along in my life, I uh I realized that maybe this might be something really cool that I would like to do this. And I remember my mother badgering my mother to take me out to San Francisco Airport. We lived in the Bay Area, and I was about 10 or 11 years old, take me out there just to look at the airplanes. I mean, this is long before the big new terminals were built. It was just one little um terminal building about twice the size of your garage and about three or four airlines. And um, when I was in high school between my junior and senior year, I was looking for meaningful employment during the summer. And I went out to the airport, and there was a fixed base, little fixed base operator, uh, operating right in the middle of the airport, right about the intersection of runway 28 and runway 10 now. And a little shack there. Um, American Airlines was beginning to build a little hangar on the other side. And this guy, this operation was uh run by an ex-Navy pilot, World War II Navy pilot, and he had a bonanza and a couple of air coups, and he had a ran a kind of a flying school and a charter service. And I went out there and asked him for work. And he looked at me and said, Well, he said, I can't pay you anything. He said, if you're willing to come out here and answer the phones and uh wash the airplanes and pump gas, and he said, Uh, I'll give you flying lessons when I have time. And my God, I thought, what more could I possibly want? And the only problem that I saw on the horizon was I had to convince my parents that was a good idea. Um, my dad was okay, my mom was a pretty tough sell.

SPEAKER_08 31:24

But in the end, he was okay with it.

SPEAKER_15 31:27

Mom said, well, but and then it turned out to be two to one. And so I worked out there all summer, and uh, as it happened, the uh the guy who ran the school, his name was Harry Cranston. He took off his flight instructor hat and put on his CAA hat. It was a predecessor of the FAA, and he gave me the check ride and then wrote me out a private pilot's license. That's great. How old were you? I was 16. Uh yeah. And my first passenger that I took up was my mother. And what was that like? Oh my god. She was pretty reluctant at first, but then she realized that how disappointed I'd be if I'd if she didn't go. So I wrote about that in one of my columns in the magazine that I wrote for the magazine. But uh yeah, and then I just went on from there. I went in the air force as an aviation cadet. Um I flew uh B-25 bombers as a flight instructor, and then I got into the nuclear bomber business in B-52s, um, right during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I did that for eight years, then got out. I did some executive flying for a year, and then Pan Am started hiring in 1964, and I never looked back.

SPEAKER_00 32:52

What was it like uh joining Pan American in 1964? Oh my god, Pan Am was the was the gold standard.

SPEAKER_15 33:00

It was the holy grail that anybody uh everybody wanted to go to work for Pan Am. Uh airline hiring had come to pretty much a halt in the early 60s because the 707, the jet transport, and the DC8 both came along in about 1958-59, and the whole airline dynamic changed, and it changed the you know, the the manning uh module for the airlines, and a lot of guys were put on furlough, and it wasn't until 1964 that it finally started to break loose. And the guys who were been working for uh Eastern Airlines and Branif and Delta, and they were quitting a droves to go to work, get an interview with Pan Am. Wow, and I was just lucky. I filled out the application and and uh I was living in Sacramento at the time, that's where I was doing my executive flying. And um, I got a telegram back saying, Um, can you will you accept the position in Berlin, Germany, starting July 5th, 1964? And I said, I in effect, I went back and said, hell yes. So went to Miami for training. Uh DC six. What was the first first aircraft? The DC six, the old Douglas four-engine piston airline, and I was a flight engineer. And I think there were about oh eight or ten of us in that class that uh went to Berlin uh at about that time and checked out as flight engineers, and I stayed in Berlin for 11 years. I was an engineer for the first two, and then the they brought the 727 in. And by that time I was senior enough to fly as a first officer on the jet on the on the 7-2. So I just stayed, I stayed in Berlin uh for 11 years, and what a fabulous, exciting, exotic city it was. It was just an incredible place, and still is, but boy, it sure was in those days.

SPEAKER_00 35:14

Uh, did your mom ever fly on a PM flight with you in the cockpit? She did, as a matter of fact, and it was in Berlin.

SPEAKER_08 35:22

Of this whole interview.

SPEAKER_15 35:25

Yeah, she did. Uh my mother and father came over and visited us uh in Berlin. And uh as it happened when they left, the trip that I that they flew out on was my trip, and uh so that was pretty exciting. And boy, she died out on that for years.

SPEAKER_00 35:47

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 35:49

Tell us about some of your other memorable flights.

SPEAKER_15 35:54

Well, in a 30,000-hour career over a number of years, yeah, you run into a a lot of stuff. I guess one of probably one of the most unusual ones was a flight, a 747 flight from Karachi to Frankfurt. And it was in May of 86. And to give you a little background, for historically, for many years, the air route between Europe and the subcontinent and Southeast Asia went through the Mediterranean and the Middle East, um, through Lebanon and uh Iraq and and Syria and Iran. And as the years went on, the politics became more and more convoluted, and the route became not only more um unstable and inefficient, but in some cases dangerous. And so I think it was during the uh the Reagan Gorbachev summit in Iceland earlier that year that this whole dynamic was negotiated, that uh the Soviets would create a new uh airway specifically for transit aircraft going from Europe to the subcontinent and to the Far East. And it went straight up across Russia, um, 2,000 miles between a meaningful radio station and communications and navigation. Um pretty dicey then. Um, but it saved a lot of fuel and saved a lot of time, uh, given what we were faced with down in the Middle East. So that was that was it. Uh the trip in question that I'm talking about was uh a flight that originated in Kara, uh actually it originated in Delhi, went from Delhi to Karachi, which is where my crew picked it up. And we were going to go from Karachi to Frankfurt. It's about a nine-hour flight. And uh the flight left Karachi in the middle of the night, like all the Indian operations did. And we took off and flew up straight up north through Afghanistan and up over the Aral Sea and through Okubinsk and a great huge big circle route over just south of Warsaw, uh Moscow, and then down into Poland and into Frankfurt. Well, the flight was pretty normal in every respect, and we took off on schedule, and uh weather was good. Sun came up, and we were about just south of Moscow, and uh I asked them for a higher flight flight level for economy reasons. So they gave us, I think we were at 35 and they gave us flight level 37, 370. And as we pushed the throttles up, uh, we didn't use the autopilots for climb and descent in those days. I pushed the throttles up uh to start the climb, and the number one engine just flamed out. That's the one on the far left, it just quit flying, it quit. And jet engines very, very rarely quit without a good reason, but it does happen. Uh, we tried a quick relight uh to no avail. And it rapidly became obvious that we had to negotiate a lower altitude because we couldn't maintain that altitude on three engines. Uh it took a while to get the idea through to the Russian controller, and but they gave us, we finally ended up, I think, at about 27,000. And we tried a couple of times to relight the engine to with no success at all. Well, the weather was good. Uh, it was a beautiful spring morning, it was in May, and the in-rit weather and Frankfurt weather was all good, so I was inclined to keep going. And I got a phone patched to the uh uh Pan Am Operations Center uh through um Stockholm Radio, talked to the uh dispatchers up there, flight controllers, told them what I had in mind, and they agreed that it was a logical plan. So we kept on going when we headed uh into Polish airspace, and we were a little bit more successful getting direct routings uh to Frankfurt from the Polish controllers. And we were about uh 50 or 60 miles west of Warsaw, and I reached up to just make a minor power adjustment on the other three engines, and I noticed the temperature on the number two just heading north. It was getting hotter and hotter, the fuel flow was was going off the charts, and I kept pulling the throttle back and pulling it back and pulling it back. Finally, I had the throttle back to the stop, and the temperature was still too hot. I reached over and I shut the engine down, and I said to the first officer, I said, I think we're going to Warsaw. And from then on, things had started happening pretty darn fast. Um, I had been to Warsaw once before, um on a on a charter in a 707 years earlier, and I had kind of a mental picture of what the airport looked like. And we called the the Warsaw controller, and uh he had us in radar contact, and he gave us direct clearance to the airport. And of course, we started a descent because now we're on two engines instead of three. And uh I suddenly realized that we had a whole airplane full of passengers. We had about 350 passengers in the back, most of them Indian nationals, and we had an Indian national flight attendant crew. They're all based in Bombay. They had been on board for about two or three weeks, I think. So I rang down and asked for the purser to come to the cockpit. And in the meantime, we're running all kinds of checklists and and uh trying to get the numbers for uh the Warsaw runway, what the frequency was, what the length was, what the weather was. Uh it turned out that the the ILS runway, the instrument runway, was a little bit shorter than I would have liked. And they said I could have the longer VFR runway, which uh given the weather I thought was a good idea. And then I was trying to mentally convert wind speed from meters per second to miles to miles per hour. I knew what the formula was, but I couldn't bring it up. And about that time the purser came into the cockpit and he saw the chaos that was controlled chaos that was going on there, and he turned, he was gonna flee. I said, Hold on, just a minute. So I told him we're gonna be making an a precautionary, I said precautionary landing in Warsaw in just a few minutes. Of course, they had just set out lunch throughout the entire airplane. I said, give me a passengers didn't know what was going on. I had not made it uh an announcement at that time. I said, get the trays up as soon as you can. I'll make an announcement as soon as I as soon as I possibly can. Well his face turned white about the sheet of sheet of white paper. He turned around he and he left. And I made uh I I found time to make a quick announcement and tell him we were making a precautionary landing. And and about that time we were. Getting low enough to where I could see the outline of the airport ahead. And I thought, well, we're in pretty good shape. And the closer we got to it, I realized that there was nothing but tanks and armored personnel carriers and you know, NES all over the runways. And then I remembered from the one time I had been in there before that there was a military field that was northeast of the main airport, Warsaw. And just about that time, the Warsaw controller said, uh Clipper, you're left, of course, uh airport uh one o'clock. I said one o'clock, five miles, something like that. And I instantly I I knew pretty much where I was. And I started a huge big 270-degree left turn um to line up with uh the line runway at Warsaw Airport. And uh by this time we're down to about down to about 3,000 feet, I think. Is the aircraft difficult to control with so the left? No, it just requires different control inputs, but you don't have the margins, safety margins, obviously, that you do on four engines. And I was just praying to God that the other two would keep running because I had no idea what caused the other two to quit. So I started to turn, and about that time the Warsaw controller very frantically comes out and says, Clipper, stop, turn, stop, turn. It's forbidden to fly over the city of Warsaw below 5,000 feet. And the first officer looked at me, he said, What do I tell him? I said, Don't tell him anything, don't even answer. I said, We'll talk about that on the ground. So I continued the turnaround and rolled out just exactly where I thought I would on a long final in the haze. It was kind of a day where you could look down, but the forward visibility was very hazy. Not a lot of clouds, but just haze. And I spotted the runway, and we got the rest of the flap on it and got the gear down and uh landed, and uh we taxed in, taxed to the to the gate and uh shut the airplane down. And I I wondered what this funny noise was, and it was my knees knocking. And as it turned out, we were the first 747 ever to land at Warsaw. Wow. And as well luck would have it, our APU didn't work, and their electrical connection from uh their external power carts didn't fit either. So fortunately, uh it was a Pan Am station, and we had a uh Pan Am mechanic there who was on uh temporary assignment from Frankfurt and he was 747 qualified, which was absolutely fabulous. Well, we had to decide then what in the hell do we do now? And the station manager in Warsaw was a lovely, lovely lady named Kathy Tomachevska. I'll never forget her. And she came out and she got the wheels moving, got everything going for us. Warsaw at that time was still very much behind the Herring Curtain, and you just didn't go back and forth between the ramp and the terminal without going through all this massive customs and immigration, all that stuff. She was instrumental in doing it. You got 300 people on your plane, right? Yeah, we got 350 people. What do we do with them? They haven't both of them haven't had lunch yet. I told Kathy that, and I said, uh, I don't know how we're gonna work that. Do you want to know whether we should take the baggage off? And I said, Well, hold off on that. Um it would have all had to have been done by hand anyway, because they didn't have a baggage loader that could handle the 747. So she got us off the airplane and into the operations office where we uh tried to make contact with uh New York flight control and maintenance control. And uh because at that point they didn't really know what had happened to us. Well, it it turned out it was gonna take two or three hours to get a phone call through to New York. But we could teletype them and ask them to call us, which worked. So they called us uh while we were standing there in the office, I talked to them and uh told them what you know what had gone on. They wanted me to go out and run the engines again first first to drain the tanks, the fuel tanks. And so we did that, we drained the fuel tanks and found out that three out of the four main tanks were up to the saturation limit with water. And uh, we had been flying through some very cold temperatures for several hours. And uh I don't know whether it was uh um a problem with the fuel heat system or what, but I suspect that we ended up with uh a bunch of fuel ice we didn't know about. Uh fuel cat fuel uh generally starts to gel and freeze at about 42, 44 degrees below zero centigrade. And we had been flying for several hours in temperatures of minus 60 or 65, which is pretty cold. You don't normally encounter those kind of temperatures. So, in the meantime, Jaffi Tomajowska arranged to have the passengers offloaded, put in some holding pen somewhere in the terminal, and there was a restaurant in there, and I think they probably every chicken in Poland died for the cause that day because that's all they had. They had fried chicken and potatoes, and and then uh the company in London generated another 747, an empty 747 that ferried over to Warsaw to pick up the passengers. By the time that airplane got there, we had done another engine run that was okay, and they asked me if I would be willing to ferry the airplane uh to Frankfurt, and they said all the passengers will go on this new airplane. And I I said I will do that as long as we can do it in daylight. And so as it happened, they loaded all the passengers onto this new airplane, and they took off for Frankfurt. We took off about 20 minutes behind them with the baggage, and we landed within 15 minutes of each other in Frankfurt, and everything came together and and everybody was happy. But it was it was an exciting day, I'll tell you. Sounds like it.

SPEAKER_08 51:01

Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you for your time, and uh we're very excited to have you back on the podcast. Well, thanks again. Okay. Pan Am was a pioneer in air travel and still stands as one of the most iconic and innovative airlines in aviation history. That legacy lives on at the Pan Am Museum in Garden City, New York, where you can explore the rich history of the aircraft and individuals at the heart of the company known as the world's most experienced airline. For more information about the Pan Am Museum, check out our website at www.thepan Amuseum.org. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. As was once a tagline in one of our commercials, we would greatly appreciate your support to help the Pan Am Museum continue making the going great. You can also support the museum by shopping on our online store for all things Pan Am accessories, apparel, jewelry, books, models, and posters. We want to hear from you. If you have a question for us or want to share your story, our email address is podcast at the Pan Ammuseum.org. You may have wondered what music we used at the opening of this program. It's a version of a Pan Am song called We Fly the World, the Way the World Wants to Fly, from 1979, but I like to call it the disco version. And with that, we're gonna close out this episode with this complete song. As flight crews once said to passengers departing for their destinations around the world, thank you for flying, Pan Am.

SPEAKER_05 53:35

Every day we love the show we've got to be within around in all the way, and even today, the best we can do.