SCADTA

In practice, it was staffed, financed, and largely flown by Germans, a number of them former World War I pilots, and it was very, very good at what it did.

SCADTA was already flying scheduled international routes years before most American airlines had figured out how to keep mail contracts solvent.

To officials in Washington, particularly in the War Department, this was not just a business story.

This was a national security issue.

They went on to secure a foreign airmail contract for FAM-4 to carry airmail between Key West and Havana, Cuba.

As you

mentioned, SCADA was already entrenched in Latin America and, in theory, could have posed a threat to the Panama Canal.

America badly wanted its own airline presence in the region, and the Key West to Havana mail route would be the first step in putting an American airline in competition with SCADA, thus enter Pan Am.