"If you build it," said Trippe, "I'll buy it." "If you buy it," said Allen, "I'll build it."

My kind of guys.

Trippe said he would buy 25 airplanes. The price: $450 million, in those days big money. It wasn't yet called the jumbo (the Brits, I'm happy to say, came up with that one).

Pan Am under Trippe always rode shotgun with any new airplane it ordered. Trippe hired Charles Lindbergh to ride his airplanes incognito, and Lindbergh's ideas helped shape the cabin of the first jets. He also served as a pathfinder, exploring possible commercial air routes across the Atlantic and over the polar regions of Asia. Pan Am engineers crawled all over Boeing as the company conceived the outline for the new jet, the 747.

By pure chance, it was Trippe himself who gave the jumbo its signature bulge. In a rare lapse of vision, Trippe thought the 747 would be superseded by a big supersonic jet, as cheap to run as a subsonic jet. Some hope.

He therefore decreed that on the 747, pilots should sit above the flight deck so the nose could be opened up and take cargo. The 747's ultimate fate, he thought, would be as a flying Mack truck. Boeing showed him a wooden mock-up of the 747's flight deck, in the hump above the nose. He foraged around and came upon the space behind the flight deck, the rest of the hump. "What is this for?" he asked. "A crew rest area," said a Boeing engineer. "Rest area?" barked Trippe. "This is going to be reserved for passengers."

And so as co-creator of the 747, Trippe gave us the world's traveling machine. I launched Virgin Atlantic in June 1984 with 747s at the point when it was really shrinking the world and air travel was truly democratized, as Trippe intended.

Sadly, the 747 also sank Pan Am.

Trippe bought too many 747s in the early 1970s. A world oil crisis hit airline travel hard, and his business never recovered. Boeing itself almost went belly-up because of the cost of launching the 747.

Trippe had been a continuous innovator, but the sad irony is that he failed to re-invent his company for the leaner, far more competitive age he had done so much to shape: the age of travel for Everyman. A decade after his death, his airline, substantially dismembered, finally expired in 1991.

Throughout his career, Juan Trippe had been driven by the great American instinct for seeing a market before it happened • and then making it happen. In a real sense, he fathered the international airline business. To do so, he took on the entire airline industry, and risked his company to see his vision through. You've just got to admire a guy like that.

Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic, knows a bit about airline renegades

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July 31, 1933	March 28, 1949
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