"They're vivid dreams," says the former maintenance contract manager at Pan Am's old hangar at New York John F. Kennedy Airport. "I see specific assignments I worked on, lots of details, specific people I worked with."

Come December, maybe those dreams can stop.

That's when Kane and about 15,000 other former employees of what was touted as "The World's Most Experienced Airline" will receive their final paychecks. An additional 8,000 people who held tickets on Pan Am at the time of its shutdown in December 1991 are also in line for payments, as are about 1,500 other creditors.

The checks won't be large, probably only a few hundred dollars on average for former employees, says New York attorney Walter Curchack, head of the Pan Am Liquidation Trust. They will be about 5 or 6 cents on the dollar of what the recipients were owed when the company collapsed.

The money, the first to be paid to creditors of the Pan Am estate in 10 years, is coming from a $30 million legal settlement with Libya in the long-running civil lawsuit over the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988.

In 2001, Libyan intelligence agent Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was convicted of the Flight 103 bombing. That permitted attention to turn to issues of civil law. It's taken an additional five years for Libya to settle the civil damages with the liquidation trust and with insurers of the plane. Separately, Libya has paid benefits to victims' families.

Once the settlement checks are sent out, Curchack will shut down the Pan Am Liquidation Trust, and the last legal vestige of the original corporate entity founded in 1927 will cease to exist.

Of course, Pan Am hasn't really been an airline since Dec. 4, 1991, when it shut down after Delta Air Lines walked away from a possible deal to buy it. A good argument can be made that it wasn't much of one for years before that because of its serious financial difficulties.

Until the 1970s, Pan Am had been known as "The Chosen Instrument." It earned that nickname because U.S. government policymakers favored it when deciding which carriers would be authorized to carry U.S. travelers to foreign lands. Though privately owned, Pan Am received the same kind of favorable treatment as government-owned foreign carriers.

In the 1930s and early 1940s, the government allowed only Pan Am to fly outside the USA. International routes began to open up in the late 1940s. TWA received authority to fly to Europe; Braniff to Latin America, the predecessor of today's Northwest to Japan. Still, only Pan Am was allowed to serve all those regions, plus Africa, the Middle East and Central and South Asia.

The jet age was not kind to Pan Am. With its late 1950s orders for Boeing 707s and Douglas DC-8s, Pan Am was a pioneer of the technology that promised to shrink the globe and foster a boom in international travel. Yet the resulting surge in international travel also created lots of competition for Pan Am.

In 1966, when it persuaded Boeing to build the world's first jumbo jet, the 747, it was writing the beginning of its own economic end. Pan Am bought 72 of the big planes and operated as many as 64 of them at once.

The massive, bump-nosed 747 was a technological marvel and a thing of beauty to airline buffs. But it was so big that it became a financial albatross. Pan Am never could consistently fill its fleet of 747s with enough passengers to cover the expense of flying them.

Then, in 1978, the U.S. government deregulated the domestic air market. For decades, Pan Am had a near-monopoly on foreign routes and long had pummeled foreign airlines in competition for high-fare-paying U.S. business travelers flying abroad.

But under deregulation, it couldn't compete against other U.S. carriers as they expanded into foreign markets, fed by passengers and cash flowing from their sprawling domestic route networks.

Traveling in style

Pan Am itself never developed such a network. When it tried to buy one, it grossly overpaid for the former National Airlines.

The only net profits Pan Am reported in its last 20-plus years of operation came in those years when it sold off big chunks of itself: its landmark Manhattan headquarters building, a subsidiary that serviced the space shuttles, its rights to serve London's Heathrow Airport and, its crown jewel, the famed Pacific Division.

Finally, the Lockerbie bombing just before Christmas 1988 destroyed what confidence the traveling public still had in Pan Am. It entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 1991 and managed to stay in the air for nearly a year after that by selling seats at well below cost and by selling assets.

For the most part, though, that's not the Pan Am that its former employees and loyal former customers remember. They remember the carrier that taught Americans how to travel in style.

"You'll never get on an airline that is as good as Pan Am was," says 83-year-old Mary Goshgarin, the unofficial keeper of the Pan Am flame. For 35 years she worked in the Clipper Club, Pan Am's lounge for VIPs at the Miami airport. Now she runs, on a strictly volunteer basis, the Pan Am Aware store, a treasure trove of Pan Am memorabilia at the Miami airport.

"We loved this company. This company was the best. We were family, still are," she says. She cried, she says, when she heard that the company that bought the rights to the Pan Am name and globe logo had begun plastering them on railroad freight cars.

Goshgarin is not among those who expect to receive a check from the Liquidation Trust in December. Most who will receive the payments were with the company up to its last day. Goshgarin, though, retired in spring 1991.

But she has a lot of friends who stayed to the very end. "They're excited about getting a little bit more money now. It won't be much. But they weren't planning on getting anything, so it's found money."

Ed Trippe won't be receiving any money, either. He spent 20 years as an executive at InterContinental Hotels, originally a Pan Am subsidiary. But the closing of the final chapter of the Pan Am saga is not without special meaning to him. He literally grew up with the company founded by his world famous father, Juan T. Trippe. Today, Ed Trippe is chairman of the Pan Am Historical Foundation.

"I can't say the closing of this final chapter brings any particular emotion," Trippe said from his office in Bermuda, where he is developing an exclusive hotel and resort community. But he's emotionally tied to the thousands of former employees and customers whose love for his father's old company continues unabated.

"What's really amazing to me is how many Pan Ammers around the world are still close and involved," Trippe says.

Last weekend, several thousand former Pan Am flight attendants gathered for the annual convention of their group, World Wings International. A pilots group, the Clipper Pioneers, still gathers.

"In some ways, Pan Am is more alive now than ever," says Jeff Kriendler, a South Florida resident who was the airline's last vice president of corporate communications. "In light of the quality of service on airlines today, there are lots of people out there still nursing fond memories of Pan Am's service."

Kriendler acknowledges that the air market barely skipped a beat when Pan Am went out of business.

"But you can say that about every airline that's gone out of business," he says. "Any hole left in the market by a carrier's demise is filled in almost overnight by other airlines."

The same can't be said for all the workers displaced by the shutdown of airlines such as Pan Am.

Fallout for workers

Kane, for example, was never able to fully capitalize on his years of experience in managing aircraft and engine maintenance operations. After Pan Am shut down, he discovered that the job market for experienced aircraft maintenance managers in their 50s was almost non-existent.

A job with a cargo carrier lasted only a few months. And there was a consulting gig with Tower Air, now out of business. Now, when asked if he's retired, the 68-year-old Kane's stock answer is, "Not voluntarily."

Kane says he expects a few hundred dollars in the liquidation, a fraction of the compensation he was owed. Enough time has passed that the event has little meaning for him. "The book on Pan Am has been closed for me for a long time now," he says.

His memories, like his dreams, are mostly fond ones. When people learn where he worked, "They always say how much they miss our service, how much they miss our planes. That makes me feel good about what kind of company we ran. And my wife and I got to travel the world. It was nice for us."