George B. E. Hambleton, scion of a distinguished Maryland family who was a Pan American World Airways executive and Korean War veteran, died June 27 in his sleep at his home in Charleston, South Carolina. He was 94.

“George was charming, elegant, handsome and just delightful to be around,” said Martha Frick Symington “Martie” Sanger, a cousin and author. “He was just a lovely, lovely guy.”

Former state Senator C.A. Porter Hopkins and Mr. Hambleton were boyhood friends and later classmates at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire.

“George had a fascination with anything that flew,” Mr. Hopkins said. “He took flying lessons when we were in boarding school and I remember one day when he buzzed the chapel. Anybody else would’ve been thrown out for that, but not George.”

George Blow Elliot Hambleton, son of John Adams Hambleton, a World War I fighter pilot and a founder of Pan American World Airways, and Margaret Elliot Hambleton, was born in Baltimore and raised in Lutherville.

Mr. Hambleton never knew his father, who was killed in 1929 in an air crash near Wilmington, North Carolina.

“His mother, who was pregnant with George, was at the airport when the plane went down and witnessed the crash,” Ms. Sanger said.

As a teenager, Mr. Hambleton wished to fly but his mother refused to pay for lessons. He took a job in a quarry and made “what to me was a huge amount of money in that summer and went and spent it on flying lessons,” he told Ms. Sanger for her book, “Maryland Blood: An American Family in War and Peace.”

Mr. Hambleton attended Gilman School and after graduating from St. Paul’s in Concord, entered Princeton University, where he continued flying, was president of the flying club, and earned a degree in 1952 in Eastern European history.

He then joined the Army as an artillery officer before switching to the Air Force.

Sent to Korea, he flew helicopters on combat missions for the 45th Division and was the personal pilot for Gen. Paul D. Harkins, commander of the division.

“He didn’t talk much about the war but he did talk about taking the general pheasant hunting,” Mr. Hopkins said. “He kept shotguns onboard the chopper and when they saw the pheasants, they shot them and took a couple of them home for dinner.”

After being discharged in 1955, he began his career at Pan Am.

Hired by Juan Trippe, another founder of the line, he was assigned to the company’s Latin American Division, flying routes in Panama, Guatemala and Costa Rica, among others. While working for Pan Am, he met and fell in love with Janet MacLaren, whom he married in 1962. She died in 1991.

“He was following in his father’s footsteps, and metaphorically speaking, was looking for his father, who had been very brave and a big success at Pan Am, in the clouds,” Ms. Sanger said.

During the Cold War, Mr. Hambleton, who was fluent in Russian, moved to Helsinki when promoted to the line’s director of operations in what was then the Soviet Union.

“He viewed the assignment as a grand adventure,” wrote a daughter, Anne Hambleton, of Unionville, Pennsylvania, in an email.

“He was smart as hell and was always fascinated with what was going on in Russia,” Mr. Hopkins said.

In 1926, his father had advocated for international flight over the polar route, and his son fulfilled that vision when he helped Pan Am launch service to Moscow in 1968. “These were truly the first transpolar flights,” Mr. Hambleton told Ms. Sanger.

Returning to New York in 1970, Mr. Hambleton was appointed director of international affairs in Washington, and purchased a farm in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, where he flew his own plane to work, family members said.

From 1978 to 1980, when he resigned from Pan Am, he was director of international sales. Pan Am filed for bankruptcy in 1991.

Mr. Hambleton and Dr. David Paton, an ophthalmologist, teamed up in 1980 to establish Project Orbis, a non-teaching eye hospital in a converted airplane whose “mission was to combat eye disease around the globe,” his daughter wrote.

Mr. Hambleton left Orbis in 1986 when President Ronald W. Reagan appointed him deputy assistant Secretary of Commerce, and the deputy director general of the U.S. and Foreign Commercial Service.

He later was president of the U.S. division of Andrews MacLaren Ltd., a company founded by his father-in-law, that manufactured aircraft landing gears, brakes and the collapsible baby stroller.

Mr. Hambleton sat on numerous boards, including the Pan Am Historical Foundation, College of the Atlantic and the American-Russian Cultural Cooperation Foundation.

A fly fisherman and upland game hunter, he enjoyed flying, working on his New Jersey farm and spending summers on Mount Desert Island, Maine.

“George traveled so often, you never knew where he was,” Mr. Porter said, with a laugh. “He told the world’s worst jokes but was just a good fellow you enjoyed being around.”

Plans for a celebration of life gathering to be held in September are incomplete.

In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife of 25 years, Diana Lea; two sons, Charles Hambleton, of Sausalito, California, and James Hambleton, of San Clemente, California; six step-grandchildren; and four step-great-grandchildren.