Word: air
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Ocean. "The air," wrote Sir George Cayley, an 18th Century plane designer (who never got off the ground), "is an uninterrupted, navigable ocean that comes to the threshold of every man's door." It remained for Trippe to use the air to build an empire...
After service as a World War I Navy pilot (he did not get overseas), he returned to Yale's Sheffield Scientific School. He organized a flying club and an intercollegiate air meet, which he helped to win in a souped-up Jennie. He also became fast friends with a rough-cut classmate named Samuel F. Pryor, now his right-hand man. The old school tie is strong at Pan Am: Vice Presidents Howard B. Dean, Franklin Gledhill and David S. Ingalls were all Trippe contemporaries at Yale...
Three years out of college, he helped organize Colonial Air Transport, which won the first U.S. airmail contract. But when he daringly proposed that little Colonial's Boston-New York route be stretched all the way to Florida, his staid New England backers were alarmed. Trippe pulled out, having learned a lesson: never to take a board of directors into his confidence until his plans were...
Though the U.S. had no international air policy in the early '20s-and did not even know that it needed one-Trippe did. In 1927, while Sonny Whitney lined up $300,000 capital, Trippe merged three aviation firms into what eventually became Pan American Airways, and started flying the 110-mile Key West-to-Cuba route...
...along his road to empire, he competed with the empire-building air routes of the British, Dutch, French, Nazis and Italians, and usually won a place for Pan Am. He negotiated his own treaties with 62 foreign governments. "If Pan American had let the State Department deal with these countries in its behalf," Trippe says, "the U.S. would have had to grant reciprocal landing rights, and today would be crisscrossed with foreign carriers. As it was, by doing its own negotiating, Pan American had to offer nothing but air service...