1991: Remembering Pan Am, Worrying About Air France

“Inability to Adapt in New Era of Aviation Doomed Pan Am.”  That was the headline of Aviation Week’s cover story about the shutdown of the iconic carrier 13 years after the deregulation of the U.S. airline industry.  Pan Am had been sick a long time when it finally ceased operations in late 1991. 

Our coverage, led by future Editor-in-Chief Tony Velocci and civil transport editor Jim Ott, provided an in-depth portrait of how and why the airline slowly slid into oblivion. As deregulation arrived and Pan Am lost its special, albeit unofficial status as the nation’s flag carrier, it found itself unprepared for stiffer competition and suffered from a lack of domestic routes to feed its long-haul service (Pan Am acquired National Airlines in an effort to fix that problem, but National’s north-south routes were not a good fit).

The 1991 article is worth re-reading as some of Europe’s legacy airlines struggle with the proliferation of new competition from low-cost airlines. In a recent column, Pierre Sparaco, a regular Aviation Week columnist and former chief of our Paris bureau, notes that “Air France is in for the fight of its life.” He notes that a recent two-week pilot strike cost the airline an estimated $645 million. Perhaps more important, the pilots succeeded in forcing Air France to retreat from plans to expand its low-cost subsidiary across Europe.

Will Air France go the way of Pan American? There is no evidence to suggest any imminent demise, and some commenters on our web site have scoffed at the notion as hyperbolic. But as Velocci and Ott illustrated, it took two decades for Pan Am to slowly decline and fail. It is a lesson worth remembering.

► Read the report in the December 16, 1991 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology:

Inability to Adapt in New Era of Aviation Doomed Pan Am

► Aviation Week is approaching its 100th anniversary in 2016. In a series of blogs, our editors highlight editorial content from the magazine's long and rich history, including viewpoints from the industry's most iconic names and stories that have helped change the shape of the industry.