Clipper cargo horizons, Vol. 2, No. 1, January 1962

              AirPak Bows Successfully at Key Pacific Gateway
UP IT GOES and the loading went fine. Pan Am and Douglas engineers scrutinized AirPak’s launching, found it simple, practical, fast—as originally designed.
Flexible Pan Am ’Frisco Terminal has room and efficiency to launch new concept; system to spread quickly to other areas, is set for future all-cargo jets
VIEW PAST inbound cargo catches glimpse of pallet loading, others waiting on line.
* Trademark Reg.
The big lift in ground handling has arrived.
That’s being demonstrated on the San Francisco-Tokyo airlanes by a DC-7F Clipper equipped with AirPak.
Launched from Pan Am’s spacious and flexible San Francisco cargo terminal, the revolutionary, free-wheeling cargo handling system, designed to chip precious time off aircraft loading, is staking out the guidelines for an extension of fast cargo service. Two more Douglas-modified AirPak planes will be operating out of the Golden Gate’s International Airport by mid-February. By that time the fleet of 13 DC-7F cargo planes will be almost finished with the AirPak overhaul. Soon AirPak aircraft will be in operation across the Atlantic, and servicing the cargo routes out of the West Coast.
The all-cargo Clipper now departs San Francisco, transits Honolulu and Wake Island, and continues on to
Tokyo, where it turns around. It is proving that AirPak will do all it is designed to do—tighten schedules, increase the availability of cargo aircraft, usher in space and flight pattern economies, and hasten rate reductions for shippers of all kinds in the 80 countries served by Pan Am.
Rousing Bow. The inaugural flight departed San Francisco November 30. By early evening of that day, a driving rain pelted the aircraft, AirPak rolling stock, and the handling crews. It was the toughest kind of weather for working the cargo apron. But special heavy-duty plastic wrap protects all AirPak loads.
Shippers, feeding their cargo into Pan Am’s 14,000-square-foot cargo terminal, put the severest strain on AirPak from the first documents. They brought in an 1160-kilo drum of cable and a helicopter, both for Honolulu, two
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