DBAHC: Screw Pan Am

Tales Weaver

Tales Weaver

Today, Pan American World Airways is the biggest Airline company in the world, with purchasing Airbus A380 in 2010.
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Your challenge is to screw the airline with POD of 1927 without ASB.
 
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creighton

creighton

While it nearly bankrupted them when the fuel crisis hit, buying TWA to give Pan Am a domestic route network gave them a revenue stream that helped them survive their bumpy time in the early 1990s. So, maybe you make them overpay, or never complete the sale. The pictures from their new first class suites look amazing, hoping to save enough miles to redeem one for a hop from ORD->LHR.
 
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LegionoftheUnitedStates

Handle the move to Airbus badly? Pan Am is the defacto flag carrier of the US. The move to purchase Airbus instead of Boeing aircraft was controversial (to put it mildly...). The Airline did an excellent job in managing the fallout and selling it to the public. But it was touch and go for a while.
 

Archibald

Banned
Surely enough, had Pan Am not bought Airbus A300 by 1977, Airbus would never had their breakthrough on the U.S market, and it would probably have ended like another Concorde or Mercure - a truly miserable commercial failure, even if the aircraft itself was quite good.
Once Pan Am was onboard the Airbus train, it was only a matter of time before other airlines bought A300 to fill the "260-passenger gap" - between 707/727/737 and 747, between DC-9 and DC-10...

Although former Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman later said Eastern Airlines decision to buy A300 was taken a week before Pan Am, but who knows and cares about Eastern airlines ? Just ask Joe Six-Pack in the street to mention one airline. "Pan Am" and that's it.

(OOC: http://www.tailsthroughtime.com/2010/09/american-astronaut-saves-a300-and.html
- a former Apollo astronaut gave Airbus a much-needed breakthrough in America.)
 
Tales Weaver

Tales Weaver

Archibald said:
Surely enough, had Pan Am not bought Airbus A300 by 1977, Airbus would never had their breakthrough on the U.S market, and it would probably have ended like another Concorde or Mercure - a truly miserable commercial failure, even if the aircraft itself was quite good.
Once Pan Am was onboard the Airbus train, it was only a matter of time before other airlines bought A300 to fill the "260-passenger gap" - between 707/727/737 and 747, between DC-9 and DC-10...
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Boeing and MD tried to respond to that as well. MD with DC-10 Twin and Boeing with 767, and you know how did that ended up.
 

fscott

bhlee0019 said:
Boeing and MD tried to respond to that as well. MD with DC-10 Twin and Boeing with 767, and you know how did that ended up.
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What was wrong with the 767? Boeing basically built the same plane only different sizes. Pilots took very few hours to be certified on one if they were already certified on the other. As far as the DC 10 twin whoever came out with the first DC-10 should be beaten senseless that was the worst design plane ever well not ever there is the comment still but still I don't see where it was going wrong.
 

NOLAWildcat

creighton said:
While it nearly bankrupted them when the fuel crisis hit, buying TWA to give Pan Am a domestic route network gave them a revenue stream that helped them survive their bumpy time in the early 1990s. So, maybe you make them overpay, or never complete the sale. The pictures from their new first class suites look amazing, hoping to save enough miles to redeem one for a hop from ORD->LHR.
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OOC: Your comment seems to surmise that Pan Am bought TWA shortly before the oil shocks of 1973. While I can see the CAB allowing some consolidation given the early 70’s was a bad time for the US Aviation industry (they approved the Delta-Northeast and Bonanza-Pacific-West Coast mergers in this time period), there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of the CAB letting the two largest international US Airlines merge, creating a monopoly over the Atlantic, especially when PA is still run by Trippe, who ran often afoul of the powers that be. You also need to somehow keep PanAm from buying so many 747s, instead going with DC-8-63s early, then a mix of DC-10-30/747s, so as to better weather the 70’s without pissing away money flying empty 747s. Then either successfully negotiating a buyout of a largish American trunkline (Delta or Continental, perhaps, not sure if a Braniff merger would fly with their big South American network) prior to Deregulation or not overpaying for National immediately afterward. The National buyout was horrible for the airline and gave them a overpriced domestic network ill-suited for feeding their international flights once the major US trunk carriers branched out internationally and quit feeding PA. In the late 70’s the extra cash would come in handy for purchasing A300B4s and delivery slots for 757/767s. These steps, and dumping the money-losing international flights in 1979 rather than waiting til 1985 to sell the Pacific network to United in a gasp for cash, may have given them some daylight.
 

NOLAWildcat

IC: No doubt PanAm benefited immensely from the TWA merger—I’m still shocked the RFK administration directed the CAB to push that one through...wonder what dirt Trippe had on him. But the big post-merger moves that set them down the path to success were PA’s decision to slash the big fleet of 747s down in favor of DC-10-30s in the mid-70s to allow for better optimization of loads, the rapid phaseout of the big 707 fleet in favor of 727-200Advs from 1975 onward, and the decision to mirror Braniff’s move in Dallas by building up the old TWA operation at O’Hare into the dual hub with United it is today. Ended up forcing American to build up a hub in St. Louis after PA forced them out of Chicago and then subsequently lost the Battle of the Metroplex to Braniff. American limped along until PA bought them out of Chapter 11 following the 4/17 attacks. I know some former AA employees who still hate Bob Crandall over that merger. Ironically, Crandall was originally at American and got poached by Pan Am. That “Deal of the Century” he worked out with McDonnell Douglas to get MD-80s on the cheap helped PanAm expand tremendously out of the traditional TWA footprint in the 80’s.
 
Tales Weaver

Tales Weaver

Not buying that National airline was a best decision. If you know what would have happened if pan am bought national, just look at what happened to NWA.
 
Tales Weaver

Tales Weaver

fscott said:
What was wrong with the 767? Boeing basically built the same plane only different sizes. Pilots took very few hours to be certified on one if they were already certified on the other. As far as the DC 10 twin whoever came out with the first DC-10 should be beaten senseless that was the worst design plane ever well not ever there is the comment still but still I don't see where it was going wrong
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By the time these 767 rolled along, the Market Share for Airbus was too Big.

also, for DC-10 Twin.. That was made before ETOPS loosened.
 
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omega13a

Whiteshore said:
Give them a worse safety record instead of American Airlines?
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Probably do things like not check to make sure the owners of each piece of luggage belongs to someone who actually boarded the plane when terrorists were into non-suicidal ways to bring down planes.
 
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