In the news today, Pan Am Airlines rose for its last gasp of breath, fifteen years after folding.
When Libya finally agreed to pay reparations for the 1989 Lockerbie bombing, Pan Am was one of the benficiaries, partially recouping its financial losses in that bombing. To their credit, the executors of the bankrupt defunct airline have used the proceeds to make (partial) good on back pay and vacation time owed to the employees let go fifteen years ago.
Pan Am was, once upon a time, the airline people thought of when the subject of air travel came up.
And the clearest visual representation of that iconic status was when Stanley Kubrick put the Pan Am logo on the Earth-to-Moon ship in the early moments of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Pan Am would (at least it seemed at the time) be there when humanity began regular travel to the Moon, a few decades after Kubrick's movie.
Alas, he was (we were) wrong on both counts. In the realm of failed SF predictions, I've always found that one particularly sad.
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