Pan Am

For half a century Pan American World Airways was international flight. It pioneered the trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic routes, launched the Boeing 747, and made its blue globe logo a worldwide symbol of glamour and modernity — so much so that Stanley Kubrick painted it on the orbiting spaceplane in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a confident bet that Pan Am would fly people to space stations.

The future arrived without it. US airline deregulation in 1978 exposed Pan Am’s high costs and thin domestic network to brutal competition, and a string of disasters compounded the damage — above all the bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, which killed 270 people and shattered passenger confidence. Bleeding money, the airline sold off its prized routes one by one and finally shut down on 4 December 1991. When the actual year 2001 came around, the airline that was supposed to carry us to the stars had been gone for ten years.