Pan Am's roots grew in Port Washington
Giant Pan American flying boat Yankee Clipper arrived in Southampton in April. She has made history by bringing over the Atlantic the largest number of people ever brought over in the flying boat. The Yankee Clipper landing at Southampton. (April 4, 1939) Credit: AP
Set in 1963 mostly aboard the Clipper Majestic airplane, the new television series "Pan Am" explores the dawn of the jet age -- an era with its origins in Port Washington.
In the show, the crew and passengers leave the shiny Pan Am Worldport terminal at Idlewild Airport, later renamed Kennedy Airport, for destinations such as Berlin and Paris.
The airline's first fixed-wing trans-Atlantic flights came in 1939, when two "flying boat" clipper airships left Pan American World Airways' Port Washington marine base on Manhasset Isle.
The Yankee Clipper flew the first scheduled trans-Atlantic mail delivery route to Lisbon, Portugal, with a stopover in the Azores, in May 1939. The next day, the clipper flew on to Marseilles, France, and Southampton, England.
In June, the Dixie Clipper flew the first regularly scheduled paid-passenger flight to Lisbon. That flight, which also included a stop in the Azores, took 23 hours to reach Lisbon before heading to France, according to a New York Times story at the time. Tickets were $375 one way and $675 round-trip, according to the Chronicle of Aviation.
The Boeing 314s earned the "flying boat" nickname from their water takeoffs and landings.
"I'm not sure anyone is fully aware of the connection locally," said Robert Weitzner, mayor of the Village of Port Washington North. "The TV show is reviving the name."
The village on Sunday unveiled a ceramic tile mural by local artist Aaron Morgan at Bay Walk Park to commemorate local Pan Am history.
The Pan Am terminal on Manhasset Isle was at the site of a defunct seaplane base that closed during the Great Depression in the 1930s. A seaplane ramp and hangar remained intact and close to a harbor with access to Long Island Sound, said Josh Stoff, curator at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City.
The terminal served as Pan Am's trans-Atlantic base until 1940, when the airline moved to the Marine Air Terminal, at what is now LaGuardia International Airport, he said.
It remains unclear to historians how many clipper ships took off from Manhasset Isle, but half of Pan Am's Boeing 314 clipper fleet of 12 served trans-Atlantic flights at that time.
"It was operating as a scheduled airline, so it was every few days," Stoff said.
While the planes were luxurious, with dressing rooms, a dining room and lounge -- even a honeymoon suite -- the flights were not. Planes at that time were not pressurized, the trips were long and many passengers fell sick from turbulence, said Atlanta resident Dan Grossman, a former pilot and founder of ClipperFlyingBoats.com.
"In a lot of ways, all the luxury was to try to sand the edges off of what was an inherently uncomfortable form of flight," he said. "They took a long time, people bounced around a lot and they were noisy."
For the time, Pan Am had a safe flying record, but the Yankee Clipper crashed off Portugal in 1943 when a wing clipped water while preparing to land. The crash killed 24 of the 39 people aboard, according to PanAm.org, the Pan Am Historical Foundation's website.
