Resurrected Airline Linked To Mellon Family
Pan Am's Partners Are A Sharp Contrast In Style
MASCOUTAH (June 7, 2000) - During its heyday a generation ago, Pan American Airways owned the most storied name in commercial aviation.
 Its blue-and-white globe logo symbolized glamour, luxury, exotic destinations. The airline's cachet was such that the spaceship in director Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, "2001: A Space Odyssey," even bore the Pan Am logo.
These days Pan Am's resurrection is taking place at an abandoned Air Force base in Portsmouth, N.H., and its list of destinations doesn't get any more romantic than Pittsburgh, Bangor, Maine, Gary, Indiana, and by mid-August, Mascoutah, Illinois.
David Fink, the airline's president, sees gold in the Pan Am name.
"What the Pan Am name does is give us instant credibility," Fink said after a news conference Tuesday at MidAmerica Airport.
Fink and business partner Tim Mellon, the airline CEO, scoff at anyone who doubts Pan Am can succeed at MidAmerica.
"We've done this before. We're not silly," Fink said. "We're not frivolous." Although Fink and Mellon have been running an airline less than two years. Pan Am has grown rapidly. For the 12-month period that ended in February, the airline had flown nearly 86 million passenger miles - nearly eight times the number of passenger-miles during the previous 12-month period, U.S. Department of Transportation figures show.
But the fledgling airline - which employs more than 350 workers and whose fleet consists of seven specially outfitted Boeing 727 airplanes - lost more than $3.2 million in 1999, transportation department figures show.
Mellon, however, downplayed the red ink. "That's actually the cost of investing," he said. Mellon can afford to take the long view. He is, after all, scion of the banking Mellons, who sit on one of America's great family fortunes, estimated today to be worth at least $10 billion.
News reports state Guilford Transportation Industries, which Fink and Mellon co-own, paid about $30 million for the assets and trademark of the airline that started the world's first scheduled international air service in 1927.
Fink and Mellon are contrasts. Fink, 63, is beefy, flamboyant, a natural salesman with a voice like a trumpet. Mellon, 58, is understated and speaks in a flat voice barely above a whisper.
Fink grew up in Pennsylvania, a fourth-generation railroad worker. One job in the early 1960s even brought him to Belleville, where he and his wife lived for four years and where their daughter was born.
Mellon is heir to a vast family fortune, and at Yale University, he became friends with Ed Trippe, the son of Pan Am founder Juan Trippe, the first aviation tycoon.
Information provided by the Belleville News-Democrat
Mike Fitzgerald Article
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