Trans World Airlines: Wooden Wings, Howard Hughes and the Karabu Deal

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Transcontinental and Western Air was formed in 1930 when Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown pressured Transcontinental Air Transport and Western Air Express to merge so larger carriers could handle airmail contracts. Marketed as the Lindbergh Line, it faced a crisis on March 31, 1931, when a TWA Fokker F-10 crashed in a Kansas wheat field, killing all eight aboard, including Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne; moisture had degraded the hide glue in its wooden wing. Locked out of the Boeing 247 by United, TWA asked Douglas for a new metal plane, which produced the DC-1, the DC-2 and, by 1937, the DC-3. Howard Hughes took control in the early 1940s, partnered with Lockheed on the pressurized Constellation, and turned the renamed Trans World Airlines into a second American flag carrier alongside Pan Am.

Hughes forced out Jack Frye in 1947, then ordered more than $400 million in jets; lenders made him put his stock in a voting trust in 1960, and he sold out in 1966 for over half a billion dollars. By 1969 TWA had passed Pan Am in transatlantic passengers and opened Eero Saarinen's Flight Center at JFK. Hijackings and bombings between 1969 and 1986, oil shocks and the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act exposed its weak domestic feeder network. Carl Icahn took control in 1985 and took the airline private in 1988, adding over half a billion dollars in debt, sold the London Heathrow routes to American Airlines in 1990, and on leaving in 1993 secured the Karabu deal, letting his company buy TWA tickets at a 45 percent discount, estimated to cost TWA about $150 million a year. After bankruptcies in 1992 and 1995 and the loss of all 230 people on TWA Flight 800 in 1996, a third filing in 2001 ended with American Airlines acquiring its assets.

• TWA asked Douglas for a 12-passenger metal plane that could fly over 1,000 miles and cross mountain routes on one engine.
• During World War II, TWA flew thousands of transatlantic logistics missions for the U.S. military.
• TWA lost over $14 million in 1946 as its pilots went on strike.
• In 1958 TWA hired Margaret Grant, becoming the first major airline to employ an African American flight attendant.
• Saarinen's 1962 terminal at JFK has been restored as the TWA Hotel, with a vintage Constellation bar on the tarmac.