Pan Am and its DC8s
I've picked up a summer 1963 Pan Am timetable to add to my others. An interesting document to flick through. Apart from the German internal services (still all DC6B) there are just one or two prop flights still around.
The timetable, throughout, states that jet services are by 707 or DC8. Pan Am always said this in the 1960s. Now Pan Am by 1963 had 45 707s and 18 DC8s. I would presume that for operational reasons the DC8s, which were slowly sold off through the 1960s, were just kept to one part of the network and not strung all around. But where were they concentrated ? Looking at miscellaneous places they seem based at New York and to be on transatlantic services, in particular to Northern Europe and Scandinavia. Was there a policy ? Did they ever get used to Latin America or across the Pacific, out of the bases at Miami or San Francisco ?
While we are digging at such detail, the Panagra (50% owned by Pan Am)service down the west coast of South America in the 1960s, also shown in the timetable, was a strange arrangement, with National flight numbers New York to Miami, Pan Am from Miami to Panama, and Panagra south of there. The aircraft appears to have operated right through. All three of these operators had DC8s by this time, but whose aircraft were used ? Just Panagra's, or a mixture of the three partners ?