The First Airline Gateway To Europe Gave Us This Favorite Coffee Drink

04.11.2023 - 16:17 / forbes.com / John F.Kennedy / Pan Am / Heathrow Airport / Shannon Airport

Tens of millions of travelers fly across large oceans annually. It’s routine these days. Main routes, such as between New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport and Heathrow Airport in Hounslow to the west of London, see over a dozen nonstop flights a day in each direction. The massive airports that serve them have multiple terminals connected by their own rail systems to move both people and their luggage. Thousands of workers start shifts before dawn and stay on duty until the last airplane has safely departed. More than 76,000 people work at LHR as flyers know it.

Regarding how airlines decide where to fly, today, among other ways, there is a trade show called Routes. It draws several thousand airline and airport executives who discuss potential new services. Since travel and tourism accounts for around 10% of all jobs worldwide, getting new flights can boost a local economy. Governments and tourism boards sometimes underwrite a new flight or chip in with promotional support. Executives at Routes sit across tables from each other, laptops open, reviewing data.

But how and where did the first European gateway for passenger flights from the U.S. come to be?

The story is well told at the place where it started, the Foynes Flying Boat & Maritime Museum in Foynes, Ireland. Locate on the Shannon Estuary, it is about a 50-minute drive from Shannon Airport, which for many years was the gateway to Ireland before nonstop flights from North America to the capital in Dublin were permitted. That stopover a political decision meant so visitors would spend money in the rural west. However, the original selection was based entirely on merit.

In 1933, choosing the first version of Heathrow Airport was made by Charles Lindbergh. After famously making the first nonstop flight between North America and Continental Europe in 1927, the aviator became a consultant to legendary Pan Am founder and CEO Juan Trippe.

Without the vision of Trippe, the jet age and then jumbo jet age would have been delayed and may have looked quite different. He is credited with getting McDonald Douglas to build the Douglas DC-8 jetliner and simultaneously pushing Boeing to make the 707. Later, he would be the launch customer for the queen of the skies, the Boeing 747. Trippe also supported supersonic travel and passenger flights to the moon, and his order with Dassault for its first private jet launched the French OEM into business aviation.

In the case of Trippe and Lindbergh, the latter was instrumental in helping survey new routes the former wanted to open. Trippe would tell Lindberg where he wanted to fly, and the iconic aviator would fly there in the rickety propeller airplanes of the time. In the 1920s and 30s, he searched for places where Pan