Vintage 1970s-1980s Pan Am Stock Certificate ✈️ Teal, Pan American World Airways, Golden Age Aviation

Was Pan Am Really the World's Most Experienced Airline? ✈️ A Vintage 1970s-1980s Pan American World Airways Stock Certificate, Teal

Size: 12" x 8"

A real, issued capital stock certificate of PAN AMERICAN WORLD AIRWAYS, INC., engraved by the AMERICAN BANK NOTE COMPANY with a teal border: a bald eagle with its wings spread over two globes, the Americas on one side and Europe, Africa and Asia on the other, with a seated figure holding a torch on the left and one holding a caduceus on the right. The corporate seal reads 1927, NEW YORK; Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York was the transfer agent and registrar, and the certificate was transferable in New York or San Francisco. These were cancelled when the shares changed hands, so they carry cancellation punches and transfer stamps.

✈️ Pan Am

That 1927 in the seal is the year it all started. Pan American Airways was set up as a shell company on March 14, 1927, by three Army Air Corps officers - Henry "Hap" Arnold, Carl Spaatz and John Jouett - and it flew its first international flight out of Key West that October in a chartered Fairchild floatplane. Juan Trippe built it from there into the airline that flew the Clipper flying boats across the Pacific and the Atlantic; the board did push him out in March 1939 and put his old backer Cornelius Vanderbilt "Sonny" Whitney in charge, but they asked Trippe back in less than a year. Pan Am flew the first scheduled jet service by an American airline, New York to Paris on a Boeing 707 on October 26, 1958, and in April 1966 it ordered 25 Boeing 747s for $525 million and became the jumbo jet's launch customer.

In 1928 Trippe's Aviation Corporation of the Americas merged with two rival groups, including Atlantic, Gulf and Caribbean Airways, into one Pan American, and in 1930 it swallowed the New York, Rio and Buenos Aires Line and had the run of South America. Charles Lindbergh came aboard as its technical adviser and flew survey routes for it. In November 1935 the China Clipper left San Francisco Bay with the first transpacific airmail, in 1939 the big Boeing 314 Clippers began the first scheduled passenger flights across the Atlantic, and in December 1941, caught in New Zealand when Pearl Harbor was bombed, the Pacific Clipper flew home the long way, westward, and landed in New York in January 1942 as the first airliner to fly around the world. The company took the name Pan American World Airways in 1950. One of its pilots after the war was a young Gene Roddenberry, who walked away from the crash of the Clipper Eclipse in the Syrian desert in 1947 and later created Star Trek.

By the 1960s Pan Am was its own skyline: the Pan Am Building opened over Grand Central on Park Avenue in 1963, and the blue globe logo - the Blue Meatball, people called it - was on tails all over the world.

The story goes that Trippe chased landing rights personally, country by country, like a man collecting stamps in a passport - and San Francisco on the certificate isn't there by accident; that was the gateway for Pan Am's Pacific flights.

🖋️ The man who signed this plate

The plate on these sheets carries printed signatures, and the chairman's on the sheet I photographed is William T. Seawell's. Seawell became Pan Am's president in 1972 and ran it as chairman until 1981, through the oil shocks and deregulation. He bought National Airlines in January 1980 for $437 million to finally get the domestic routes Pan Am had never been allowed, then sold the Pan Am Building to Metropolitan Life that November for $400 million, and the InterContinental hotels in 1981, to keep the planes flying. Some of the later teal sheets out there carry C. Edward Acker's name as chairman instead, so the printings run from the 1970s into the 1980s.

🌎 The end

After the Lockerbie bombing of Flight 103 in December 1988 and the fuel spike of the Gulf War, Pan Am went into bankruptcy in January 1991, sold most of its transatlantic routes to Delta that year, and stopped flying on December 4, 1991. Old-timers still talk about it as the day the golden age of air travel really ended - the white gloves, the Clipper names, the blue globe on the tail.

📅 How old is it?

The printed CUSIP number dates the plate to 1968 or later - the first CUSIP directory came out that December - and the signatures put these sheets in the 1970s and 1980s. The one you get may carry a different date, share count and stamps than the one in my pictures.

🦅 About these certificates

They're 12 by 8 inches, engraved the old way on heavy certificate paper, with the cancellation punches and transfer stamps that came with being used. It's a great one framed for a pilot, a flight attendant, a frequent flyer, anybody who ever flew Pan Am, or an office wall. The supply is finite - Pan Am has been gone since 1991, nobody's issuing its stock again, and once these last certificates are framed, they'll be very difficult to acquire.