The Chosen Instrument: Pan Am, Juan Trippe, The Rise and Fall of an American Entrepreneur Unbound – January 1, 1982

This book is a slog of a read. It will take some effort to get through it, but you'll learn things about Pan Am here that others never could present. When you're done, you'll have a good idea of why Pan Am got the treatment it did from the US Government. If you want to get at what really made Pan Am work, and what broke it, this will lay it out for you and cover the less shiny side of parts of the airline. Required reading if you want a thorough understanding of Trippe's management style.

A very good book. I'd have given it 5 stars as the details provided were so impressive....but, since the book, open or closed). smelled SO BADLY of mold or mildew it was hard to stay focused. Thank you otherwise.

The first several chapters were boring, I found the interesting information in the last three chapters. I am aware of Pan American Airlines long history. I believe the writers were harsh in their characterization of Juan Trippe. Guess you just have to understands the fierce competetion of those early days.

Good historical read

Disappointing!The most interesting aspects of Juan Trippe and Pan Am are NOT covered by this book. Although its many pages go far back into his ancestry, we get few clues as to what kind of person he really was, and why. Arrogant, evasive, manipulative – yes; but he must have possessed some good qualities as well, keeping so many valuable friends and contacts and accomplishing so much. There are hardly any quotes from personal letters or a close friend to explain his enigma, except one: that he was "the politest and least compassionate man I have ever known".Some people simply state what they want and achieve it that way. Another category of people think they can only obtain their goals by manipulation, intrigue and ulterior motives. Trippe evidently belonged to the latter; always holding a trick up his sleeve. But without him, Pan Am would never have become the greatest airline in history. The first big passenger jets, the 707 and DC-8, would probably never have gotten their final size. The comfortable trans-Atlantic jet service would have been postponed with at least a decade, and the 747 might never have been built.Of the great men in aviation history, William Boeing promised himself as a young man that he would earn enough money to retire at 50 – a promise he kept with a few years to spare. His successor, Bill Allen, brought the company to soar even higher. Donald Douglas chose to stay on into old age, ruining his family by marrying his young female driver, and turning the reins of the company over to his incapable and unsympathetic son bearing the same name, so that all mature executives left – leaving the company without men of experience and responsibility. This started the honorable company's decline with the infamous DC-10.Why Juan Trippe did not groom a proper successor still remains an enigma after this book. Personally, I have suspected that he was too much of a prima donna to take on board men who could match up to him; but he must still have had some sense of responsibility for the future of his huge empire – literally embracing the whole world with 44,000 employees.The authors of this book "who happen to be husband and wife" (p. 526) take us far back into Pan Am's early history and the expansion in South America and across the Pacific – with endless lists of insignificant names, and too many details. This work took place while Trippe waited to realize his adolescent dream of a non-stop trans-Atlantic service, finally in operation from October, 1958.Trippe's role in founding and expanding the InterContinental hotel chain already in 1946 is barely mentioned. This astonishing business marvel managed to establish hotels with Western standard even in the poorest capitals around the world, and the money-maker was among the first to go when Pan Am had to start selling off assets in its late days.The book suffers from several other important omissions, inaccuracies and downright errors. The story of how England gave the U.S. the first jet engine is completely wrong. The Boeing 727 (half of Pan Am's fleet at its peak) is completely omitted. There is hardly any mentioning of the Supersonic Transport (SST) and its craze that ravaged the air industry in the 1950s and 60s. The reasons why the 747 got its "hump" and the cockpit on top are completely misunderstood.If you (like me) are "bitten by the bug", this book might give you a few more clues. But most other books on the topic are better.