Nah, I'm still looking at what happened between 1976 and 1985 as the real issue. You had a chairman who saw the airline as just one subsidiary out of many subsidiaries.
It's not Icahn's fault they decided to spin out TWA.
It's also not Icahn's fault that he was brought in to fend off Frank Lorenzo. That one you have to hold the unions accountable for. They were so interested in avoiding a repeat of what happened at CO that they set all of you up for something far worse.
Here's a good article that lays out the love affair the unions had with Icahn:
http://fortune.com/2013/08/18/the-comeuppance-of-carl-icahn-fortune-1986/
The last paragraph sums it all up:
In its 52-year history, with all profits and losses taken into account, the airline has made no money. Zero. It is a tough business to be locked into.
This was before Icahn had even started to try and recoup his investment...
I've often wondered how different the airline world would have been if TW's unions hadn't been successful in fighting off Lorenzo.
Had TWA become part of Texas Air, Lorenzo would have never bothered with Eastern, People Express, or Frontier, and TWA probably wouldn't have bothered with Ozark. Maybe DL wouldn't have gone after Western, AA after AirCal, or US Airways going after Piedmont and PSA.
Without question, there would have been mergers, but they would have looked much, much different.