The Diary of Jet No. 19921

Like aging baseball players who move from team to team, many jets pass from one airline to another as they grow older and more expensive to maintain. Fairly typical is Boeing jet No. 19921, a 737 that has called five nations home since it was built in 1968.

Bought by San Diego-based Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) for approximately $3 million, No. 19921 spent its first eight months hopping a few hundred miles at a time to San Francisco, Los Angeles and other California cities. Then it was sold for about $3.5 million to Pacific Western Airlines (PWA), a Canadian carrier based in Calgary. There No. 19921 settled down for 13 years, carrying passengers to such cities as Edmonton and Vancouver, as well as to remote communities in the Canadian Arctic. In 1982 PWA leased the plane to Bahamasair for five months.

In September of that year, an American leasing agent bought the now middle- aged airliner for approximately $6 million and rented it to financially ailing Pan American World Airways for $130,000 a month. Based in Berlin, No. 19921 spent the next four years making short runs to Frankfurt, Munich and other West German cities. Though the plane was sold twice again during that period to other lessors, Pan Am continued to rent it. From 1986 until last September, the 737 made New York's Kennedy airport its home, flying daily routes to such cities as Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

After Pan Am turned it in for a newer plane last November, No. 19921 was leased to a Honduran airline, SAHSA, for about $130,000 a month. SAHSA shares the plane with another Honduran carrier, TAN. Based these days in the capital city of Tegucigalpa, the aging airliner, a veteran of approximately 65,000 flights, carries about 1,000 passengers a day on several routes, north to Miami and Guatemala, and south to El Salvador and Panama. During 20 years of service, No. 19921 has outlived two of its airlines: PSA and PWA both merged into other companies.