SPEAKER_00 0:14

Welcome to the Plan One Podcast, brought to you by the Plan One Museum in Garden City, New York. This podcast on our museum are dedicated to celebrating the legacy of the world's most iconic airlock, Pan American World Airways. My name is Tom Betty, and I'm the host of this program. Thank you for joining us. This program is sponsored by the generous support of Mr. Adam Aaron, the CEO of AMC Entertainment Holdings, Incorporated. The Panam Museum Foundation is a nonprofit organization. Please visit our website for more information at the Panamuseum.org. Again, our website is the Pan Ammuseum.org. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. 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. In this episode, we are joined by Dan Calusi, who served as Panam's president and chief operating officer in the 1970s. Dan will share his experiences of working in the airline industry during a pivotal point in Panam history. But first, an update on this podcast in our YouTube channel. As of June 2023, the Panam Podcast has been downloaded almost 100,000 times in more than 156 countries. And our YouTube channel has over 2 million views, totaling 270,000 hours of viewing time with almost 12,000 subscribers. Truly a remarkable achievement that could not have been possible without people like you. Also, we are cross-promoting this program with another podcast for both of us to be introduced to each other's listeners, especially because we both love aviation. So I'd like to take a moment to tell you about a fun new podcast called So There I Was. If you're a fan of aviation or simply enjoy hearing captivating stories, then this is the podcast for you. Hosted by former Marine pilots Fig and Repeat, this podcast shares first ten accounts of flying experiences that will have you on the edge of your seat. Whether you're in the mood for something funny, scary, poignant, or tragic, this podcast has it all. With a relaxed and conversational tone, the pilots share their stories like you're sitting right there with them at the bar after a flight. Hear from fighter pilots, astronauts, blue angels, aircraft carrier captains, Navy and Coast Guard rescue pilots, and many more. Most have survived near-death experiences. Others have overcome incredible disabilities to continue to fly airplanes. You'll hear about heart-pumping moments in the cockpit, hilarious screw-ups during flights, insane hijinks off-duty, and the challenges pilots routinely face. Hear what it feels like to be shot off the bow of a carrier or into space. Experience the terror of landing on a pitching deck at night, so black that the pilots can barely taxi afterwards because his legs are shaking so badly. Hear firsthand how lonely it is in the middle of the ocean in a life raft on a dark night in eight foot seas. Each story is unique and told with a level of detail that will make you feel like you were there. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll laugh until you cry. But one thing is you will not be bored. So again, the podcast is called So There I Was. It's how all great aviation tales begin, and you can find it on whatever platform you listen to podcasts. Now on to our interview with Dan Calusti. Dan Calusti was born on June 3, 1931. He just celebrated his 92nd birthday, and everyone at the Pania Museum wishes him the happiest of birthdays. After serving in the U.S. Coast Guard after college, Mr. Calusi began his career in engineering at General Electric and then went on to work for American Airlines and Northeast Airlines in executive marketing positions before joining the prestigious advertising agency Wells Rich as senior vice president overseeing the Trans World Airlines account. As a result of a chance encounter with the Pan Am CEO on a TWA plane over the Atlantic, Mr. Calusi was hired by Pan Am in 1970 as vice president of marketing and development, and in a short period of time was promoted to senior vice president of the same division. In 1976, Mr. Calusi was promoted to executive vice president and was elected as a member of the board of directors of Pan American World Airways. Two years later, in May 1978, he was elected president and chief operating officer of Pan American World Airways by the company's board of directors. William Stuhl remained Pan Am CEO and Chairman. He left Pan Am in 1980 to pursue other opportunities in the airline and aerospace industries. Mr. Calusi is a very successful and respected businessman. Among his many pursuits, he served as chairman and CEO of Canadian Pacific Airlines and is the former chairman of Iridium Satellite, which he took out of bankruptcy in 2000 and rebuilt it into a global and profitable satellite network providing communication services for over 1 million customers worldwide. Today, Mr. Calusi is the chairman of Gemini Capital, a venture capital fund investing in new technologies. Welcome to the program, sir. Yes, uh Tom. Pleased to be here. So let's start with uh where you grew up and how you got involved with the aviation business.

SPEAKER_02 7:19

I grew up in western Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh until I was about 13 years old. Uh I started in aviation uh when I was in fourth grade because part of my family had a farm up in um Cattersport near uh Pennsylvania. And the three sons of my would be my uh my grandfather's brother started an airport. So they had they had three planes, a grass strip and a hangar and so forth. They had air shows there and uh rocket cars, the whole nine yards. And it was it was free. And if you went, the Boy Scouts would park a car for you. This was in let's see, I was uh I was about uh in fourth grade, what year was about nine years old, I guess. And what year was this? Uh this would have been uh 1930. Let's see if I was nine years old, it would have been 1939. So I had my first flight, I was in fourth grade, okay, in a fiper cub and uh still in the backseat, and so it was great. Uh so I was uh aviation oriented, my whole family. I had several of my older cousins, like 19 and 20. One one especially I was close to was a P-51 pilot in World War II, so he was my hero. So I was involved in aviation right from the start. Then, of course, uh World War II uh broke out when I was 11 years old. Of course, my father was too old to serve, he was 40, but he was recruited to uh because he was an architect and a builder, and he was recruited to go to Tampa, Florida to build concrete ships, uh Liberty ships. A Liberty ship is 460 foot long, they were you know cargo vessels. There were standard ones that were being built Mobile Board II to carry cargo. So there was steel shortage, they decided to try to build these ships out of concrete, and that was done in Tampa, Florida. So the whole family was uh got moved to Tampa, Florida. I had uh a younger brother and a younger sister, and we all moved to Florida when I was in uh eighth grade and so forth. So during the war we spent there. My father participated in this, and they built 24 concrete liberty ships, okay? And uh they worked fine. And uh after the war they were all sunk and made into breakwaters and stuff, but uh they carried cargo and did their did their job in World War II. So I finished high school in in Pennsylvania and then decided to go to prep school in uh Washington, D.C. Because I'd moved around so much in my high school. I I uh I wanted to cement my uh education a little better. So uh I went to a boarding school in uh uh in Washington as a postgraduate uh situation for my high school. And uh while I was there, uh we had a visit from a Coast Guard officer, and he showed us these wonderful pictures about the Coast Guard Academy and the sailing on the Eagle and uh all those wonderful things like that. And I so I took the exam and placed uh 31st in the country, so I decided, well, I just didn't I didn't know anything about the Coast Guard Academy, but it looked like a lot of uh interesting stuff. And you got an engineering degree, so so I I decided to go there, which I did, and spent my four years there. We had an aircraft stationed academy, so I we got into aviation there, and in our in our second class year, we spent at an air station in North Carolina and you know got some flight time in there as well. So I was very much oriented towards that, and of course, my family orientation towards aviation as well. On active duty, this was during the tail end of the Korean War, I was in the Coast Guard. I was stationed in uh Yokosuka, Japan on a ship that was patrolling off of the you know Korean coast to get down to aviators or what happened, whatever was required of us. In the Coast Guard to become an aviator, you have to spend your first 18 months at sea duty. Then you go to uh Pensacola and become a naval aviator, and that's 18 months. So you have to serve another three years. So I just even though I wanted to go to flight school, I just been sea spending all those years because I really wanted to get out and have a civilian career.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

So, what was your first job out of the Coast Guard?

SPEAKER_02 11:47

So I spent my uh uh my three years at sea duty, uh, got out of the Coast Guard, and then I was recruited by General Electric in their Flight Propulsion Division. And that was my first uh civilian job. And uh I worked as an engineer in the flight propulsion division on jet engines. That was a era, that was at the beginning of 1956. And it was the early days of jet engine. We did a lot of development work on uh new jet engines, so I became quite an expert on jet engines, and uh during that uh session, I was in Boston. Actually, I decided, even when I was in the Coast Guard to go to graduate school, and I applied to Harvard, and at that point I went to Harvard and got my MBA and uh graduated in 1965. Uh, majority of my classmates went to Wall Street because that's where you made all the money and so forth. But I just I just can see myself doing that. So I really settled in on the airlines because for one thing, I took a, you know, I took a look at the airlines, the management team, so I interviewed uh several airlines, and I had a great interview with the uh senior vice president of operations at American Airlines, who was a Naval Academy graduate and also a Harvard Biddle School graduate, and he convinced me this would be a great uh you know career for me and so forth. So that fit right in with my goals. Uh I should say, uh in the meantime, when I got to the Coast Guard, I went to a uh commercial aviation school using a GI Bill. You know, went through uh and got my commercial license. So I was a commercial pilot at that point. So this all fit in. I had uh I had an engineering background and I had uh an MBA and also my uh commercial pilot's license. So I thought it was it would be great to look at the airlines. This uh individual that uh recruited, he was impressive, and he gave me a good sales pitch and uh turned out to be my mentor. So that was great. So I went to work for American Airlines, uh based in Manhattan and 266 Third Avenue, the headquarters of American. After the first year and a half or so, the first within the first two years, uh my mentor then was uh offered the job to go as president of Northeast Airlines in Boston. Uh, Northeast Airlines had been a small uh regional uh New England airline. But they were acquired by Stored Broadcasting, and Stored wanted expanded, and they were able to get routes to Florida, out of all the northeastern cities and the Bahamas, close to Freeport and uh Nassau and so forth. So the airline was in a big expansion, going to some new uh exciting destinations at that point, out of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, up uh down to not only Florida, but to the uh to the islands. So uh that was a great experience for me. And I became the uh executive vice president of marketing. So I had all that work under me. And now I was away from engineering and I was doing some pretty interesting things in marketing, which I which I enjoyed a lot.

SPEAKER_00 14:56

Okay, so you're a young man at this time in your late 20s. American Airline was your first airline job, and then you followed your mentor to Northeast Airlines, building up quite the resume. What happened next?

SPEAKER_02 15:09

At that point, I was uh recruited by uh Mary Wells. Uh name may not mean anything to you. She was a very successful woman who started the first female-owned advertising agency uh in New York called Wells Rich and Green. She had two partners that were men. She was the uh she was the leader, very dynamic gal. Her husband was also the uh CEO of Branoff Airlines. So staying in the airline circuit here. And she hired me because she had she had the Braniff account because her husband was CEO. And in those days, she did a very dramatic thing. She uh she painted all the airplanes in Brano uh pastel colors. Very successful campaign, it was just unique. And Braniff had started to fly to South America and they had 747 so forth. So uh, but then she landed a TWA account, which was a huge account for her. So she recruited me to come to go from Northeast to uh uh back to New York and uh work for her and take over the TWA account. So that's how uh that's how I got back over involved with TWA. And uh so I developed some some new programs for them and uh and they worked.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

For our listeners, Wells Rich and Green was a famous ad agency, most notably behind the I Love New York campaign, plop, plop, fizz, fizz, alka seltzer campaign, and the raise your hand if you're sure deodorant campaign, just to name a few. So, Mr. Calusi, you told me before the interview about a chance encounter you had with someone on a certain flight over the Atlantic that changed the course of your career. Let's talk about that.

SPEAKER_02 16:58

I was flying around the you know the uh the TWA system, uh flying to the Paris Air Show uh on TWA. And uh and I think you must have heard that story because you mentioned it. So I uh just by sure action, I uh my seed mate was uh Nojibali, who was the then the CEO of Pan Am. And he said uh he started a chat, of course. And uh so when I found out who he was, I said, What are you doing with TWA by the way? And he said, Oh, he said, I do this because I like to check out the competition, see what it's like. Good idea. Uh so we were chatting away, and he said, Yeah, I've heard about you. You're you're really giving us a bad time, and uh so I know who you are, but I mean I don't know you personally, but I know about you. So we chatted, had a nice chat across the Atlantic. And uh that was it. I went to Paris Air Show and so forth, and we did our um uh TWA thing. And I got back to New York, and um, oh, maybe a couple weeks later I had a call from a uh from a headhunter I knew, and he said, Hey, uh uh, you'd probably like to have lunch with you. Would you be willing to do that? I said, Oh, sure, why not? Nice guy. So we had lunch, and uh he said, uh, would you be willing to come to Pan Am because I'm looking for somebody to be involved in marketing and have some new ideas and you know, more addresses and so forth. So I said, Well, that would be of interest. I you know, I'm making a lot of money and working for an advertising agency, so I want to be compensated. He said, Well, we can, you know, probably can uh work that out. So I interviewed uh with him and some of the other guys. I could I could see the marketing guys at Pan Am were not that interested in like how many they were satisfied. Uh but um so what Najee was trying to do was just you know stir things up because the head of marketing at Pan Am was called uh the vice president of they didn't use the term marketing, traffic, vice president of traffic. That was a traditional online airline title because you know they're responsible for traffic, for getting the uh traffic, and that's the title they used. So they were a little bit behind the times. Still still a wonderful airline. Uh JW Thompson was their ad agency, and of course, they're a global large agency. They did some very conventional ads, good stuff, but um, you know, not very innovative and pretty routine. So I decided to accept. I mean, you know, it was an uh opportunity to get into a uh airline. Of course, uh I could see then that they were already a troubled company. They had uh they had lost money and uh and they were struggling to still, you know, they they served 120 cities and big 85 countries in something like that. So a very global company, but they had been denied any kind of domestic routes. So they were stuck. They flew out of 10 gateway cities in the US, outbound and inbound, but couldn't even on the round-the-world flight where the uh uh left of New York and San Francisco to uh uh around the world, it took five airplanes to do that, but they couldn't couldn't fly transconscious of New York if uh had to get off. They wanted to go in in the interior or the west coast and take another airline. The same thing if they were coming uh eastbound from the Pacific. It was a strange situation. They uh said um, you know, why is this because we had no feed traffic, we had to get everything. So we had to make deals with the domestic carriers and uh to get past feet-to-feed traffic into our uh gateway cities. So I found out pretty quick, uh, Pan Am was in a tight situation because you know you're denied feed from all of the the huge uh marketplace in the U.S. And you just had the we could obviously promote in those cities, and you know, certainly Pan Am was uh was well known, but if you wanted to fly from uh Columbus, Ohio to uh overseas, uh uh you took a domestic carrier, and then the domestic carriers all of them uh favored the foreign flags because the foreign flags gave them these extraordinary deals. When you share uh a pasture domestic internationally, uh you share the fares, and there's a there's a formula for that for the international guys given some extremely uh lucrative deals to the domestic carriers. So they were inclined to feed the tonsons, British Airways, uh, Japan Airlines, what have you. And uh that was a big problem for Pan Am because we we didn't have any fees, and then the the domestic carriers were favoring uh the international carriers who are our competitors. I mean, to New York London, for example, we had eight carriers flying New York London. It was a fight uh, you know, to get carriers. Uh, the travel agents were the same way, they were leisure part of the national. Travel was over half the business. So that was handled mostly by travel agents. So it was uh Panam was in a real vine. So I finally worked my way up the ranks. And then in the meantime, uh Halby was, I have to say, he was fired basically by the board. And uh he went, and that's when I brought in Bill Sewell. I had actually known Bill Sewell. Tell us more about that. When I was at Northeast, he actually offered me a job to come to work with him. And he his first job out of the Air Force was to be president of Rolls-Royce uh North America, which was an engine company. And he uh but I said, you know, no, thank you. I'm in the airline business now, Bill. So uh at any rate, so he comes to Panama. I mean, obviously, I know women have a nice relationship. Uh, our our wives knew each other and so forth. And uh I think I helped him, and he obviously helped me as well. And uh we did we we did some good things, and uh, of course, in the middle of all this, the oil crisis the 70s were not a good decade for the airline business for any business. There was uh minimal growth. We had uh you know a couple of major recessions, but the big thing was the oil crisis that happened began in October of 1973. It was giant for Pan Am because we bought 80% of our fuel uh internationally. And we had had we'd been paying 15 cents a gallon, okay, for jet fuel since the advent of the jet airplane. Okay, that's what's what it was. So nobody thought much about the cost of the fuel because it was you know uh low, uh uh low price. So overnight in October of 1973, the price of our fuel, because this it's all related to this uh you know historic battle, uh the oncupore war and all that, and the uh OPEC was formed and they decided they put an embargo on fuel worldwide. This was during the Nix administration, and Nixon had put in price controls on petroleum products. So the domestic airlines, uh, when the embargo happened, it didn't have any impact on them. They uh their prices went up, but they were but but they were frozen by this edict from President Nixon. We bought our 80% of our fuel internationally, which went from 15 cents a gallon to 44 cents a gallon. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 24:46

Holy smokes.

SPEAKER_02 24:47

Overnight, okay. Overnight. Wow. That was an absolutely hopeless situation.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

You can't raise fares to make up that kind of what what did TWA do?

SPEAKER_02 24:58

Because they had domestic and international uh TWA had very minimal routes, you know, compared. They just flew the North Atlantic, and uh that's all they had. They didn't fly the Pacific or Latin America, so that was an international, perhaps it's 20% around 20% of their total business. Ours was 100%. So Pan Am was really in a bind, and uh then we had 41,000 employees at that point, and we went through a dreadful uh period where we just had to cut back on routes. We had to analyze every route we flew, and uh a lot of the routes were you know uh developmental routes were rebuilding the traffic over time, and uh so we had to abandon all that. We we cut back very painful period. Uh we cut back from 41,000 employees to about 28,000. And uh and as the senior managers of the company, it was you know very hard to do that, but we had no choice. Uh the we're losing money, the banks are on our case. But uh that actually turned the company around. We started to break even, and then we're getting now into the uh late 70s again now, and I was the uh executive vice president of marketing and services. So I had all the service people under me, I had over half of the employees would work for me at that point. So we struggled, and but we were uh we were making progress because we'd reduced our costs uh hugely. We were able to raise our fares somewhat. And of course, we had to deal with the introduction of the 747 as well.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

Let's talk about the 747 because it was revolutionary when it was introduced, but the 1970s were a very turbulent time for the airlines, especially international carriers like Pan Am. There was the oil crisis and a new age of terrorism. Let's talk about the 747. You joined Pan Am right when the aircraft was launched and the jumbo jet era began.

SPEAKER_02 27:10

The 747 was obviously a great airplane. It did enable uh lower fares because the seat mount cost was lower uh compared to a 707 or any smaller airplane. So you could you had room to lower the fares. And when I was a marketing guy, um even before I took over services as well, it was just uh uh past through marketing. Uh that's when I uh interface with Juan Tripp. He was still he was still around in. And uh he's the one who brought Hallaby in and so forth. He thought Hallaby was gonna help us with the government situation because Halleby had been head of the FA under the Kennedy administration. So he thought he was bringing somebody in who could have a little horsepower in uh in uh DC. Uh so that's when I started to go to Washington to try to, of course, we had to explain why we wanted to raise fares to compensate for the fuel and all the other uh huge issues we had with no domestic routes. That's when I meant uh I really was astounded to find out the negative attitudes about Pan Am and the bureaucrats in Washington. Uh the routes still had to be assigned, and then at that point they started to award international routes to some of the large domestic carriers as well. So we had a we had quite a battle on our hands. But the interesting uh part, I shouldn't say interesting, the negative part of it was they it was this very negative view of Pan Am and the bureaucrats. And that's when I started to go to DC in a period of time. I was, wow, what did we do? I mean, what's the uh problem here? I finally got some of them to uh uh to talk, you know, frankly, and what they told me, and I can't, you know, I can't vouch for this as being the absolute truth. This is what I was told uh by bureaucrats. Well, we we don't we don't like Pan Am because uh you know if you go back in the history of Pan Am, uh one trip tended to uh you know bypass us at the CAB and so forth. And the story was, and I as I said, I'm I can't vouch for the uh for the truth of this, but I'm just telling you what I was told. And seemed it seemed reasonable, okay. That in uh in Pan Am's heyday when he first started, let's say during World War II, when Roosevelt was the president, and uh Pan Am was really getting into its own. This would be in the 40s.

SPEAKER_00 29:49

For our listeners, the CAB stands for the Civil Aeronautics Board. So I think I know where you're going here. Wantripp was not only good friends with Franklin Roosevelt, but his brother-in-law, Edward Statonius, held many high-level positions in the Roosevelt administration and became U.S. Secretary of State in June of 1944. Many of the bureaucrats on the CAB had ties with people in other airlines and resented Pan Am for many years afterwards for that special relationship with President Roosevelt. Give us your insight.

SPEAKER_02 30:24

So Juan had access in the government, you know, well above the bureaucrats in the CAB. So when something didn't go so well, he would go to his uh father-in-law and say, you know, those idiots at the CAB, I'm using that's my own phrase. They're doing this to us and they're hurting it, which they were, by the way. But um so he was he was able to bypass uh the minions at the CAB. And uh you're you're in the government service yourself, so you know there's a uh uh institutional memory in uh in the in the uh government agencies. So that I was told that I assume it's true, it sounded rat you know logical and so forth. And that they were just against Pan Am. I mean, there was no doubt about it, and we're doing things. And I got to know some of these guys, and I say, why are you screwing us? I mean, this is uh ridiculous. Well, yeah, this reason we have to let the domestic carriers have international. Okay, well, give us some domestic routes too. Let us fire TransCon from New York to San Francisco for openers that are uh around the world play. Uh well, there was it was just a bad scene, okay. Deregulation clouded that up because we were already deregulated as far as I was concerned, because the foreign flags were, you know, I remember one issue with the State Department, especially uh uh KLM flew to New York, and then they wanted to expand to Chicago, to Houston, to San Francisco, and Seattle. In fact, I was uh I was asked to testify on the CAB hearings in those days. So they were they were granting KLM all these new routes to the US, and we had one destination in in Netherlands. What's that? Amsterdam. That's the only it's the only city of any size. And so we had New York, Amsterdam, big deal. They uh KLM had uh Amsterdam, uh, New York, uh, Washington, uh, Boston, Chicago, LA, etc. I won't name them all. So I was talking to the State Department guys, and I said, Well, you know, can't you guys protect American companies? Because you know, we're we're getting killed here. They said, no, and they said, Well, uh, so uh it went up the line of kiss year, and he said, No, no, we'd be nice to know they're gonna buy F-14s, and uh, you know, that's a that's a high priority for the country. So I'm smiling, but I mean it's like what they're gonna buy F-14s, so that's why they get all these routes. But that's the kind of stuff that you were we were told it was horrible. And of course, the Cale, you know, uh the Dutch, I give them credit for this. It's enough. They are mercantile people, okay. They've been trading for their this little tiny country in uh uh in Europe has been a very prosperous trading company for decades and decades, probably, and they had every trick in the book. I mean, it was one of the worst carriers to compete with because they had every dirty trick in the book in terms of special deals and so forth. I was actually friend with friends with the CEO of Catlam, uh Sergio Orlandini. He was an Italian guy, somehow got to be CEO of uh Catlam. So he and I became friends because I was Italian heritage, also, and uh we had that little uh you know commonality anyway. So that's what was happening to Panama. It was a it was we had a huge struggle.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

Let's circle back. So you knew uh Mr. Tripp, Mr. Hallaby, and Mr. Sewell personally. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about what they were like? Let's start with Mr. Tripp first.

SPEAKER_02 34:16

Well, one trip was a giant, okay. I mean, everything that's said about him was true. He was very aggressive. He built Pan in from, you know, flying from uh Key West to Havana in 1929 to what it was. He but it was interesting. He had a he had a formula which if you knew the company could follow it. He his his his primary strategy was to always be first with the biggest and the fastest airplanes. And he did that with the with the clippers and so forth. We had the biggest flying boats, the fastest ones, and so forth. And of course, we were uh early on with the 707. And uh, in fact, we were buying in uh when I arrived in in April 1970, I came to Pan Am. They were still taking deliveries on 707s and TC8s. And then, of course, Pan Am came out with the announcement, I think in 69, don't hold me to that, but it's about the 747 order, which was you know, revolutionary order, Pan Am Order 25, uh 747. Then the story there was he went to he was good friends with uh Bob Allen, who was the uh chairman and CEO of Boeing. They were obviously we're good friends about many Boeing airplanes through the years. And uh Boeing offered this uh the 747 to all the airlines, and they I think without exception, they rejected it because it was felt was too big too soon. They were still uh digesting the the 707 and the DCAs and so forth, but not one. This was uh this is right up his uh right up his hose pipe, so to speak. Biggest airplane, fastest airplane. It's gonna revolutionize air transportation, which it did. And he jumped right in, ordered 25. And uh, even though they were very cheap in those days, the first 747 cost 18 and a half million dollars. Today a 747 sells for I don't know, 200 million, something like that. I'm not sure the exact price, but it's way up there. But nevertheless, uh 25 of them was a lot of money. And uh once it was announced that um Pan Am was doing this, it was a huge, uh exciting uh announcement worldwide. Everybody was how can you have an airplane that big so it carry 400 passengers? My god, when you have a crash, you know, it was it was a positive and a negative, but mostly positive. Of course, the other airlines, uh the especially international airlines, hey, we're not letting Pan Am get away with this. So they they all placed orders. Of course, TWA did, and uh the domestics were a little slower to order them because they you know they just didn't have the need that long a range and the capacity, so forth. But they I think American ordered a few and so forth, but uh the real orders came in from the international guys who we were competing with, and so every airline put in big orders for 747. So one said, geez, we only ordered 25. We better order eight more. So we had 33 coming. Then we start thinking about freight, but gee, we you know, these would make beautiful freighters. Wow. So we ordered six more, six freighters coming. And there's another uh these the 747 SP is still to come, okay. But that's later on. So here we are. We got we're still taking deliveries on 707s and DCAs. They're about, you know, they were still had a forget the numbers we had, but you know, a substantial number of those airplanes. And uh so the 7.4 arrived at a very poor time in terms of the uh world economy, but not a good time. The 70s were a toll situation with the um OPEC and so forth.

SPEAKER_00 38:26

And then on top of that, you have uh hijackings, terrorism. Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, that was I mean the 70s were a tumultuous period. You can that's that's my whole experience with Pan Am, so I can attest to that.

SPEAKER_02 38:40

Speaking of hijacking, the some amusing part of hijacking. So uh in the early days, about once a month or so, we'd get hijacked because some uh Cuban wanted to go to Havana. And so we'd have to land in in Havana. They never uh did any damage to the planes, but we'd have to, you know, uh nonstop the Rio had had to land in Havana and uh had to wait around until got approval to leave again. The guy got off the plane and fine. There was never any uh violence there at all, except uh one day uh the plane was there for like four or five hours or saying, hey, what's what's the problem here? Get that flight moving. I mean it's bad enough to get hijacked, but now we're there for five or six hours. The word came back out uh uh Castro heard about it and he wants he'd never seen a 747, so he wants to see the he wants to inspect the 747. The plane had to wait there while Castro came and the captain came a tour of the plane, you know, this is great. So okay, you can leave now.

SPEAKER_00 39:54

Very interesting, totally different time because obviously, uh as we know in history, you know, the hijackings became violent in the 70s and and and violent in the 80s as well.

SPEAKER_02 40:07

These were these were friendly ones. They they of course, obviously, if you already said it got much worse internationally. We were pretty fortunate. Uh we the worst one we had was in um in Rome, and it was on the 707 when PLO came on board and uh took over the airplane at the gate, and and uh they tried to get him off, and he threw some hand grenades down the aisle and kills uh I forget the number, it might have been six or eight people were killed on the the airplane, and the airplane had a full blown in and so forth. But uh terrible situation. Yeah, that was uh forth he the you know it wasn't an airborne type thing where we lost it uh killed everybody, but uh it was bad enough.

SPEAKER_00 40:51

So when you joined Pan Am, one trip was already retired, but he was still working. Tell us a little bit about your relationship with him.

SPEAKER_02 40:59

He's certainly there. You're seeing he was uh working there, and he would, because I was the marketing guy, he would come by my office and say, Gia, uh, you know, it's plain that these seven fours are going to let us lower fares, we had a lower seat mile cost. And I said, one, I totally agree. And so we came up with a lot of innovative fares, which then you had to, we were still part of IOTA, so it had to go through the whole IOTA bureaucracy when you wanted to lower fairs.

SPEAKER_00 41:26

We are going to take a quick break with a Pan Am commercial from 1979.

SPEAKER_01 41:37

Because we fly people who move the world, and people who watch the world, people who make the world work, and people who make the world smile, we've got a good idea what the world wants from an airline. So we have our full service economy class, offering every panel and passenger complete service no matter how inexpensive their ticket. We have three class, giving full-fair passengers even more service, including free drinks and hauteurs, plus an empty seat beside them whenever possible. And in first class upon our 747 SPs, we're introducing a luxurious new table for two dining room, and unique reclining sleeper seats, the most comfortable chairs in the air. Now we've got three great ways to fly the world.

SPEAKER_00 42:41

For our listeners, IOTA stands for the International Air Transport Association, and it sets technical standards for airlines, formulates industry policy and standards, and also fixes airfare prices.

SPEAKER_02 42:55

Pan Am actually founded uh IOTA way back in 1930 or something. And there were those days there were 106 airlines in uh in IOTA. I'm sure there's a lot more today. And but but in those days, the fares had to be submitted through IOTA, and they were uh uh if they were approved, then that became you know the legal fares. And in the US, uh the CAB had to approve them after IOTA approved them, so they became legal fares. If you if you sold, uh you were you were breaking the law in the US if you sold anything other than what was uh the approved fare because it'd gone through the IOTA approval and then uh by the CAB. Uh there was still the CAB in those days. Uh the CAB didn't go away until 1978, I think is uh when the uh CAB was dissolved. But um and those were the fairs, okay. So we had to buy by our lawyers were very rigid on that. Don't you guys don't uh you know play around with these fares because uh you'd be breaking the law. Well, the foreign flags were having a field day because they they had every trick in the book to uh you know discount the fares, the travel agents and ways which weren't uh and and we couldn't do that. We were we were getting into legal trouble, so we were hurting from that uh quite a bit, and um quite a lot, I should say. And uh because we were in in addition to have no domestic feed, we had to deal with all this unethical behavior of the foreign flags, and as I already said, Calium was a master of this. They had every trick in the book, as did every other airline for that matter.

SPEAKER_00 44:47

And they have their government supporting them.

SPEAKER_02 44:50

They they didn't worry about a profit because they they were not publicly, they were not uh privately owned, they were owned by their governments. It's just they were they were government agency, almost without exception. That's changed, of course, dramatically and not in current times, but back then they were 100% on. They were they were an instrument of national policy, okay. And if they want to develop tourism, yeah, let's find ways to bring tourism here. And if we need low fares, who cares? Nobody, nobody really cared at seeing the president of Alitalia told me once. He's I don't know whether I was president then or not, but I uh I forget, but I I knew him and I used to meet him at meetings, and he said, uh, I said, you guys keep doing this and dropping fairs today. And you know, we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna join you and uh you know we're gonna fight you and we're gonna I was saying that knowing we couldn't do it and he knew I couldn't do it. He said, he said, come on, you guys are not gonna do that. He said, besides, uh, you know, when you're bleeding, uh you don't want to fight a blood bank, okay? That's us.

SPEAKER_00 45:55

In other words, we had unlimited money, so don't any other personal stories you'd like to share about working with Juan Trip?

SPEAKER_02 46:05

Well, Ron would come uh yes, he would he would come to my office and say, uh, you know, can't we Lord some fairs? And I said, Juan, look, we're we have we've instituted for the first time youth fairs, senior citizen fairs, group fairs. Uh I had hated all this because this was uh uh group fair. I mean, the travel agent could set up a tour and we could give him a special price. So we were doing all that. And I said, you know, we're beginning the ideas. We're we're open to it because we're doing you know everything you can do to blow our fares. And it and it was stimulating traffic. I mean, there's no doubt the 747 permitted the the average citizen to fly internationally, and that was a big thing. Uh, before that, it was only the uh you know the upper strata that flew internationally and so forth. And now this opened up the whole world. And Panama was developing markets all over the world in Japan, for example. Uh, we were the first ones. Java was still in its incipient stages, they weren't that aggressive. So we started to fly uh Japanese tourists for the first time. After the war, they didn't go anywhere, and suddenly they had the resources. Now they wanted to start flying. So we obliged them. And we developed markets out of Japan. We flew tourists to um, well, the first flights we had were to uh Guam. And Guam is that you know, there's nice beaches, and there were some hotels there. And God, we flew that, we had a real successful market going, and then we flew to Indonesia to uh to Bali, Japanese tourists, they loved it. And they, you know, they have these mass weddings in Japan, like a hundred uh couples will get married at once, and they all take a vacation together. We were exploiting all that, we had a real good market, and then we said, hey, let's try Hawaii. It's a oh, they loved Hawaii. We started, we had two or three flights a day from Tokyo to Hawaii. But then, of course, once we did that, Jal got onto it and then uh eventually and so forth. But for a while there, we were very uh you know innovative and uh develop these markets. So uh, but getting back to Juan, yeah, I you know we did everything we could. I I had a good relationship with him. I admired him, obviously. I mean, who wouldn't admire Juan? His two sons worked for the company, uh Ed Ed and Charles. And uh I was good friends with them. One worked with the hotel company, and and Charlie uh he was even charged of planning and uh replanting and stuff. And um, so it was it was a happy family. I mean, it uh there wasn't uh a lot of uh uh internal fighting. But then one then uh I'm trying to think when it was, maybe after Hallaby, I'm not sure, but one then sort of did fade away because out of the company. I think that's about the time Hallaby was let go and and uh and Bill Sewell took over. Bill Sewell and I were had a very good relationship, as I said, went back years, and uh and I think I helped him and I he and he helped me. I think we had a very good relationship. I was promoted and I became executive vice president of marketing and services because I always complained about you know the flight attendants uh if they were part of marketing, we could uh incentivize them more and so forth, which is true, by the way. And because then I used to have a lot of meetings with flight attendants all over the world. We had uh you know, we had a lot of foreign flight attendants, and uh because we had the language capability, and uh so we had a lot of Scandinavian, Japanese, German uh women, and so forth. And uh they were excellent uh flight attendants, you know, uh in those days they had retired age 32. Okay. That's what they reported in, they had to be weighed and they had to wear girdles and so forth. Can you imagine us getting away with that today? I mean, but they loved it. I mean, it's these were uh you know, college mostly college educated because they had to speak a language, and we had the top-notch uh flight attendants. Uh, but um, they were an independent bunch, though, and then and they had a leader that got to be very militant. Uh, I forget her name now, but she was she was tough. And uh so any rate, yeah. I knew Bill was fine, and uh he uh and I knew his wife very well, Judy. So uh we went, we were the first Americans to go in Japan. We were to uh the People's Republic of China in January of 1974. Uh we were invited to visit China, the People's Republic of China. Uh they had just been opened up. If you remember, Kissinger and Nixon uh opened that up, and we were pretty much the first Americans or the first group of Americans that visited there. George Bush and his wife were the American representatives in then Peking before it was changed to be a Beijing. And uh so we we got to meet the Bushers as well when we flew in there. And we spent three weeks, and we had we got the uh VIP tours. They we we had these uh chauffeur-driven cars, they were they were they were Chinese made, but they looked like old Packards, you know. So every place we went, we went uh we uh we flew into uh in those days you couldn't fly into China, only uh the Russian airplanes could fly into China. So we flew into Hong Kong and then went to uh New Territory in China, which is the northern part of Hong Kong, and there's the bridge. We we we literally walked into China, Bill Seoul and I and his wife, and we had another couple with us, and we had to carry our suitcases and walked over this little bridge to get into China and there got on a railroad and went to Canton. Of course, they changed the name there as well, and uh, we were welcomed every place we went.

SPEAKER_00 52:09

So you were hired by Mr. Hallaby. Can you describe the leadership style of Mr. Hallaby and Mr. Sewell and the differences between their two leadership styles?

SPEAKER_02 52:23

Uh Najee uh Najib Hallaby was very personable, um but inexperienced in uh commercial matters. Okay, I'll put it that way. He had been head of the FAA and he'd been a Navy pilot and so forth. He's uh very good looking, handsome, attractive, well spoken, all those wonderful things. As I said earlier, I think Juan hired him, even though he had no airline experience, because he felt he had uh the Kennedy administration, he thought that he had some horsepower in DC. And Hallibate would be the first one to tell you look, I that's not why I want this job. I don't know that's not what I want to do. It's not uh but anyway, that's why he was hired. And but I think I would say that since he had no uh commercial experience at all, it never, I don't think he'd ever worked, best of my knowledge, he'd never worked for a company. It'd always been in the government, military, and so forth. So this was all a real chore to him. And he was very involved in charities and stuff. He he was he was he was very liberal, so he was involved in you know a lot of the uh charities in New York and so forth, all of which was fine, except the company was in gar shapes, okay. The company was losing money, big money, the banks were on our case and so forth. So uh I would say Najee uh just you know, he just didn't have it. Okay, as a CEO. He had a lot of the characteristics, but he didn't have that commercial drive, the uh the which you need to run a complex company, especially. And in Washington, he he he he he he wasn't helping. So that's when the board let him go. I forget the date now, when that was it was about the time that Juan phased out, too, I think. I'm not sure of that, but and uh Bill's Bill Sowell came in, and that was good because Bill, even though he had been in the military his whole life, he was a general uh in the Air Force, and he had been to Rolls-Royce as the president of Rolls-Royce uh in North America. So he had some industrial experience. He was good, he uh he brought in some other people that had experience. Uh Bill Krilly from Eastern Airlines, who was an experienced airline guy, he was good. And we we uh this is when we did the cutbacks and so forth, and he got Pan Am back profitable. So uh Bill did a good job on that, as far as I was concerned. I knew him, so I was prejudiced, but and I certainly uh you know advanced under him, but I I think I I helped him and he helped me, and I helped the airline as well, as far as I'm concerned. So we instituted a lot of things, and you know, there was a lot of uh innovation that you could do at Pan Am because the guy not from the marketing point of view. And uh I I don't want to make any uh you know special claims or anything, but did a lot of things like that, which I mean the fair structure. I built up a uh very strong relationship with the travel agent community, which Pan Am had been neglected because they were like the king, and you know, travel agents were okay, but you had to pay them commissions and uh they weren't they weren't encouraged. So I spent a lot of time with the uh travel agents speaking at their groups all over the world. I'd go to their meetings and stuff, and uh so we we ended up getting very good support from the agents. So that was one thing I that I was able to do, and the fare structures we had to fight for those, but uh that was good. That's what of course that's what Juan wanted, and that was a sensible thing to do. We had these big airplanes and uh plenty of seats to sell for sure. And as long as you're the thing about lower fares, as long as you have enough restrictions on so you can preserve your higher fares, your first class passengers. In other words, you put enough restrictions on your low fares so the people that have the money that want to travel and need to travel on short notice, you know, so you you can preserve your your your um your higher fares. And that's and that's what we did. That that that took a lot of uh study on my part and a lot of uh discussions. And Ita was a big problem for Pan Am. Uh, because uh I I mentioned earlier that the fare structures had to go through them and they had to take these votes, and there were 106 airlines. I went to a couple of meetings and I just threw my thing ridiculous. I mean, we're this airline's in trouble, and we have to deal with this bureaucracy, and they were all cheating on us anyhow, under the table. So I went to Bill Sowell and said, you know, the big thing we have to do, Bill, is get out of IOTA. We have to resign to 106 airlines. And when I uttered that, everybody's oh my god, Pan Am found at IOTA, you can't do it. It's like, how can you even contemplate that? I said, Well, look, it's it's nothing but a negative for us, okay? So at an IOTA meeting in France, I got up and said, uh, you know, at the end of its meeting, Pan Am is submitting a resignation. Oh my God, it was like a lightning strike or something. You know, people, well, you can't do that. So forth and so on. Well, I when I got back to New York, I had to have meetings with the employees because they were all upset too. Well, how you put in IOTA since its founding years and so forth. I explained it all. It was very helpful, okay, because now the lawyers, now it wasn't illegal anymore. If we wanted to play games with travel agents by they had these stupid things they were doing, like if a uh if a travel agent would set up a tour, he has to uh he has to make a brochure, okay, he has to get it to go to print and uh design and print and so forth. Well, what what these guys were doing in uh uh KLM and they're all doing, they were they were paying the travel agents for their for their for their tour books. So that was like you know, several thousand dollars they would get as a bonus. Oh, we could do that, that was illegal. Well, now we could do that. So we spent on a special office in the legal department. So they uh the marketing guys, when they wanted to make a deal with the travel agent, they had to go to the legal department to get it approved because now we were out of IOTA so we could do this. So um that was that was uh you know a uh a big thing, and that helped enormously in getting uh you know enhancing our business because now we couldn't we could we could compete, okay. If they were doing this, we could match it, or we could have do something similar.

SPEAKER_00 59:13

And what was it like to be president of this prestigious company?

SPEAKER_02 59:17

It was a surprise to me. I uh when I when I was being president, um this is not atypical. I mean, uh marketing guys companies are always under attack by the finance department and others, especially if your revenues might be off the planet. The marketing guys are always being attacked, and I was under constant attack. Board meetings. I was I was put on the board of directors, Buddhill soul, which wasn't uh great. Uh, but at the uh board meetings, the uh more often uh very often I would get attacked by the by the chief financial officer about you know he was forecast if I were losing money. So I was always on the edge all those years and figured, you know, at some point I'm gonna need to fire because the uh the marketing guy always takes the die when things aren't going well. So we had we had a big board meeting, uh this is in late 77. And uh I was attacked as usual by the CF CFO. By the way, his job prior to coming to Panama, you're from Ohio, right? He was the chief financial officer for the state of Ohio.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:37

Oh, interesting. I didn't know that. I didn't know. There's a there's always an Ohio connection to everything.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:43

Oh, I'm saying, so I was telling him, if he's attacking me, I'm saying, well, how does a guy go from being the treasurer of the state of Ohio to the CFO of Pan Am? What's the what's the connection? So you and I didn't get along though for obvious reasons. So um we had this one meeting, uh very uncomfortable meeting and so forth, and I was but not the whole meeting, of course, but just when we were doing the I had to get up every meeting and give a presentation on our on our revenues versus plan and so forth. So it was always a bit of discussion about that. As there isn't any company, I I still do it today, and the companies I'm involved with, so it's nothing to do about it. So I had kind of a bad meeting, and I went back to my office. I was on the 46th floor in the sort of the center of the uh hallway, and the chairman was uh at the quarter office, and the boardroom is right opposite his office, with a huge boardroom and building. So they uh after the board that the as the board meeting was terminated, they they announced they're gonna have an executive committee meeting of the board, meaning the managers on the board are not invited, it's just for the outside directors. So I thought to myself, okay, well, when you have the executive committee, it's usually somebody's gonna get fired, so it's probably gonna be me. So I was totally prepared for it, but you know, I at this point I was 46 years old, and look this is a tough job. And I, you know, I could there's so many other opportunities I had anyhow. If I get fired, so would be it. I was totally prepared. So have executive committee, everybody's uh board leaves and so forth. I got a call the secretary, the chairman, he wants to see me come to his office. Okay, well, this is my this I'm gonna be fired. It's fine, I'm adjusted, so I'm prepared. So I get out of Sewell's office, and that's he said, uh, well, Dan, you know we have an executive committee on the board. I said, Yeah, I'm aware of that bill. And the uh board uh asked me to ask you if you'd become accept the job as president of the company. I said, Well, president of the company.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:00

I thought I was gonna be fired. I didn't tell him that. Wow. So you thought you were gonna be fired when they gave you presidency of the company.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:10

So what it was clearly, I mean, the board knew I was doing a good job and doing the best you could do on these circumstances. And this guy was uh badgering me was not doing whatever. In other words, I was fine. Okay, the uh board liked what I was doing, and uh they wanted me to be president. Okay, you're right. And so had been president and chief executive, so they wanted and chairman, so they wanted to separate and have it be two jobs. Well, that was fine with me. Bill was the chairman and CEO, and I was president and chief operating officer. So I had so I started having meetings immediately seven o'clock in the morning all all over the world, uh, you know, wanting to know on time performance, got into all that good stuff. We did good. In fact, uh in 78, uh we were made uh record profits in 1978. 79, we had a very good year. In 1980, another fuel crisis, another Middle East crisis on fuel. So fuel price went up. It was a very difficult year. So I'd been with Pan Am then about uh 10 or 11 years, 11 years and so. And you know, uh I had a lot of opportunities. People were always approaching me. I think I was being interviewed by the you know, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, so people at American Express were very high on the and the German American Express would uh you know call me occasionally just do social things and so forth. So I had opportunities, okay, uh in Pan Am. And it was it was it was a tough job being a marketing guy at Pan Am. Got me all these troubles that we had. Uh so in uh you see, we're now into 1980, yeah, the towards the end of 1980. And uh I've been approached by some uh people to do some other things, okay, outside of Pan Am, which really uh interested me quite a bit. Uh Bill Soul became aware of it and we talked about it. He said, Look, Dan, if you want to do this, you're gonna, you know, it's not gonna work, you're gonna have to leave the company. And I said, Bill, that's that's the truth, and that's what I want to do. So it was at the very end of 1980. Very end 1980, we parted company, and I went off and did some other things. But the years that I went, the first years I was president were really great years, 78, 79, and uh 80 was okay, but it was the fuel thing came up again, another fuel crisis. And uh so I had like 11 years of panning, okay, and uh Obviously they were great years, uh good and bad experiences, but overall I I became president at age 46. Okay, so I was still a fairly young guy. I left. I just should uh turn 50 then. That's great.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:19

So so what is it about Pan Am that still captures the public's imagination and attention?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:29

Like you, I would almost ask the same question. Uh, but this the thing that we had at Pan Am, which was unique, is the employees, you know, the average employee, the pilot, the flight attendant, the average person at the ticket office or at the airport, they sort of knew of these issues that I was talking to you about over on, but you know, to them, this was a very prestigious company, which it was. If you were a flight attendant at Pan Am, you were at the top of drawer, okay, and pretty much the other people as well. And every place we went all over the world, Pan Am is respected. You you know the the foreign countries thought that Pan Am was the airline of the US, okay, that we were the national carrier, and which we weren't, of course. We were the opposite of that practical. But um, so it was it was a and you know, you flew all these exotic places, and um it was just an exciting career. And people got transferred around, they got to visit, and um so it was it was a great place to work, okay. And it's just was so unfortunate that you had these economic problems and these regulatory problems, which were worked against the company so badly. Uh, but we could still survive, and uh you know it went bankrupt in 1991, so that was um uh 11 years after I left the company. Back in that era, uh Delta went bankrupt, America went bankrupt, United went bankrupt. Okay, so it's because it was again a troubled situation with fuel and this and that and all kinds of the airlines now uh they weren't protected like they were as I said you know back in uh 1973 and 74. There was no price controls or anything like that. So they have they were suffering like everybody. And um they all went bankrupt.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:35

Were you ever the heir apparent to Mr. Sewell?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:41

Yeah, I could have been probably if I'd have stayed with the company. If I'd have stayed with the company, I probably would have been. I the board was um I I found this out afterwards that the board was a very uh you know, I have a good relationship with the board of directors. They liked what I did and um I had a good because I heard from a lot of them after I left.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:05

And um and uh so yeah, I was I was a logical successor to probably looking back. Do you have any second guesses about leaving, or do you still think that was the right decision for you?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:24

Yeah, for me personally, it was the right decision because I have a lot of entrepreneurial instincts built into me. And uh when you run a company as um, you know, as limited, I say limited in the terms of actions you can take because of its size and the regulatory issues and the labor issues and so forth, uh, it's hard to do entrepreneurial things. And uh so I went down that other route and I had a very successful career and uh made you know a lot of money and so forth. And uh, although I didn't do it for money, I mean that's not one of my if I wanted money when I graduated from hard, I'd go on to Wall Street.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:07

Good point. No way I was gonna do that. People said, You're going to the airlines, or you must be out of your mind. I mean, you don't make any money.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:15

So this uh podcast program is listened to all over the world. And we have a museum on Long Island outside of New York City where uh visitors from all over the world come to see the Panium Museum within the Cradle of Aviation Museum. What message do you have for people that are interested in Panium history? And also what message do you have for the former employees that worked for Panium when you were part of leadership?

SPEAKER_02 1:10:46

Well, I was uh let's start with that first. The the I was very much uh sensitive to employees. I always felt close to them. I I supported aware, which was the uh in fact, Sewell wasn't didn't particularly like aware, he thought it was just a nuisance, but I supported aware. Um when I left Pan Am, the Aware group took out an ad in the New York Times thanking me for my service. Bill Sewell got very pissed off at that. He said I said, nothing to do with it, Bill. I didn't know about it. I saw it and extended myself.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:24

And for our listeners, can you explain what aware is?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:28

Uh aware was they came up with the name, meaning they're aware of our situation. It was it was a group of employees really started by a flight attendant, and she motivated the flight attendants and the pilots and a lot of the ground people as well to form a group. And they had meetings all over the chapters of several cities, and they decided on their own that they were going to go plead Panam's case for the government. I mean, we're let's say management was unable to get a hearing uh on the hill with uh important people. A bunch of employees show up in uniform and say, hey, you know, here's the story, we're we're we're getting uh improperly treated. They got uh good reception because you know, if you go to a politician's office and you hear this uh president or the chief marketing officer of something, I mean you're you're very suspect, okay. We walk into, but an employee, uh an attractive employee, especially wearing a uniform and so forth, they they would get an audience. And I'm not sure what they accomplished, but their mission was very uh you know uh very positive, and it showed the basic love of the company, if I can use that term, uh that they that the employees had. And it's it's amazing to this day, okay. They went bankrupt in 91 and this is 22. Okay, I mean it's uh getting 30 years here, and uh you still have employees, former employees, of course, that are willing to support the company. And of course, I joined uh the uh uh foundation as well, and uh I'm happy to help them however I can. Uh there's this uh this uh incredible lawyer, they were basically good employees, most you know, upscale. There weren't any uh low-level people that were part of Pan Am. These were uh well-trained, uh dedicated people, okay. And um due to this combination of events, it's so unfortunate that it had to uh end up in a uh in the liquidation of the company. Okay, bankruptcy was not a disgrace. Okay, bankruptcy laws are set up that let companies reorganize, and every major airline I'm sure there are exceptions, I can't remember exactly, but all the majors uh you know went into chapter 11 and struggled to get out, and they did, and here they are, they're still flying, and Ban M's gone and got all split up into pieces and so forth. Of course, employees went with these airlines and they still had jobs. Uh at least most of them did, I think probably didn't. But um it was a tragedy, frankly. I I'd been gone for so long, and I I just was stunned by the fact that they were uh you know into uh liquidation process, which was so I but I but I understood, and that's why I still am part of the group that's holding it together. I'm amazed and pleased by the fact that we still have that spirit. And now they're uh I'm I'm trying to recruit my daughters to join, and I a lot of the uh people that uh foreign employees are getting their offspring to join the foundation so forth.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:14

Excellent. Well, also tell them about the Panam podcast.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:19

Yeah, that's right. No, I will I will for sure. Yeah, no, that's that's that's gonna be very helpful, and uh thank you for doing that. That's uh that's gonna be a wonderful thing. No, it's uh because it's it it is an interesting story. I mean, Pan Am was a major factor in the development of air travel worldwide, okay, from day one. And you just have to admire one trip for that type of initiative and vision and so forth. I you know, I was he uh he couldn't resist the 747. We probably in retrospect, I would say we'd probably been better off because we had plenty of airplanes. We had one of the problems we had is in the marketing area. Where were we going to put these airplanes? We were getting like one a week, okay. And okay, we put one, obviously, you know, London, uh, Paris, Rome, uh, Rio. You put one to a couple of Japan, but you have to stop in Alaska in those days. It couldn't go non-stop. And uh put some in the Hawaii market, which was very low yield. Didn't work in the Caribbean. We put a put some to uh you know Rio and uh Venezuela, stuff like that. Um, but they kept coming, okay. And uh he started to put them in Amsterdam. Well, that's you know, that's a very marginal market, and and we actually had pretty good luck putting them in Africa because we served 18 countries in Africa. So we puddle jumped across to Africa, starting in Senegal and ending up in uh uh Nairobi, going up different routes uh each day and went to South Africa to uh to uh Joe Burke and so forth. So uh we ended up getting them distributed, but it was you know, it was before its time. It was too uh because we we were still taking deliveries on 707s. Okay, I mean we had a lot of capacity and put most of the 707s into uh reserve fleet and so forth. But um yeah, it was it was probably been better, not introduced. The 747 was not invented, you know, it was not created as a commercial airplane, it was created by Boeing to compete with the C5. And that contract went to Lockheed. You know what the C5 is Monster uh cargo plane. Well, the 747 was created as a cargo plane, and that's why we had the cockpit on the second level because the nose could open up, and the uh it was designed the landing gear was gonna collapse so you'd go right down to ground level and roll on cargo that way. That was the design. Boeing lost it, lost uh lost a lockade. So being very creative, they said, hey, just try to sell this to the airlines, you know, change it around, make it into a commercial airplane, and seats 400 people or so, depending. And uh made the rounds when they first I was at American and when they came to us the first time. We said, no, it's just a great airplane, but it's we can't use that kind of capacity. I mean, it's way too big, and we're still absorbing 707 and so forth. Uh and that was a general feeling, I think, uh, you know, throughout the world, but it but it caught people's imagination. It's this giant airplane now. I mean, wow, this is fantastic. Juan had that sense. I mean, he was good at that. I mean, he's first across the Pacific. I mean, you know, you go on and on about the uh things that that uh Pan Am did that were you know uh breakthrough type of uh new value that's very exciting to everybody because the employees employees loved it. I mean, hey, we're uh we're Pan Am and we're respected every place we go and so forth. Uh there's there's no doubt, you know, when I was a Pan Am, I never had to explain. And I was always given respect as whatever my position was because I was with Pan Am.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:52

So I think that that explains this uh loyalty and because that didn't uh didn't doesn't happen in typically any closing thoughts that you'd like to share? Um anything you'd like to tell future generations that may be interested in learning more about Pan Am history.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:19

Well, I think I would say things you've no doubt already heard, but um well when you when when you do uh creative things on a massive scale that Pan Am was able to do it with such you know uh worldwide visibility. Um I would encourage people to think big. I I've in my own way I've always thought beyond the small things. I took uh one of my uh notable accomplishments, I think I have a few, but uh one certainly was taking uh Iridium satellite out of bankruptcy. Okay, that's a it was a system that cost five billion dollars to build this 66 satellites in space that gave global coverage. And it's my Pan M background actually got me interested because when we we couldn't commute with our airplanes, they would be gone for hours at a time. We could never commute with them. Now you have a global satellite system where I could I could dial in and speak to any captain, any place literally any place in the world, whether the North Pole, South Pole, Middle Pacific, or Atlantic, I could dial them up and say, you know, or they could dial up when they had a problem. And uh so I I I had the vision to take that company out of bankruptcy when every big company in the world had turned it down, and uh it's now has a market capitalization of uh $50 billion. So I mean it's all those uh things that it's hard to explain why companies that could easily have done what I did and it's so much easier, but as an individual, I was able to do it, and uh and sort of that's kind of the Pan Am spirit. I mean, doing these uh these things that were very unique and creative, and uh the employees loved that, and I think that I think it was appreciated by even even the competitors uh uh admired Pan Am, I think, for that initiative. The fact that they were first with almost everything. Juan was first with everything he did, including the 747, of course. And uh it was it it was a winning strategy.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:43

Well, uh, I'd like to thank you very much for your time coming on the program. We appreciate you taking the time to share these stories and your very unique insight.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:54

Well, I'm happy to do it, and uh it's uh it's uh the tradition of AM is certainly one that I'm very uh happy to help uh uh continue because it's it's something that's worthwhile. My my biggest biggest disappointment today now that I'm now that I'm 91 years old, I ask a young person places, where did you work? Oh, I I was uh I worked at Pan Am they look at me and say, was that an airline? These are you know young people, but not so young, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:30

Well, that's what we're trying to change. That's what the the museum and this program and all of the museum's uh initiatives and uh programming. That's what we're trying to keep alive.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:42

That's great. Well, thank you very much for doing that. And it shows your sensitivity to you know great things too. So it's gonna be a matter for that.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:52

Again, Mr. Calusi, as a fellow Italian, it's an honor to talk to you, and I I certainly uh appreciate your time and you uh taking the time to talk to me. It truly is an honor, and I appreciate it. Thank you for that. Thank you so much. Take care.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:09

Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:18

Panium 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 Panium 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 Panama Museum, check out our website at www.thepawnmuseum.org. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. 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 stopping on our online store for all things pan 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 Am Museum.org. As flight crews once said to passengers departing for their destinations around the world, thank you for flying, Pan Am.