Originally Posted by
Lomapaseo
I thought it was Howard Hughes that screwed TWA
At the end of TWA (I think 2001), the employees "owned" the airline, but Carl Icahn owned about 40% of the seats, which were sold on sites like Priceline. He got the money from these ticket sales, which he did not share with the airline.
20 years ago I was buying tickets through Priceline, and I found out about TWA because I got placed on them. I actually liked flying on TWA; I gained a lot of respect for the pilots and FAs who were with them at the end. TWA's problems were that they had almost no ground staff (this was true at both DCA and BWI). One of my all time favorite upgrades was on a $99 one-way ticket BWI-STL-SFO; TWA was so desperate for money that they overlooked their usual policy that "bulk tickets" were not upgradeable, and they sold me an upgrade at the airport 90 minutes before scheduled departure for an additional $99. I thus had confirmed F one-way ticket for $198 (their staff in SFO wouldn't sell me an upgrade on the return). The food and service were great; they even had decent tasting champagne on the flight.
The "new" runway at STL, which former Congressman Dick Gephardt got the funding to buy out about half the property owners in the municipality of Bridgeton, Missouri, was built for TWA's STL hub. I think WN now operates about half the flights out of STL.