From its inception, TWA, or at least its predecessor, was ambitious, transcending the traditional concept of exclusively postal air transport with the addition of passengers, incorporating intermodal means by combining surface or rail sections, and setting its sights on the Costa West from East, to significantly reduce transcontinental travel by means of wings and wheels.
Originally known as Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT), which was formed on May 16, 1928 by a conglomerate of prominent business interests, it inaugurated service on the route charted by Charles Lindbergh, taking to the skies during the day in a Ford TriMotor and the rails at night, allowing passengers to retire in the comfort of a Pullman stateroom. But the venture proved less than lucrative.
The mail, as had already been shown, would remain the financial drive for the aircraft, albeit in much shorter segments, and relying on TAT authority for it by Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown was his suggestion to merge with another competitor, Western Air Express (WAE), to avoid duplicating government payments.
Renamed Transcontinental and Western Air (TWA) upon its merger on July 24, 1930, it was awarded the mail contract for the 36-hour journey that stayed true to its “transcontinental” name, but with an overnight layover midway through on the way, specifically in Kansas City.
Despite their soulless states, airlines invariably took on the personas of their owners and leaders.
John “Jack” Frye, a former Hollywood stunt pilot and the airline’s first COO, was instrumental in determining the specifications for TWA’s low-wing, all-metal, 12-passenger Douglas DC-1 and its successor, the 14-passenger DC-2, aeronautical answers to Boeing’s B-247, whose cramped cabin was hampered by the wing spar running across it. As a licensed pilot, he flew the first Douglas design as the DC-2 entered service on May 18, 1934 from Columbus, Ohio to New York.
The even larger and wider DC-3 entered the route system three years later.
Flamboyant to the point of eccentric, but brimming with money, Howard Hughes was drawn to the fledgling airline, becoming its largest shareholder in 1939.
Its first pressurized aircraft, the four-engine Boeing 307 Stratoliner, entered service on the one-stop transcontinental route from New York to Los Angeles via Chicago on July 8 of the following year.
Although the military hiatus required by World War II deprived it of equipment and route development, its end marked the beginning of another battle, with American and United over the transcontinental crossing, which had given rise to its name. Central to the design of the Lockheed L-049 Constellation, with its distinctive airfoil-shaped fuselage and triple tail, Hughes secured TWA’s competitive edge with an aircraft that was superior to United’s DC-4s, which entered service on March 1, 1946. But Lockheed’s counterpart allowed the airline to spread its wings across the Atlantic, with a New York-Gander-Shannon-Paris route, later extended to Rome and Bombay, breaking the international monopoly from Pan Am after the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) granted it route authority.
Four years later, its “TWA” abbreviation stood for its now official “Trans World Airlines” designation.
However, the aircraft manufacturers’ war – for sales – continued to rage. While American and United introduced the higher-capacity Douglas DC-6s, TWA, drawing on Hughes’ influence, responded with the Lockheed L-1049A Super Constellation, which offered a 35 percent increase in passenger capacity over the model. earlier and facilitated the inauguration of the first non-stop transcontinental sector, from Los Angeles to New York, on October 19, 1953.
The final L-1649A Starliner, which introduced a longer wing and the increased range provided by its fuel capacity, launched the Los Angeles-San Francisco-London polar route in October 1957.
Despite Hughes’s positive influence on the airline’s expansion and modernization, he was involved in few corporate decisions, firing Frye, sinking into seclusion, and allowing him to go into debt, prompting the airline’s lawsuit against him. forcing him to hand over his majority control. . He sold his remaining shares in 1965.
Entering the jet age, TWA inaugurated Boeing 707-120 service on the transcontinental route between New York and Los Angeles on March 20, 1959, and the type entered the international arena nine months later on November 23.
Domestic medium-range routes were served by the four-engine Convair CV-880 when it was introduced on January 12, 1961 and was soon replaced by the three-engine Boeing 727-100 in 1964 and the two-engine Douglas DC-9. . 10 in 1966.
Taking delivery of its first Boeing 747-100 widebody on December 31, 1969, the year it had usurped Pan Am as the largest transatlantic airline in the US, it became the first airline to offer domestic service in USA segment of York on February 25 of the following year. The Lockheed L-1011-1 TriStar, his second wide-body aircraft, followed in 1972.
Establishing hubs in New York, St. Louis, Chicago and Kansas City, it served 49 domestic US and 16 European destinations by the end of the decade, the latter including Athens, Barcelona, Dublin, Frankfurt, Lisbon, London -Heathrow. , Madrid, Malaga, Milan, Nice, Paris, Rome, Santa Maria, Shannon, Terceira and Vienna, along with Cairo and Egypt in North Africa and Tel Aviv in the Middle East. As the seventh largest airline in the world, it carried more passengers between the United States and Europe than any other, even on the Los Angeles-London polar route, and had a total of 22,653,000 in 1979.
While Hughes ultimately proved detrimental to the airline, another famous figure, Carl Icahn, a corporate raider who bought most of TWA’s stock in 1985 when financial perils brought on by deregulation left little choice if he wanted to stay on the air, left his own image tarnished. on it, taking the once illustrious international airline and turning it into a low-cost rag.
A brief respite showed promise when it acquired Ozark Air Lines, giving it a monopoly on its St. Louis hub, and Pan Am’s carefully curated international routes in a similar spiral offered it attractively priced assets. But his precarious financial burden broke his back, causing him to slowly sell off his own strengths, notably his London routes from Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York to the United States, for $445 million in 1991, a year before she was forced to sell. file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Another purchase of the route authority, by USAir for service to London from Baltimore and Philadelphia, filled its coffers with a little more cash.
An August 24, 1992 agreement with the three main TWA unions changed the concessions to a 45 percent stake, and Icahn resigned as president the following January, leaving the bird a plucked carcass.
Promise once again peaked when it emerged from bankruptcy on November 3, 1993, having now counted Boeing 767-200 widebody twin-engines, narrowbody MD-80s and Boeing 757-200s in its fleet. , but came back less. that two years later, in June.
However, the wings, once clipped by deregulation and a tarnished image associated with low-cost carriers, were virtually impossible to reestablish, leaving AMR Corporation’s American Airlines to acquire most of its assets and provide financing for its return. bankruptcy on January 10, 2001. after a three-quarter-century flight as one of the “big four” airlines after Eastern, United and the one that kept its spirit in the skies.