TWA

» see twa.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Transcontinental & Western Air was created on 16 July 1930 because the Postmaster General told two airlines to merge. Walter Folger Brown wanted a single carrier flying the central transcontinental mail route and he got one by rearranging the contracts until only that answer was left. Howard Hughes bought control in 1939 and kept it until 1965. Under him the airline collected the postwar international route awards that turned a domestic mail operation into a genuine rival for Pan Am. It flew the Lockheed Constellation on those routes and renamed itself Trans World Airlines in 1950.

TWA passed Pan Am as the busiest carrier across the Atlantic in July 1969. Eero Saarinen's terminal at Idlewild had opened in 1962 with the concrete wings that everyone photographs now, and the airline had been showing films in the cabin since 1961. It bought Hilton International in 1967 and spent the seventies as a conglomerate with an airline inside it, which was an ordinary thing for an American carrier to be in the years before deregulation.

Carl Icahn arrived in 1985. The unions backed him against Frank Lorenzo of Texas Air on the reasonable ground that Lorenzo had a record of breaking airline unions, and Icahn won the company. In 1988 he took it private in a leveraged buyout that paid out the shareholders and left the airline about $540 million deeper in debt. What followed was a decade of selling pieces to cover the interest. The London Heathrow route authorities went to American Airlines in 1991 for $445 million. Bankruptcy came in January 1992 and again in June 1995, with the employees taking equity in exchange for wage concessions on both occasions. The third filing was on 10 January 2001, and American bought the assets that spring for around $745 million.

~ the case file ~

~ the raider ~

When TWA came out of the 1992 bankruptcy, Icahn was still owed about $190 million, and the settlement he negotiated is the part worth remembering. Through a company called Karabu he took the right to buy TWA tickets at 55 percent of face value for eight years, on any itinerary that did not begin or end in St. Louis, and to resell them. He built lowestfare.com to do the reselling. American Airlines later put the damage at roughly $100 million a year.

So the man who had taken the airline private in 1988 spent the following decade as one of its largest structural costs. The arrangement ran until 2001 and there was no clean way out of it, because TWA had signed it to get out of bankruptcy court and never had the cash to buy it back. A leveraged buyout done to a business with no pricing power leaves a mark like that: the debt does not leave when the raider does.

~ flight 220 ~

The last one was Flight 220, a short hop from Kansas City to St. Louis on 1 December 2001. Kansas City had held the overhaul base since the thirties and the hub until 1982, and St. Louis had carried the hub after that, so the final trip ran between the two cities the airline had actually lived in. About 10,000 people were still on the payroll. American had bought the assets rather than the company, which meant the former TWA employees were placed near the bottom of the combined seniority list, and the arbitration over that ran for years.

~ what the name is now ~

American painted a 737 in TWA red and white in 2015 as part of a heritage fleet, which is the usual way a dead airline gets remembered by the one that bought it. The stronger afterlife is at JFK. Saarinen's old terminal sat empty for most of two decades and reopened in May 2019 as the TWA Hotel, with the original departures board clacking in the lobby and a 1958 Constellation parked on the apron outside, converted into a cocktail bar.

It is a strange kind of preservation. The building is the most complete surviving statement of what mid-century American air travel wanted to feel like, and it now works as a place to sleep near a runway. Nothing about the hotel has anything to do with why the airline failed, and that is presumably the point of it.

I was seventeen when Flight 220 landed, and an American domestic carrier was never going to feature in my life in any direct way. TWA reached me the way it reached most people outside the United States, through news coverage and through films that used the tail logo as shorthand for a decade. The loss of Flight 800 off Long Island in July 1996 was on television everywhere, and I was a child watching it from Turkey. By the time I had reasons of my own to care which airline flew which route, TWA had been gone for years.

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