We’ll Never See its Likes Again

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Just over ten years ago, one of the most storied names in aviation disappeared forever. It was April 9, 2001, an inappropriately sunny day for a wake in St. Louis. Thousands of employees gathered in a cavernous hangar, many wearing the “Two Great Airlines, One Great Future” ballcaps being handed out at the entrance. Burgers and brats were consumed en masse. A Boeing 777 and a Lockheed Constellation stood just outside the hangar, nose-to-nose, and many toured these pinnacles of their respective ages. It was a bittersweet day. Nobody but the bean counters really wanted the merger, but most thought it was a better outcome than liquidation, a real possibility considering the airline’s meager and waning cash reserves. A thousand miles away, Mohammed Atta and his compatriots were preparing the attack that would put the vast majority of these people out of work and turn STL into a virtual ghost town, but nobody knew that at the time.

Transcontinental and Western Airlines was itself the product of a 1930 merger between Transcontinental Air Transport and Western Air Express. T&WA inherited a transcontinental route structure from TAT, and a visionary named Jack Frye from Western Air Express. Frye was the man who delivered to Douglas Airlines the specifications for the DC-1, and later the DC-2 and DC-3. In 1939, Howard Hughes invested in the airline, later becoming the majority owner. Hughes ordered the fleet of Lockheed Constellations that would make the new Trans World Airlines moniker no great exaggeration. Overseas expansion began after WW2 and continued steadily for 40 years.

TWA was late in ordering jets at the end of the 1950s but they did become the first all-jet airline with the retirement of the Connies in 1967. Two years later, TWA surpassed PanAm in transatlantic traffic and opened Pacific routes to create a true round-the-world route structure. In the 1970s, they developed an extensive intra-Europe network using B727s, even maintaining pilot bases in major European cities. As one of the most visible American symbols abroad, they became a favorite target of terrorist hijackers and bombers through the 1970s and into the 1980s. By 1988, TWA was carrying over 50% of all transatlantic passengers.

It was a dominance that would not last long. Deregulation and the LBO craze of the 1980s turned TWA into a target for corporate raiders. In 1985, unwanted attention from Frank Lorenzo drove the board of directors into the arms of Carl Icahn. He turned out to be every bit as destructive a force as Lorenzo. Icahn sold off TWA’s most valuable assets to competitors, in particular their prized London route authorities to American Airlines. Icahn financed a 1986 purchase of Ozark Airlines by selling their fleet of DC-9s to lessors, then torpedoed the intra-Europe route structure in 1989 by signing DC-9 leases that prohibited operation outside the continental United States.

Icahn wasn’t ousted until 1993, by which time he had transferred hundreds of millions of dollars from TWA into his own accounts. It took a bankruptcy to get rid of him, as well as a poisonous deal that would ultimately contribute to TWA’s downfall. TWA agreed to sell Icahn’s Karibu Corporation an unlimited number of tickets at 45% off the lowest published fare for ten years, excluding tickets originating or terminating in STL. It was a bitter pill to swallow in 1993, and became even more punishing in subsequent years as internet-based ticket sales soared. Icahn sold the tickets through lowestfare.com, and TWA could not compete. Karibu cost them an estimated $150 million per year. TWA went into bankruptcy a second time in 1995, and still couldn’t get the Karibu agreement terminated.

The company fought hard for survival. They reorganized their domestic structure around St Louis to help counter Karibu. The unions gave huge concessions. Employees actually bought an MD-83 and donated it to the company. TWA pilot Bill Compton took over as CEO, continuing to fly the line once a month. TWA was on the verge of profitability when a bare wire in a B747-131’s center fuel tank sparked disaster just off Long Island. Passengers deserted the airline in droves.

By the turn of the millennium, TWA was a ghost of its former self. Their aging B747s and L1011s had all been sold in the aftermath of TWA800, and only a few transatlantic routes remained. They still had a major presence in JFK at their iconic Terminal 5, but otherwise had retrenched to St Louis. Even in the bountiful days of the late 1990s, TWA was losing money, and by the fall of 2000 they were down to under $150 million in the bank.

It’s hard to say, then, what moved me to apply for an internship with TWA for the spring semester of 2001. I knew a girl in St Louis; she turned out to be nutty and drove me to drinking, but I liked her at the time. I had utterly burned myself out flying over the previous summer at UND and needed to get away from Grand Forks. Perhaps it was misplaced affection for the underdog. I said as much in the interview: “It’s do or die time for TWA. I’d like to be part of ‘do.’” It was either a winning line or there was a shortage of applicants lining up to intern for an airline apparently on the verge of collapse.

As it turned out, I worked for TWA for all of three days before they announced a third bankruptcy and purchase by American Airlines. For the remainder of the spring, I got to know a dying airline that had become a husk of itself, still living on the memory of past glory. What remained was a core of absolutely fantastic people and a singularly unique culture. At the time, I had no airline experience; I didn’t realize just how wonderfully different TWA was until well afterward.

When busy line pilots enthusiastically welcomed a lowly intern onto their jumpseat and treated me like a V.I.P., I didn’t know how overinflated egos complicate jumpseat politics at other airlines. When matronly flight attendants who had been flying since Kennedy was President tried to ply me with booze and set me up with their cute granddaughters, I never thought that other airlines’ “cat ranchers” might have a markedly different reputation. When my boss in Training Systems Development insisted that I take a week off to travel as a reward for work well done, I didn’t think much of it. When I met the retired TWA Captain in his 80s who still volunteered as a goodwill ambassador at LAX, I assumed all airlines had similarly loyal employees who couldn’t bear to say goodbye…and figured they would all be happy to have the extra help. When I helped a group of frequent fliers throw an unofficial farewell party in the old STL Ambassador’s Club, I guessed that most businessmen would get a little teary-eyed over the demise of their airline of choice.

At the Hilton in Cairo, Egypt, a very senior B767 Captain reached into his pocket and rented me a dayroom against my wishes because he recognized that a very jetlagged youngster on his first trip outside North America might do something stupid roaming the streets of a third world country. His parting words to me were, “Someday I hope to see you in the left seat. When that day comes, I want you to remember this lesson: always, always take care of your crew.” I took his words to heart and yearned for the day when I could fly with such wise old birdmen and learn from their wealth of experience.

TWA turned me into an airline pilot for life when the circumstances of the time probably ought to have sent me running for the hills. The majority of the pilots were stapled to American’s list and subsequently furloughed after 9/11. An even greater proportion of ground-based workers lost their jobs. Every single TWA flight attendant ended up on the street; in fact, I was on a TWA flight on their last day in November 2001 and every FA on the plane had over 40 years seniority. Of my coworkers in Training Systems Development, one was reassigned to Dallas and the others lost their jobs. One committed suicide less than a year later. Even Captain Randy at LAX had to finally resign himself to retirement.

Today, a sticker with TWA’s double globe logo graces my flight bag. Almost every week, pilots from the far corners of the industry approach to ask me whether I flew for their beloved former airline. My status as a mere intern in the fading twilight of TWA’s long history seems to do little to tamper these strangers’ enthusiasm; they talk to me like old friends. I think it’s because I understand a little bit of what was lost in 2001. The unvarnished reality is that by the end TWA paid their pilots poorly, flew shabby equipment, had few good routes, and couldn’t offer any light at the end of the tunnel. It was the people who made the airline. I don’t know if TWA was exceptionally talented at recruiting good folks, if simply treating their employees respectfully made the difference, or whether years of shared adversity had knit the group tightly. Whatever the cause, I now recognize that TWA had an utterly unique culture that will likely never be replicated in this industry.

If there is one overriding lesson I learned from my experience at TWA, it is this. When something good comes along in aviation, appreciate the heck out of it while you still can. Chances are, it will not last. Everything good in this industry, unfortunately, seems fated to disappear.

A Short History of Flight

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Mankind has dreamed of flight from the very dawn of time. Cave paintings and fossilized remains discovered in Croatia prove that sometime around 30,000 B.C., an early tribe of Homo Sapiens designed and began construction on a wood-and-reed aircraft clearly inspired by the wings of eagles. Unfortunately, the project was beset by design flaws, underperforming subcontractors, an overextended supply chain, and certification delays. To offset cost overruns, the village aircraft consortium floated an IPO, but it attracted little interest and share prices plummeted from the very start. The village elders were debating subsidies for the consortium when a competing tribe of Neanderthals snuck into their camp and clubbed everyone to death. Dreams of flight would remain dreams only for thousands of years.

Around 1500 B.C., a Greek communist named Daedalus and his son Icarus wished to return from Crete to Athens for the annual austerity measures riots. King Minos, an early tea party member, forbade it, so Daedalus and Icarus plotted their leave. Daedalus rejected a more traditional seaborne escape; a pleasure cruise on the sunny Mediterranean, he declared, was a bourgeois extravagance of the corrupt middle class. His escape could only be revolutionary, and to that end Daedalus superglued duck feathers onto his and Icarus’ arms and they flew out over the sea. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, but Icarus rejected the fascist paternalism of the reactionary generation and flew where he damn well pleased. In the process he got a very nasty sunburn, stopped flapping to apply aloe, and plummeted to the sea where the modern laws of physics were already in effect; water tension snapped his spine and liquefied his internal organs. Daedalus torched a bank in Icarus’ honor.

Jack and Joe Montgolfier were French farmers who wished there was a quicker way to get their produce to market. Observing the way that smoke rises from lit fires and orating politicians, Joe deduced that heat rises and built the first hot air balloon in 1783. At first things went swimmingly, for their balloon transported their ducks, sheep, and roosters quite safely and efficiently. But then a rumor sprang up that the balloon was German, and all the Frenchmen started surrendering to it. The brothers Montgolfier solved the problem by sending up a man on all subsequent flights to shout Frenchy things, and human flight was born.

Otto Lilienthal was German, and surrendering Frenchmen were forever impeding his experiments with gliders in the late 1800s. It became such a problem that he built an artificial hill near Berlin, where he could work in peace without Frenchmen surrendering to him. His life was cut tragically short in 1896, when he crashed into a lost Polack. His last words as he lay dying were “Kleine Opfer müssen gebracht werden!,” which means “We should probably just annex them both!”

The Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics and visionaries who saw that bikes were clearly on their way out; after all, who in their right mind would toil and sweat and risk getting trampled by horses when they could fire up their trusty 3 horsepower Stanley Steamer and cruise to work in comfort and safety? Instead, the Wright Brothers turned their attention to powered heavier-than-air flight. In 1903 they got Charlie Taylor to build them a light gasoline-powered engine, strapped it to a Lilienthal glider, checked carefully to make sure there were no Frenchmen or Polacks present, and flew into history (actually, into a sand dune 100 feet away). They spent the rest of their lives suing anyone who challenged their assertion that they were the Fathers of Flight, as well as anyone who tried to repeat their feat in a similar aircraft. Among the Wright Brothers’ greatest accomplishments is the creation of the aileron.

In 1914, all of Europe went to war and dragged all their colonies along with them (including the cute ones who naively insisted they were ex-colonies). Two happy side effects were massive depopulation that prevented the world from starving to death by 1972, and a rapid advance in aircraft design. Everyone had a jolly time shooting off their propellers and dropping flour bombs on the trenches. It was so much fun that the French stopped surrendering and joined in heartily. The Red Baron pioneered the first airborne pizza delivery service, and everyone was happy and well fed during their 3-week average lifespan at the front.

A major flaw in World War One aircraft was uncovered at the end of the war, when it was discovered that wood-and-fabric planes could not be easily turned into beer cans. Instead, barnstormers flew them around the country, inspiring thousands to leave the comfort and safety of their Stanley Steamers to take to the air. One of these was Charles Lindbergh, a disgruntled postal worker who decided to fly across the Atlantic. He brilliantly realized that the surest way to find one’s way to Europe is to do so in an airplane without windows, and he did exactly that in 1927, all the way from New York to Paris. There he was mobbed by thousands of surrendering Frenchmen, a traumatic experience that turned him into a lifelong German.

In 1939, failed Bruno Ganz impersonator Adolf Hitler said “Kleine Opfer müssen gebracht werden!” and annexed both Poland and France. All of Europe went to war and dragged all their colonies along with them (including the cutes ones who pretended to be neutral for a few years to prove their independence). Two happy side effects were massive depopulation that prevented the world from starving to death until 2086, and a rapid advance in aircraft design. The French sat this one out, but everyone else had a marvelous time. Many people joined flying clubs and warbird associations, for such classics as the P-51, Spitfire, Bf 109, and B-17 were readily available then. Airshows were held almost daily. Fly-ins were held at prime holiday destinations like Italy, the French coast, and the South Pacific. Eventually the Germans insisted on all events being held in Germany, which made it all rather dull, so everyone went home (the Americans by way of Japan for one last airshow). This time everyone had the foresight to build their airplanes of aluminum for easy beer-can conversion.

After the war, the Americans turned their undivided attention to making peaceful technological advances for the betterment of humankind. They invented jet engines and installed them on supersonic fighters to keep the peace. They built massive bombers to pulverize any troublemaking cities quickly and humanely. They developed bigger and better nuclear weapons to wipe out whole countries of miscreants with the least pain and inconvenience to the recipients possible, and invented giant rockets to deliver this humanitarian assistance in mere minutes at the press of a button. Contrary to all hopes and expectations, massive depopulation did not result, and mankind was doomed to eventual starvation. More happily, the new technology was readily transferred to the realm of space exploration, where great strides were being made. In 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon. He memorialized the occasion by exclaiming “Holy [redacted], I’m [redacted] walking on the mother-[redacted] moon! Can you [redacted] believe it!?” NASA deemed these remarks unsuitable for television audiences and substituted moon landing footage that had been pre-recorded on a Hollywood sound stage.

Meanwhile, ordinary Americans were doing what Americans did best: bilking other Americans out of their hard-earned money. Legendary men like Eddie Rickenbacker, Juan Trippe, and Howard Hughes built airlines like Eastern, PanAm, and TWA into global powerhouses that would stand forever as immortal testaments to the inherent goodness, wisdom, and morality of American Capitalism. In 1958 Boeing launched the jet age with the 707, an airplane that whisked passengers to their destinations in half the time and half the comfort of the old propliners. Suddenly there was no place in the world that Americans could not quickly and easily go to loudly complain about how inferior everything was to America.

In 1978, everyman Edward Kennedy and peanut farmer Jimmy Carter lamented the fact that commercial flying was still too expensive for the Average Joe. Failing to see any way to decrease the inherent cost of using a finite fuel source to accelerate an object weighing hundreds of thousands of pounds and consisting of thousands of intricate parts painstakingly assembled by skilled craftsman to near-supersonic speeds and loft it to altitudes at the outer reaches of the atmosphere and do so with great reliability and safety, Kennedy and Carter hit on a plan to simply transfer the costs. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 indeed made flying much cheaper for passengers, and much more expensive for airlines, their employees, their suppliers, and their shareholders. It was wildly successful. By 2000, so many people were flying that nobody could fly anywhere without a three hour delay.

Saudi bad boy Osama bin Laden graciously lent a helping hand in 2001, the newly created Transportation Security Administration did its part, and soon traffic was humming right along with nary a delay. The airlines took advantage of the breather to rid themselves of all their old, nasty, polluting narrow body aircraft and replace them with comfortable, efficient Canadian Regional Jets. These aircraft were flown by pilots so experienced that they met or exceeded FAA minimums, and their crews were paid near or sometimes even at the federal minimum wage. Any remaining gaps in the system were gamely filled in by Southwest Airlines, which seemed to come out of nowhere with an audacious business plan that involved young, attractive stewardesses in gogo boots serving free booze (who could’ve anticipated that working, especially in Texas!?!).

In the mid-aughts, airline executives courageously declared that they would not allow such stirring success to go unrewarded. Convinced of the justness of their cause, they took their companies to court, where some of the bravest judges in the free world did the right thing and transferred more of the cost of flying onto airline employees, suppliers, and shareholders. At long last, airline executives were able to share in the bounty of all they had wrought through the force of their blood, sweat, and tears. After striking such a blow for freedom one might expect the executives to rest on their laurels, but they were relentless in their pursuit of justice. With hardly a pause, they embarked on a crusade against the rapacious work rules that kept them toiling night and day. In short time they had merged six airlines into three, thus emancipating countless executives from the tyranny of their duties and freeing them to enjoy the fruits of their labors with such middle-class pastimes as yachting, mansion decoration, and making love to the secretaries of their Vice-Presidents’ Executive Assistants’ Assistants’ Assistants to the Assistant Executive Assistants.

The remaining executives, meanwhile, were finding their obligations much less taxing as they had discovered they could run an airline without actually running an airline. Through the magic of codeshares and global alliances they could sell tickets and take in revenue while poor executives still enslaved on the dark shores of Europe and Asia did the hard work of actually flying the passengers. Whatever could not be done offshore was subcontracted to regional airlines, whose executives still worked very hard flying so many legs every day but didn’t seem to mind so long as wads of cash were being constantly stuffed in their suits.

Boeing executives took note of airline management’s stirring example and threw off their own chains by shutting down production of every airliner except the most dated one, which Southwest bribed Boeing to keep building with gogo-booted stewardesses and free booze. Meanwhile they designed a revolutionary new airliner clearly inspired by the wings of eagles and built with advanced wood and reed composites, but the project was beset by design flaws, underperforming subcontractors, an overextended supply chain, and certification delays. None of this bothered the executives much, for all the hard work was being done overseas, freeing them to enjoy such middle-class pastimes as yachting, mansion decoration, and making love to the Secretary of the Air Force.

As the second decade of the twenty-first century dawns, America stands triumphant in the field of aerospace, as in most other things. We have the biggest airlines, who are burdened with very little flying. We have the best airplane manufacturers, who only need do very little building. Our marvelous aviation industry, in short, has achieved the American Dream, so succinctly summed up by that philosopher of the mother country, Mark Knopfler: “Money for nothing, and chicks for free.” Let the Canadians, the Brazilians, the Japanese do the hard work. We will have a jolly time yachting and mansion decorating and mocking those blinkered Airbus executives working hard shouting Frenchy things at their Polack workers and surrendering wheelbarrows full of cash to their German bankers. The future is bright!