PBS - Across the Pacific The Story of Pan Am (2020) Part 1 Airborne

Across the Pacific is a three-hour documentary series about one of the great milestones in aviation history the 1935 crossing of the Pacific Ocean by a Pan American Airways flying boat known as the China Clipper. The China Clipper's take-off from San Francisco Bay in November 1935 was one of the most-anticipated, most-listened-to events in history to that point. Broadcast live over nine radio networks reaching millions of listeners on four continents, it was a forerunner of the rocket launches from Cape Canaveral a quarter century later. People everywhere sensed this was a pivotal moment in human history, for if the Pacific could be crossed, there would be no place on earth that could not be reached by airplane. The world would suddenly be smaller. But as with the space program, the real drama in this story is not in the flight itself; it's in the effort it took to reach this point. The Clipper's maiden voyage was the culmination of eight years of explosive innovation and growth, involving hundreds of men and women, both famous and unknown. Like the NASA engineers and astronauts who would later put a man on the moon in less than a decade, these earlier aviation pioneers built new aircraft, invented new technologies and overcame innumerable obstacles. They had begun in 1927 with a single, 90-mile airmail route. Now they stood at the water's edge, poised to vault the 8,700 miles of the mighty Pacific. When Pan Am's M-130 flying boat “China Clipper” took off for the first scheduled flight to Manila on November 22, 1935, it riveted the attention of people around the world. At that moment Pan Am vaulted to a commanding position and the world changed forever as a result. That's the story brought to life in “Across the Pacific.” Newly unearthed archival motion pictures, photographs, and original sound recordings as well as stunning graphics, help bring this history back to life. The film tells the epic story of how Pan American Airways became the first to bridge the mighty Pacific - the first airline to cross any ocean. Broadcast on PBS, the three-part program is focusing in particular on the contributions of Pan Am's visionary leader Juan Trippe, aircraft designer Igor Sikorsky, and a little-known engineer named Hugo Leuteritz, who harnessed the radio to develop the navigational techniques that would guide Pan Am's planes safely to their destinations. We meet these four men as they separately struggle to find a place in post-World War I aviation, then join forces to build an airline that would conquer all of South America and cross the oceans. Produced by a team of award-winning producers, writers and directors, the series combines dramatic re-enactments, interviews with biographers and other scholars, and films and photographs drawn from the rich archival record about Pan Am and the early years of commercial aviation.

Part 1 Airborne

The film's four main characters – airline executive Juan Trippe, pilot Charles Lindbergh, airplane builder Igor Sikorsky and radio engineer Hugo Leuteritz – separately struggle to find a place in post-World War I aviation. Their struggles illuminate the challenges all aviation pioneers face in these early, uncertain days. Several times, disaster is narrowly averted as they fight for survival, facing impassable weather, airplane crashes, and ruthless competition from domestic and foreign adversaries. After repeated setbacks, the four men join forces and, capitalizing on the Air Mail Act and the aviation mania triggered by Lindbergh’s 1927 transatlantic flight, set out to build an airline to South America Pan Am.

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