Originally Posted by
bcgallacher
By the time it went bust PanAm was a travesty of its former self. I am a retired Licenced engineer with 30 years of 747 experience and have never seen aircraft so obviously poorly maintained and in a filthy condition.
They had been like this for some time, certainly the cabin interiors. Quite some years before the end these 747s were littered with broken fittings, hi-speed tape holding interior panels together, seats not operatng, etc.
They had lost their way on the revenue side as well. The PA103 Lockerbie accident is more memorable to me than most because I was on BA at that moment en route from London to the USA; we heard nothing, of course, until arrival, when I had to deal with half my family having thought I was on it. 243 pax were lost; this is about a 60% load factor. It happened on 21 December, 4 days before Christmas. My BA flight, and a number of other transatlantic options I had looked at, were of course absolutely full, as you would expect on this day. How Pan Am only managed to sell 60% on a high demand date like this is something I have always wondered.
But the most surprising thing about Pan Am was the sheer number of fatal accidents they had postwar, from the late 1940s right through to Lockerbie and the end. Someone can count them up, but, even for the times, their record was way beyond what any other mainstream carrier was achieving. Now you can pick over individual incidents, but in sum total their losses of passengers and aircraft were way beyond the norm. Their insurance bill must have been astronomical; I wonder how many insurers refused to take them on.