Margot Robbie, who played stewardess Laura Cameron, later made an uncredited cameo reprising the role (face unseen) serving a cocktail on a Pan Am flight in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in which she also played Sharon Tate.

Sony licensed the rights to use the Pan Am name and logo from Pan Am Systems, a New Hampshire-based railroad company that had acquired the Pan Am brand in 1998.

Executive producer Nancy Hult Ganis, a real former Pan Am stewardess from 1968 to 1976, developed the series and conducted research at the Pan Am Historical Foundation and the University of Miami's Pan Am archives to help ensure accuracy.

The costume department, led by Anne Crabtree, recreated the iconic sky-blue Pan Am stewardess uniforms using the same techniques as the original 1960s manufacturing process, with twenty craftsmen working on each outfit.

Because girdles were historically mandatory for stewardesses to improve posture, some cast members had to wear them during filming and found them extremely restricting.

The series was largely filmed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and other New York City locations, with the pilot partly shot at Gold Coast Studios in Bethpage, Long Island; a life-size recreation of a Pan Am 707 jet, kept in a hangar near the Brooklyn waterfront, was described by Entertainment Weekly as 'the biggest star of the series.'

Although smoking was common on flights in the 1960s, ABC and parent company Disney banned the show's stars from being shown smoking on screen, a deliberate anachronism director Thomas Schlamme called 'the one revisionist cheat.'

The pilot episode cost an estimated $10 million to produce, and the series won the Golden Rose Award for Best Series at the 2012 international Rose d'Or TV awards, beating out Martina Cole's The Runaway and The Jury.