Juan "Terry" Trippe

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Juan Trippe was born just before the beginning of the 20th century in 1899. He was born into a relatively wealthy Protestant family with his father being a Wall Street banker and his mother, a real estate speculator. Juan was named after his mother’s favorite aunt, Juanita. Later, he would change he would informally change his name to Terry which was more fitting for his Anglo Saxon heritage. Trippe’s fascination with aviation began at a young age while watching the conquests of early pilots such as Wilbur Wright. At the age of 18, Juan began to take flying lessons at Curtiss Flying School in Miami, Florida.
Trippe went on to attend Yale University, however left after a while to become a Navy bomber pilot. Despite the fact that he never saw any action, Juan was so captivated about flying that he returned to Yale and established the very first Yale flying club with a few of his friends. Upon his graduation in 1921, Juan, with an inheritance, began working at Long Island Airways in New York, an air taxi service for the wealthy. When that business failed, Trippe raised some money from some of his Yale friends and other investors and joined Colonial Air Transport. Using some of his charm and connections with the political elite, Juan scored the first United States airmail contract. This contract was for mail transport between New York and Boston, which later turned into transport between the United States and the Caribbean.
These new found contracts led to the merger of Colonial Air Transport and two other air companies. This new company was named Pan American Airways Inc., and began business with a flight from Florida to Cuba. It was at this point that Juan decided to casually begin calling himself Terry in order to seem more le...

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...learned from his Trippe’s mistakes and as a result skyrocketed, leaving Pan Am in their wake. Juan Trippe passed away on April 3, 1981. The company keeled over ten years later in 1991.
Juan “Terry” Trippe was an innovator in aviation, business, and even in sociology. The very same techniques he used to build his business from the ground up and the jets he and his engineers worked tirelessly to design are still in use today. Though Pan American Airways is dead as a company, the legend of the most notorious and first of its kind airline company will live in the heart and soul of aviation and American history forever.

Works Cited

http://www.charleslindbergh.com/plane/trippe.asp http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/605849/Juan-T-Trippe http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/trippe_hi.html
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/chasingthesun/innovators/jtrippe.html

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