Customer Reviews

The Pan Am Journey

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In 2005, Thomas Kewin spoke at the San Francisco International airport, China Clipper 70th Anniversary Celebration. I had the honor and privilege to speak personally with a fight engineer from the greatest generation.

From the China Clipper flying boats, through the jumbo-jet liners, Tom was one of the best flight engineers. With paper and pencil, he plotted the "How Goes it?" curve in the piston days. Later, in the turbine era, he worked with the rudimentary flight computers. He alone was responsible for determining if the airliner had the fuel to make the distant land fall. Tom intersperses his personal life's trial and tribulations with his exciting travels to all points on the globe.

If you want to know what it was like to hold the lives of over 100 people in your hands, where every decision may be your last, read this book.

[...]

Pan Am Airlines legacy was that it was the airline that other airlines followed. This book made me understand how the airline who was so invincible became self-destructible when it bought National Airlines and made other fateful decisions. The author was a long-time employee who loved his job, every minute of it, his career included meeting his wife who was a stewardess, Hope Parkinson. They would marry and have three sons. Her death in 1976 of cancer after 23 years of marriage was devastating but he remarried to Phyllis and became stepfather to her two daughters. He retired in 1983 and watched Pan Am, the invincible airline destroy itself. He writes that Pan Am died in 1991 which is the right way to put it. The legacy of airline travel whether luxury or not ended upon Pan Am's death. Sure, there are other airlines barely surviving in the world today. I have flown many airlines like Lufthansa, Swiss Air, Virgin Atlantic, British Airways, American, United, even the defunct Trump, LOT, defunct Eastern, and I still wished that I could have flown Pan Am once. There are many of us who cling on to Pan Am memorabilia. I would have given it five stars but the author did not write much about PAn Am 103 and the Clipper Maid of the Seas. I'm sure that he probably flown that plane once. Almost all of Pan Am's clippers had names like that. I would have been interested in reading about the insides of the plane itself and how the explosion over Lockerbie, SCotland changed Pan Am and the world forever. Details like that would have been useful to those who don't know about Pan Am 103 which exploded from a small semtex bomb located in a tape recorder which exploded after 7PM on December 21, 1988 over the village of Lockerbie, Scotland killing all 259 aboard and 11 on ground right before Christmas. Aboard were 35 college students coming home from a semester abroad in London, England. I would have liked to have known how Lockerbie effected him as well. I wonder if he knew the flight crew and attendants.