Flying with Pan Am was a luxurious experience that meant wearing some of your finest clothes — and being served refreshments far from your assigned seat.
Some airlines now still have a separate lounge, like the economy and business classes in the Airbus A380 plane.
But it's a much rarer experience in the air now.
That being said, the cabin seats also provided plenty of space, and service, for when you were there. Here's what it was like to get served Champagne in the first-class cabin of a Boeing 747.
The staff was trained to provide this service. This photo, taken around 1960, shows crew practising serving meals at the Pan American World Airways stewardess school in Long Island.
Personal space seems to have been key to Pam Am's vision for the skies — here's what a mock-up model of a Boeing 707 Stratoliner cabin looked like around 1957.
Technology may not have been as advanced as it is now, but there was still entertainment on board, with shared screens placed high up above people's seats.
Some of the most luxurious spaces were in the airline's Flying Clipper Ships — a type of aircraft that no longer flies today.
This shows the 50-foot main aisle of one of those aircrafts, where travellers relaxed in their finery.
The airline operated many routes, and its advertisements showed how its reach made the planet a "small world."
Here's a group of flight attendants posing at the Aeropuerto Los Cerrillos in Santiago, Chile, around 1947.
They also got to work alongside some of the world's biggest celebrities. Here are the Beatles about to fly with Pan Am from London to America in 1964.
The airline's terminal at New York International Airport — now known as JFK — also became a special destination in its own right. It became somewhere people would enjoy fine dining and watch planes take off.
But this glory was not to last forever. The airline was ultimately brought down by a combination of a weak US economy, rising fuel costs, and various public-relations hits. It filed for bankruptcy in January 1991, and ultimately closed that December.
Among its problems was the public relations nightmare that accompanied the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, when Pan Am Flight 103 was destroyed with a bomb as it flew over the Scottish town of Lockerbie.
All 243 passengers and 16 crew died.
The airline filed for bankruptcy protection in January 1991, and struggled on for a few months before folding suddenly that December.
"Today we see the end of an airline whose name will be forever forged in American history," Russell L. Ray, the company's president and CEO, said at the time.
Pan Am's terminal in New York was also ultimately demolished between 2013 and 2014, long after the airline closed.
Source: Untapped Cities
