26/08/2026
A hark back to a time before Bermuda had a full runway, and to its broader aviation heritage.
Pan Am’s Bermuda Clipper, a Sikorsky S-42B, made its inaugural commercial passenger flight from New York to Bermuda in June 1937, alighting on the water at Darrell’s Island. Bermuda’s civil flying-boat airport remained in use until 1948. No runway required, just a calm stretch of water and a very large plane.
It would be easy to file that under nostalgia, except seaplanes never really went away. They’re still integral to resort transfers in the Maldives, used for private access into the Florida Keys and flying scheduled harbour-to-harbour services in the Virgin Islands. The aircraft have changed, but the basic logic hasn’t: islands still reward the most direct way of getting there. Bermuda was doing it in 1937.
The Pan Am airline itself followed a very different path. Deregulation, its costly acquisition of National Airlines and mounting losses steadily weakened Pan Am, with Lockerbie and the Gulf War travel downturn adding further pressure. It filed for bankruptcy protection in 1991 and ceased operations that December. The name, though, proved harder to retire. In June 2025, “Tracing the Transatlantic” put the blue globe back in the air on a Pan Am-branded Boeing 757 for a 12-night private-air journey inspired by its historic Atlantic routes, priced from $59,950 per person. Bermuda was its first stop after New York, welcomed at LF Wade with a water-cannon salute before the journey continued across the Atlantic.
Nearly nine decades after the Bermuda Clipper, the Pan Am globe was back in Bermuda.
Source: Bartelings, Bermuda Tourism Authority, Criterion Travel, Inside Travel Report, Metropolitan Airport News, Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records / University of Miami Libraries Special Collections, Skyport, The Royal Gazette
