Pan American World Airways - Record-setting Flights

Record-setting Flights

When Pearl Harbor was bombed a Boeing 314 was in New Zealand. With its Pacific bases attacked or abandoned, the seaplane was ordered to return via Australia, India, Arabia, Africa, South America and the Caribbean. It arrived in New York on January 6 after the first (almost) round-the-world airliner flight.

During the mid-1970s Pan Am set two round-the-world records. Liberty Bell Express, a Boeing 747SP-21 named Clipper Liberty Bell, broke the commercial round-the-world record set by a Flying Tiger Line Boeing 707 with a new record of 46 hours, 50 seconds. The flight left New York-JFK on May 1, 1976 and returned on May 3. The flight stopped only in New Delhi and Tokyo, where a strike among the airport workers delayed it two hours. The flight beat the Flying Tiger Line's record by 16 hours 24 minutes.

To commemorate its 50th birthday, Pan Am organized a round-the-world flight San Francisco to San Francisco, this time over the North Pole and the South Pole with stops in London Heathrow, Cape Town and Auckland. 747SP-21 Clipper New Horizons was the former Liberty Bell, making the plane the only one to go around the globe over the Equator and the poles. The flight made it in 54 hours, 7 minutes, and 12 seconds, creating six new world records certified by the FAI. The captain who commanded the flight also commanded the Liberty Bell Express flight.