Talaat Captan is one of four owners behind the effort to bring Pan American World Airways back, and in December 2025 the Orange County Business Journal published an in-depth look at how that group is rebuilding the brand. Reporter Emily Santiago-Molina’s article, “Pan Am to Take Off, Once Again: OC Owners Revive Airline,” lays out who the owners are, what they bought, and the long list of ventures they are building around one of the best-known names in aviation history. This post summarizes the main points of that coverage.
Four partners and a famous name
According to the Business Journal, Captan, Craig Carter, Steve Craig and Jeff Cova acquired the company that holds the Pan Am brand in early 2024, gaining its intellectual property and licensing agreements. The paper describes each partner’s role: Craig, founder of Craig Realty Group, serves as chairman; Carter, previously chief executive of an Irvine travel management company, leads the revival as chief executive; and Cova heads Pan Am Travel, the group’s corporate travel agency. Captan’s contribution centers on the experience side of the brand, which he has been shaping for more than a decade.
The article also explains how Carter and Captan first crossed paths. Before the acquisition, Carter hired Captan to help locate and purchase a decommissioned airliner for his company’s office, the kind of aviation sourcing work that Captan’s companies have handled for film and television productions for years. (For more on that side of his work, see the companies and programs section of this site.)
The Pan Am Experience at the heart of the story
The Business Journal credits Captan, together with Pan Am collector Anthony Toth, as the co-creator of the Pan Am Experience, the immersive recreation of a Pan Am flight from the airline’s golden age. Built around the rebuilt interior of a 747 in the San Fernando Valley, it hosted airline-themed dinner evenings with period crew and in-flight service, and became one of Los Angeles’ most unusual nights out. Its early success earned Captan a spot among BizBash’s 2015 Event Innovators, which we covered in this earlier post.
The experience paused after the pandemic. The Business Journal reported that the new owners plan to bring it back, led by Captan, and that it is set to move from the San Fernando Valley to Craig Realty’s Citadel Outlets. For guests who never had the chance to board the original, that relocation would put the experience within easy reach of downtown Los Angeles and alongside other Pan Am-branded projects the group is developing. Details and updates are published on the Pan Am Experience founder page.
Plans for a scheduled charter airline
The most ambitious part of the revival is a return to the air. The article reports that the owners intend to relaunch Pan American World Airways as a scheduled charter service, and that in September 2025 the company filed with the FAA to operate as a U.S. carrier, with approval still pending at the time of publication. The plan described in the article calls for a fleet of Airbus aircraft, beginning with four planes and growing to sixteen over the first four years, with flight operations run from Miami and the parent company based in Newport Beach. The owners were also looking for a luxury apparel maker to recreate the classic blue Pan Am uniforms.
Captan’s role in the leadership group was first noted on this site in Talaat Captan joins leadership team working to bring Pan Am back, which outlines the core goals of the revival.
A brand rebuilt one venture at a time
Rather than relying on the airline alone, the group is building a network of businesses that put the Pan Am name back in front of travelers. The Business Journal lists several of them:
- Pan Am Journeys – luxury group trips on a Pan Am-branded private jet. A 13-day transatlantic itinerary in July 2025 sold out within days, and a longer transpacific trip was planned for June 2026.
- Pan Am Travel – a concierge-style corporate travel agency that opened in Laguna Hills, California, in November 2024 and has grown its staff several times over.
- A Pan Am hotel – a former office building in the City of Commerce being converted into a 134-room hotel, to be operated by Hilton.
- Lounges, aviation services and travel – planned airport lounges starting at New York’s JFK, a fixed-base operator in Missouri, and a Pan Am-themed cruise voyage scheduled for 2027.
- Consumer products – licensed watches, apparel and other merchandise, with more partnerships in progress.
Why the coverage matters
For readers following Talaat Captan’s career, the article connects several threads. The aviation sets he began building after the 1998 Ground Control shoot led to Air Hollywood, the studio’s sets made the Pan Am Experience possible, and that experience in turn helped place him among the owners of the Pan Am brand itself. The Business Journal’s reporting shows how that long interest in aviation history is now part of a much larger commercial effort to restore a classic airline name.
The original article includes additional detail on the acquisition, the partners’ backgrounds and the brand’s history since 1991. Read it in full at the link below, and find more coverage of Captan’s work on the Press page.