In 1980 Pan American World Airways announced that the service it started in Fiji in 1947 would end in September 1981. This was reported in The Fiji Times of Saturday, July 5, 1980.
Pan Am said the airline would start overflying Nadi Airport because, it said, it could make more money carrying passengers non-stop between Australia and Hawaii and the US mainland.
The decision, announced by Pan Am, had been expected by the Fiji travel trade for some time. But it had come as a blow since the two Boeing 747 return flights through Nadi that Pan Am made each week brought about half the American tourists who visited Fiji.
“It is very disappointing,” the vice president of the Fiji Society of Travel agencies, Lorraine Evans, said.
“American tour operators are already complaining that they can’t get enough seats into Fiji. She said there was a “natural desire” by airlines to sell seats to passengers travelling all the way from the US to Australia rather than to people who would get off at Nadi.
In leaving Fiji, Pan Am dismissed 11 local employees but said most of them should get new jobs without trouble.
The airline’s director for the South Pacific, John McGhee, arriving in Suva from Sydney to discuss the withdrawal with the Government, said the service would be “suspended” due to “operational necessity.”
Most travellers, particularly businessmen, preferred to travel nonstop to the US. The airline’s Fiji director, Arthur Reppun, said the airline landed 9300 passengers from America and 5900 from Australia in Nadi in 1979.
The “suspension” of the service “is the soft way of saying termination,” he said. “We don’t like to burn our bridges by saying it won’t be resumed, but there are no plans too.”
Pan Am overflew Fiji because it was losing too much business to the non-stop Australia-US flights being made by Qantas. For months, Pan Am had, with other airlines, complained about the rising cost of using Nadi Airport and had trouble with the airport unions.
Pan Am’s departure cut the number of airlines flying between Nadi and North America to three — Air New Zealand, CP Air and the US airline Continental.
Continental’s Fiji manager, Steve Handy, said his company was carrying about the same number of passengers to Nadi that Pan Am was.
It took about four weeks for Continental to evaluate the situation and decide whether it should put on another flight to Nadi to puck up the traffic abandoned by Pan Am.
