Panagra (Pan American-Grace Airways) was an airline formed as a joint venture between Pan American World Airways and the Grace shipping company. It operated flights from the United States to the Andean countries of South America, connecting as far south as Buenos Aires and Santiago, Chile. The airline was founded in the 1930s to compete with SCADTA, a German-owned company, and held a quasi-monopoly over air travel in many parts of South America during the 1940s and 1950s. The airline merged with Braniff International Airways in 1967.
A Panagra Ford Tri-Motor left Buenos Aires, Argentina on October 12, 1929, and eight and a half hours later it arrived in Santiago, Chile.
Panagra started the first all-cargo route of any American flag airline when it inaugurated a route between the Canal Zone in Panama and Lima.
Indeed as the Panagra pilots continued their careers with Braniff and other airlines after the merger, not one life was lost with a Panagra pilot up front!
Panagra was the first airline in South America to develop and apply airways weather forecasts - and professional meteorologists furnish today all company planes with complete reports on the weather en-route and at destination at all hours.
Time and again, the airline's planes were sent on missions of mercy carrying a vial of precious lifesaving medicine to a dying man, an iron lung to a girl's stricken with polio, or a shipment of drugs to arrest the spread of an epidemic.
Panagra was an important factor in the economic and industrial development of South America.
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