National Airlines is a domestic US carrier based in Miami, Florida. The first example of the short/medium-haul -10 variant entered service on December 15, 1971. National ordered six long haul DC-10-30s in 1972 and N80NA joined the airline in 1973.
Pan Am was one of the most famous airlines in the world with an extensive network of purely international services. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 made it possible for US airlines to fly wherever they wanted. Domestic flying in the US was possible for Pan Am because of this. This opened up a huge new source of revenue and could also feed its international services.
Creating a domestic route network would be a huge project. It would mean opening lots of new stations. Only US, French and British airlines were allowed into West Berlin, so Pan Am only had long-haul aircraft. William T Sewell and his team at Pan Am decided to look for an existing US domestic operation to buy, and soon had National Airlines in their sights.
New York's John F Kennedy International Airport was Pan Am's biggest international hub. National was an attractive proposition for Texas International Airlines, which quickly acquired 24.6% of National's shares.
Pan Am paid $437m to buy National Airlines and took control of the airline on January 7, 1980. National had a valuable infrastructure and a fleet of 43 Boeing 727s (19 of the -135 variant and 24 stretched -235s) and 16 DC-10s (11 of the -10 variant and five long-range -30s), but Sewell had overpaid.
The coup of the decade became known as Sewell's folly. The total cost to Pan Am was at least half a billion dollars, with the added cost of repainting the fleet with Pan Am's blue meatballs.
Four months before the takeover of National, Pan Am ordered twelve L1011-500 TriStars. These were for long-haul routes that didn't have enough passengers. On April 11, 1980 the first example, N504 PA, arrived and went into service from New York JFK to Venezuela. TriStar and DC-10-30 service was interchangeably seen on many routes.
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With a weak balance sheet, the National acquisition was an enormous burden and assets were soon being shed to shore up Pan Am's finances. In the summer of 1980, the 50% share of business jet manufacturer Falcon Jet Corporation was sold, followed by the $400m sale of the New York headquarters building in November.
Ed Acker, previously of Air Florida and Braniff, was the new CEO of Pan Am after the carrier's controlling share in InterContinental Hotels was sold.
The 727s were painted in Pan Am's white and blue livery and operated on the same routes they flew in National. Pan Am received the final DC-10-30 of National's order, N84NA, on August 6, 1980, bringing its fleet of the type to seventeen. The former National Airlines trunk routes from Miami to New York JFK and Miami to California were flown by the DC-10-10s.
The long range of the DC-10-30 made it ideal for shorter trips out of Pan Am's JFK Worldport. One of the -30s, N84NA, was leased for a year to LAN Chile and used to operate long-haul flights from Santiago to other major South American cities.
Ed Acker had a reputation for tinkering with schedules and configurations at his previous two airlines, which had made them profitable, and it was his suggestion that some of the DC-10s be reconfigured in an ultra-high density layout of ten abreast. Even though this bold move didn't bear fruit, Acker was soon looking to dispose of the DC-10s in an unconventional way.
Pan Am swapped some of its aircraft with Flying Tigers in time for the peak summer season in 1983. Pan Am took the Flying Tigers passenger liners in exchange for four pure freighters which were better used by Pan Am.
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Acker had an idea about a new home for his DC-10s. American Airlines had taken delivery of sixteen passenger 757-123s at the start of the 1970s but experienced the same difficulty filling them as the other US domestic carriers and grounded eight of them in 1974, converted them to freighters and sold them to Trans Mediterranean Airlines of Lebanon. The only routes busy enough to fill a jumbo were from New York/JFK to Los Angeles and San Juan.
When American moved its main hub from New York to Dallas in the early 1980s, it flew its jumbo jets from Dallas to London/ Gatwick and Honolulu. The DC-10 was a better fit for American because they already had thirty-five of them.
Pan Am started the age of global mass transit with its 747s and standardising on the same type made more sense, so a swap was agreed. All but one of the seventeen Pan Am DC-10s went to American.
One or two DC-10s at a time were ferried to Tracor Aviation at Santa Barbara. They were given heavy checks and stripped of their livery in favor of bare silver by their new owner.
N68NA left Pan Am on November 1, 1983, and N70NA left on June 20, 1984, ferrying to Santa Barbara. Pan Am sold its entire Asia Pacific operation to United Airlines for $750 million in 1985, leaving the final example, N84NA. Pan Am sold its TriStar 500s to Delta Air Lines and the Royal Air Force in the same year. United Airlines bought the remaining six.
Pan Am ceased operations on December 4, 1991.
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The Pan Am DC-10s flew on into the 1990s with American Airlines. American's old fleet of trijets found new homes with operators such as Hawaiian Airlines and FedEx Express after the turn of the century.
The last Pan Am DC-10 was delivered by FedEx Express. It was parked in Victorville, California, after being retired. The airlines they flew for are still remembered even though the rest of the fleet has been scrapped.
The cover image is from the Wikimedia Commons.
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