Pan Am is making its way back to the skies and the blueprints are being mapped out in Orange County.
Steven Craig of Craig Realty Group, best known for developing outlet malls, along with three other partners acquired Pan American Global Holdings LLC in 2024 after the previous owner Timothy Mellon put it up for sale.
Since the purchase, the new owners have embarked on several new business ventures utilizing the Pan Am name to reinvigorate the company and make it profitable again—from designing Pan Am airport lounges to building a Pan Am hotel.
Craig and his partners, including Pan Am Chief Executive Craig Carter, Jeff Cova and Talaat Captan, are aiming for more than branding deals—they want to revive the airline.
Last June, Pan Am partnered with consulting firm AVi8 Air Capital to develop a financial strategy to resume commercial flights.
In October, the companies revealed a business plan that would allow the new owners to relaunch Pan American World Airways as a scheduled charter service.
Pan Am in September filed with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as a U.S. part 121 flag carrier to do so.
Once approved, Pan Am will manage flight operations out of Miami and start flying a fleet of Airbus commercial aircraft; the parent company will remain headquartered in Newport Beach. Carter said they will start with four Airbuses and grow to 16 total over the first four years.
The new owners said they are currently looking for a luxury apparel manufacturer to recreate the iconic blue flight attendant and pilot uniforms.
Craig, chairman of Pan Am Global, told the Business Journal that he is looking forward to people finding out where the brand is heading next.
“Because it was silent for a while and now it’s moving again, and it’s going to morph into several different things that they may find interesting,” he said.
Rebuilding Brand Recognition
In 1995, Craig founded his Newport Beach-based firm, specializing in the development and management of upscale factory outlet centers and retail properties, including the Outlets at San Clemente and the Citadel Outlets in Los Angeles. The firm manages 4 million square feet of retail space across 12 centers in seven states.
When Craig and Carter first purchased the Pan Am name, they said it had been “gathering dust” for some time.
By buying Pan American Global Holdings, the owners gain control of the brand’s intellectual property (IP) rights and the licensing deals that accompany them.
They began their Pan Am journey by reviewing existing contracts, including a chain of retail stores in Korea and a licensing deal with watchmaker Timex. After the first round of Pan Am-branded timepieces sold out in a few days, Carter has led the new owners to seek out more deals to attach the name to.
“For the most part, people are coming to us,” Carter said.
So far, they’ve done another deal with Timex and added two more with Italian and Swiss watchmakers to place Pan Am logos on more luxury watches.
The company is celebrating the 100th anniversary of Pan Am with a 28-day cruise on Holland America’s Zuiderdam ship that will visit 19 ports in 13 countries in the Caribbean. The 2027 voyage offers fares ranging from $9,500 to $25,000 per person.
“Follow the path once charted by Pan Am’s pioneering Clippers, a journey that transformed the Caribbean and Latin America into the world’s playground,” said its website.
It also released an apparel and accessories line with Malibu Shirts featuring the Pan Am logo and imagery.
The business will soon announce a licensing agreement with one of the world’s largest toy manufacturers. They have at least 20 other projects in the works.
“These are all things that emanate from the brand itself,” Carter said. Things “that we control and we manage and we generate now what we believe to be good revenue that’s turned this company into a profitable one.”
Understanding the Demand for Pan Am
The second part of reviving Pan Am has been creating profitable business divisions. Craig and Carter have several hospitality and travel projects in the works that will allow modern consumers to experience the aviation brand in-person.
One of the first opportunities spawned from a licensing deal with Criterion Travel and Bartelings that was signed prior to the recent acquisition. The two travel organizations hosted a 13-day international trip recreating Pan Am’s historic transatlantic flights.
Fifty passengers flew on a private Pan Am-branded 757-200 jet that took off from New York City and over the course of July, flew to Bermuda, Lisbon, Marseille, London, and Shannon, Ireland. With all-inclusive tickets at $59,950 and $65,500, the flight sold out in three days.
“That was another impetus for us understanding the type of demand for this particular name, just in itself,” Carter said. “It was the name that brought people out of the woodwork to want to go on this trip.
Afterwards, they absorbed the business and called it Pan Am Journeys. The company has since planned a second trip that will retrace Pan Am stops in San Francisco, Tokyo, Japan, Siem Reap, Cambodia, Singapore, Darwin, Australia and Auckland, New Zealand over 21 days in June 2026. The company is planning additional routes for the future.
The business partners also launched Pan Am Travel, a travel agency designed to bring a full-service, concierge-type program to corporate group travelers. The office, led by Jeff Cova as CEO, opened in Laguna Hills last November and has grown from four employees to 25.
Craig is in the middle of converting a former 82,000-square-foot office building in the City of Commerce into a Pan Am Hotel, to be operated by Hilton under its Tapestry brand.
The three-story property, with 134 rooms and two full-service restaurants, will flank the Citadel Outlets and is slated to open in fall 2026.
“It’ll be a big benefit to the community in Commerce. It will bring in international people that want to stay there,” Craig said.
Anthony Toth and Captan created in 2013 The Pan Am Experience, a dinner theater experience that recreates what it was like to fly Pan Am in its golden days. They are moving the venue from the San Fernando Valley to Craig Realty’s Citadel Outlets, with plans to open next year.
Pan Am is also looking to set up luxury lounges in airports across the U.S., starting with a lounge at John F. Kennedy Airport. Craig said they are also working to set up shop as a fixed-based operator (FBO) in St. Joseph, Missouri, near Kansas City.
“Everything we do will create a significant halo effect that we’ll all be able to, I think, benefit from greatly,” Carter said.
Pan Am: Aviation’s Glamorous Icon
It can be said that Pan Am wrote the history of aviation, setting a standard for class, technology and worldwide travel.
Established by Juan Trippe in 1927, it grew to worldwide recognition for its international flights, particularly its famous Clippers, planes that landed and took off on water.
“We built airports, opened continents, carried presidents, world leaders and icons,” says its website. “We defined the golden age of travel when service was art and the journey mattered as much as the destination.”
In the 1950s, it began flying Boeing 707s, cutting the New York-to-London flight time in half to seven hours. In the 1970s, it introduced the Boeing 747, launching the era of giant jets.
Pan Am’s operations ceased in 1991 following the company’s bankruptcy due to multiple factors, including deregulation of the industry in 1978 and the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.
Carnival Cruise Line was the first to secure the business, until billionaire Tim Mellon, an heir to the Mellon family fortune, purchased it in 1998 for $28.5 million, according to the New York Times. (Mellon also recently garnered national headlines by giving $130 million for troop salaries during the recent federal government shutdown.)
A Lunch at The Pacific Club
Craig Carter said the idea first germinated when he met Talaat Captan, the co-creator and operator of the original Pan Am Experience.
At the time, Carter was CEO of Luxe Travel Management in Irvine and had hired Captan to help him find and buy a decommissioned Delta plane to reassemble it at the Luxe office.
A few years later in 2023, Carter ran into Steven Craig at Newport Beach’s The Pacific Club. Carter was having lunch with Pan Am executives and introduced Craig to the table, where the real estate developer first learned that Pan Am still existed as a brand, even though the airline had ceased operations three decades earlier.
It was then that Carter and Craig found out the company would soon be up for sale. At first, Carter was concerned about the financials of the business.
“It was Steve pressing me, urging me to get off the pot and to make the deal happen,” Carter told the Business Journal. “There were a lot of suitors for this particular brand, from Korea to London.”
Once Pan Am was available to purchase, the pair and two other partners made an offer that eventually closed in February 2024. The pair declined to reveal the purchase price.
Carter said part of their winning pitch was keeping the company in the U.S. along with ways to “put Pan Am back in the forefront of the consumer’s mind.”
Craig credited part of Pan Am’s ongoing resurgence to movies such as “Catch Me If You Can” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and a short-lived “Pan Am” television show starring Margot Robbie. He also pointed to interest from younger generations seeking things that are “retro or vintage.”
Besides operating outlet malls, Craig has invested in two metal fabrication companies, a gas station operator and an aerospace manufacturer since 2015.
When the Pan Am deal came about, he was ready for a new adventure.
“I’ve never really had the opportunity to help manage a brand of this kind of magnitude. And it’s been a lot of fun,” Craig said.
