The South American Way

No one has fought harder than Juan Trippe's Pan American World Airways to keep other U.S. airlines out of Latin America. No one has put up a stiffer fight to get in than Tom Braniff's Braniff Airways. Last week it looked as though Braniff had won a resounding victory. In a fortnight, Braniff announced, it will launch its first flight from Lima to Buenos Aires, thus giving Pan Am its first independent U.S. competitor to Argentina.* After that, Braniff will fly four round trips a week between B.A. and Houston, from which its network of U.S. routes fans out as far north as Chicago, as far west as Denver. Crowed President Thomas E. Braniff: "[Pan Am] didn't think we would or could do it. We showed them."

Take-Off. To show them, Tom Braniff had been knocking long & loud at the door of Argentina. As long ago as 1946, the Civil Aeronautics Board awarded Braniff routes down the west coast of South America to Lima and across to Rio de Janeiro. He even had a route allotted him into Argentina, but he did not have the permit from Argentina that he needed. Not till Braniff got the State Department, which was considering economic assistance to Argentina, to do some diplomatic stiff-arming for him did President Peron decide to play ball. The new flights will stretch to 10,583 miles the routes over which Braniff operates a fleet of 33 planes.

Unlike many airline bosses, hardknuckled, pink-cheeked Thomas Elmer Braniff, 66, was a middle-aged man when he went into aviation. He started out at 17 to sell insurance, later branched out into Oklahoma real estate, by 1927 had already made a fortune. Then he put up $10,000 to finance a one-horse airline which operated one single-engine Stinson cabin plan from Oklahoma City to Tulsa, 116 miles away.

The line lost money from the start. Although Braniff bought planes and expanded north to tap the rich traffic at Chicago, Kansas City and Denver, he kept right on losing money. By 1933 he was ready to write off commercial aviation as a bad investment. But he changed his mind a year later when he won his first Post Office mail contract for the Chicago-Dallas route. Thanks mostly to that, by 1935 his line was in the black and he was ready to start expanding again--this time to the south.

Sound-Off. Near the end of the war he had his first real skirmish with Pan Am, when he tried to operate a route in Mexico, where Pan Am's affiliate, Compania Mexicana de Aviacion S.A., was already well established (TIME, Aug. 13, 1945). Braniff finally lost the Mexican routes when he made the Mexicans mad by sounding off against local government officials.

Braniff pressed farther south. Starting with a flight to Lima in 1948, he has opened new routes to five South American countries (e.g., Brazil, Ecuador), and he is giving Pan Am and Panagra a race for their passengers. He set up a Braniff Business Bureau to bring Latin American goods north and export U.S. goods south, offered cut-rate tourist fares. He even drummed up business among Latin America-bound Chinese travelers in the Orient by distributing handbills that were printed in Chinese. On his gross of $18,438,140 last year, Braniff rang up a net profit of $221,595.

Away from his desk, Tom Braniff is a placid, easygoing man who plays a leisurely game of golf (he bets more skillfully than he plays), takes off on hunting trips, and at Christmas dresses up as Santa Claus for the children of his 2,401 employees. But the leisurely pace never gets into his business operations. He has applied for additional routes inside & outside the U.S. (e.g., from Havana to Washington and New York). Says he: "All my life I've wanted to see a little farther over the horizon, and the horizon keeps getting farther away."

*Panagra, the only other U.S. airline operating to Argentina, is 50% owned by Pan Am.

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