Strapped, Pan Am Wants to Unload Northeast Shuttle : Airlines: The profitable line should bring $300 million. Donald Trump is considering the sale of his shuttle as well.

Cash-starved Pan Am Corp., parent of Pan American World Airways, on Friday put its profitable Northeast shuttle up for sale.

The shuttle, an airline within an airline that flies New York-Washington and New York-Boston routes, is said to be worth about $300 million. It is just the latest in a long series of assets that Pan Am, once a proud symbol of the United States overseas, has been forced to sell or consider selling in order to survive.

The airline company has retained the New York investment house of Kidder, Peabody & Co. to help in the sale of the shuttle, which is Pan Am’s only profitable operation.

A Pan Am filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday said the company is determined to pursue the “possible sale of, or other commercial transaction involving, the Pan Am shuttle.”

The statement added that the company is contemplating the action, along with other asset sales, “to provide additional liquidity to support operations of its principal subsidiary, Pan American World Airways.”

Pan Am also reiterated in the SEC filing that it believes it must merge with another airline in order to remain viable. “In the longer term, the corporation believes that Pan Am must be part of a larger network in order to add traffic to support its route structure and must obtain financial resources to support its operation. Management . . . continues to explore possible opportunities to address these objectives.”

Pan Am’s attempt to buy Northwest Airlines failed last year.

Pan Am, which has about $90 million in cash, said earlier this week that its cash position had been halved in the first quarter of 1990. Although it had major losses in the quarter, Pan Am expects gains during the busy transatlantic travel season this summer. Last year, travelers avoided Pan American in droves after the terrorist bombing and crash of Pan Am Flight 103 at Lockerbie, Scotland.

The shuttle announcement creates an interesting situation. There are two competing shuttle services in the Northeast, Pan Am’s and the Trump Shuttle, which New York financier Donald J. Trump bought last year from bankrupt Eastern Airlines for $365 million. Pan Am has about 53% of the market on the routes. While the shuttle operations are profitable, the business is not growing.

Trump, who is also believed to be in need of cash, said two weeks ago that he would sell the shuttle if he could get the right price. He said in an interview at the time that he would consider about $600 million a fair price, which airline observers said is much higher than he is likely to get.

But with both shuttle operations on the auction block, the value of each will decline, airline analysts said. “Whoever has an interest in buying a shuttle operation,” said Hans J. Plickert, an analyst with the Transportation Group, an affiliate of the Paine Webber brokerage, “has a golden opportunity.”

The sale of the Pan Am Shuttle would not include any of the leased airplanes Pan Am uses on the routes. All that a buyer would get for its money would be airport gates and landing slots. Pan Am has also been trying to sell its intra-German service, which operates shuttle-type flights between a number of German cities and West Berlin.

Earlier, Pan Am sold its New York headquarters building, a hotel chain and its valuable Pacific routes.