This one is for all my TWA friends!

[FrugalFlyerv2.0]

look at how the vestiges of Pan Am have survived compared to TW and you might have some basis for comparison.
UA acquired the largest part of Pan Am in 3 purchases over several years - the Pacific, LHR, and Latin America. UA's presence in the Pacific and LHR is still very solid. The Latin American acquisition for UA has fared worse... but the bigger question is how many employees UA hired and how many of these people were allowed to proceed as normal UA employees. I don't think any of them were singled out or isolated as PA employees... but I'd like to know if they were.

One cannot compare the UA purchase of PA's Pacific, LHR, or LatAm routes, or DL's purchase of PA European assests to the purchase of TWA by AA 10 years ago. First of all, UA had no presence in the Pacific and was shut out of LHR, so it made sense for UA to at minimum to keep the status quo there. Similarly, DL will not dismantle the former NW hub at NRT because it only had the token ATL flight there. My feeling is that you will eventually see DL do to MEM and CVG (and maybe even to some degree to SLC or MSP) what AA did to STL and UA to CLE and US to PIT. TW was mainly a 1-hub domestic carrier with a few international routes thrown in, no alliance membership, and out of money.

But if you want to make that comparison, a better question would be how was UA doing at LHR prior to the CO merger? Or how AA fares at at LHR since the purchase of those slots from TWA. And hey, whatever happenned to that DL hub at FRA?

AA over-reacted to US-UA, which in the end did not happen, but at which point it was probably too late for AA to walk away. In hind sight, they should have walked away.

Nothing against former TW employees, or the dying airline, but all y'all have got to stop grinding that axe. They may not like how they were integrated (assimilated) into AA, but by far they've got it better than if AA would not have stepped in.

 

[AV1]

look at how the vestiges of Pan Am have survived compared to TW and you might have some basis for comparison.
UA acquired the largest part of Pan Am in 3 purchases over several years - the Pacific, LHR, and Latin America. UA's presence in the Pacific and LHR is still very solid. The Latin American acquisition for UA has fared worse... but the bigger question is how many employees UA hired and how many of these people were allowed to proceed as normal UA employees. I don't think any of them were singled out or isolated as PA employees... but I'd like to know if they were.
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DL hired about 6500 PA employees w/ its TATL and Shuttle acquisitions - and those employees were integrated throughout the company.
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Asked yourself whether those PA employees have fared better than TW's employees and you might discover why there is more bitterness over the TW acquisition by AA than from PA's dismemberment by DL and UA.
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Laws were passed to make sure what happened to TW employees won't happen again.
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It's also noteworthy that ORD is hiking airline/passenger fees not long after AA closed STL and ORD now tries to fix its longstanding airfield problems... bet AA wish they still has STL as an option for a hub.

Now, that is a good post.

 

[FA Mikey]

Wow I cannot believe it took this long for one particular poster to try to turn it in to a delta good AA bad thread.

 

[aafsc]

look at how the vestiges of Pan Am have survived compared to TW and you might have some basis for comparison.
UA acquired the largest part of Pan Am in 3 purchases over several years - the Pacific, LHR, and Latin America. UA's presence in the Pacific and LHR is still very solid. The Latin American acquisition for UA has fared worse... but the bigger question is how many employees UA hired and how many of these people were allowed to proceed as normal UA employees. I don't think any of them were singled out or isolated as PA employees... but I'd like to know if they were.
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DL hired about 6500 PA employees w/ its TATL and Shuttle acquisitions - and those employees were integrated throughout the company.
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Asked yourself whether those PA employees have fared better than TW's employees and you might discover why there is more bitterness over the TW acquisition by AA than from PA's dismemberment by DL and UA.
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Laws were passed to make sure what happened to TW employees won't happen again.
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It's also noteworthy that ORD is hiking airline/passenger fees not long after AA closed STL and ORD now tries to fix its longstanding airfield problems... bet AA wish they still has STL as an option for a hub.

Delta basically offered all the New York ground based Pan Am employees employment but the flight crews were another story. How many Pan Am 747 pilots (who were the most senior) did Delta take? They basically wanted only those who were trained on the A-310. What happened to all those MIA based Pan Am employees? Wasn't DL supposed to support a reorganized MIA based Pan Am only to turn around and withhold funding it promised to provide causing the death of Pan Am? You state that Delta hired 6,500 ex-Pan Am but Pan Am had about 20,000 employees; what happened to the other 13,500? Delta hired the ex-Pan Am people they wanted after an interview and NOT in seniority order. When UA bought the Pacific and LHR routes they took a very limited number of pilots and US based F/As and very little (if any at all) ground crew. When Pan Am shut down UA bought their Latin American routes and the ex-Pan Am employees who did get a job with UA had to start all over as new hires; bottom of the pay scale AND seniority list. There are many ex-Pan Am employees that lost it all and had no recall rights to DL or UA. The TWAers fared much better than the Pan Am people because they ALL got hired by AA, were ALL given seniority for pay and benefits, and they ALL have/had recall rights to AA. In fact the vast majority were very senior which immediately shot them to the top of AA's pay scale in addition to having their vacation and sick time accruals earned at TWA honored by AA. TWAers who no longer work for AA had their careers extended from 3 to 10 years which allowed them to retire from AA with a pension, retiree medical and passes. Additionally, there are still a few thousand TWAers working at AA and there could have been many more if they had been willing to move; but they instead chose to retire. Almost all the ex-TWA pilots have been recalled; same with the F/As (except those who fell off the recall list along with the nAAtive F/As). Also, those ex-TWA people who retired before the asset purchase and never worked one day at AA get retiree medical and passes from AA.

For you to say that the Pan Am people "have it better" than the TWA people is absurd and illustrates how your extreme love affair with DL has affected your ability to think rationally.

 

[WorldTraveler]

thank you, AV1.... sometimes asking questions are uncomfortable to some people but for others it sheds light on what is really going on.
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Frugal,
excellent points and I'm glad you took the time to write your thoughts....
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you are correct that DL and UA both parts of PA in order to give it a presence in markets that it did not serve at all... true statement.
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It is also true that AA's purchase of TW did not really add much strategically to AA.... the stated purpose at the time was that it was to be overflow to ORD which was at the time running out of capacity.
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The dot.com crash and falling demand and yields for air travel proved your point that there wasn't the long term demand for travel that AA believed there would be... which was completely and finally confirmed by 9/11 and the need to pull down alot of service. Of course the low fare carriers did replace alot of that service but they did not largely use a hub and spoke system to do it.... except for WN which before long could carry a higher percentage of transit passengers through MDW than UA or AA do through ORD....
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of course there are those that say that AA bought TW to eliminate a company that existed soley by aggressively discounting.... not only on key east-west flows which competed w/ AA but also to/from the Caribbean.
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If the intent is to say that AA shouldn't be held to the same standard as UA or DL for their asset acqusitions because they were done for different purposes, then we are in agreement.
The question then is why AA took the risk to acquire a company that ultimately had to be dismantled... and that process is causing AA an enormous amount of pain.
If there is such a thing as karma, some would say that AA is getting theirs for buying TW for no other purpose than to dismantle it.
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As for LHR, UA and CO according to DOT data now carry more traffic out of LHR than AA does on its own metal. Before that, UA was #2 at LHR, a good distance behind AA but in the past couple years UA even before the CO merger has been able to overtake AA as the largest airline in the local ORD-LHR market in which AA had been the leader.
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As for FRA, DL used the dismemberment of the FRA hub as the basis for adding a number of new nonstops to markets that previously connected over FRA.
Until the CO/UA merger, DL remained the largest airline between the US and continental Europe.
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If the intent of mergers and acquisitions is to provide the ingredients necessary for an airline to expand in a region, then DL and UA's acquisitions of PA assets succeeded far more than AA's did of TW.. if there was some other justification for the AA/TW merger/acquisition, then the people involved deserve for it to be called what it was.

actually, aafsc, I asked the question as to who fared better.
DL didn't hire PA people from MIA or 747 pilots because DL did not acquire those assets.
The lawsuit against DL for terminating its funding of the reorganized PA in Latin America has long since been settled and DL was not found to be at fault; PA had performance targets which they did not meet triggering DL's ability to walk away from the deal.
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in your counts of those 20,000 people, you didn't tell us how many people UA did hire....even if it was only crews, it was not an insignificant number of people.
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You apparently believe that TW people did fare better than PA people despite the closure of the TW operation... and I won't argue with your point which you have taken the time to develop based on the data you presented. Remember I asked the question.
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Perhaps then you have another explanation as to why such bitterness grew out of the TW acquisition and why laws were passed that prevent what happened to TW people to never happen again... for some reason, those laws didn't need to be passed for other airline mergers and acquisitions. Apparently for asset acquisitions, both DL and UA were within their legal rights to not hire by seniority and to pick and choose the people they wanted to hire.
It also doesn't change the fact that so far as I know - and you haven't provided anything to say otherwise, those ex-PA employees were not singled out as a separate group of people who did not integrate with other DL or UA employees.
Did that happen or not?
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[aafsc]

First time I have cried..
One Great Airline, One Stolen Future

One great airline-back in the 1960s and 70's.
One stolen future-you're right, stolen by Carl Icahn.

 

[MCI transplant]

Just look at all the $$$$ AA spent saving TWA..Never mind what it did to morale..
Don't like your seniority????????????????????? Too bad.....

<_< ------Sorry Hopeless!!! I wasn't talking about AA, I was talking about TWA!!!------- As for seniority, I have more than you!----- I'm retired!!! So you can stick your seniority where the sun don't shine!!!

 

[Hopeful]

<_< ------Sorry Hopeless!!! I wasn't talking about AA, I was talking about TWA!!!------- As for seniority, I have more than you!----- I'm retired!!! So you can stick your seniority where the sun don't shine!!!

Waaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

aLL WE GOT FROM twa WERE A BUNCH OF LAZY ASS SCROUNGERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[AV1]

Waaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

aLL WE GOT FROM twa WERE A BUNCH OF LAZY ASS SCROUNGERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pure Idiot!!!!!!

 

[Ifly2]

Waaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

aLL WE GOT FROM twa WERE A BUNCH OF LAZY ASS SCROUNGERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I now have approximately equal amonts of time with both airlines...

From a business view, AA wins hands down, from about 1982/3, until about 2001.

From 2001 til now, AA still wins, so far... but the similarities are scary...

People wise, especially in the "laziness" category... Absolutely No Comparison... and AA is not the better airline.... not by a long, long, ways... overall...

 

[Flying low]

I'm really not surprised that this as turned into such a hate thread. When I watched the video MCI posted, I took it as a remembrance/tribute for all the TWA people.

 

[MCI transplant]

I'm really not surprised that this as turned into such a hate thread. When I watched the video MCI posted, I took it as a remembrance/tribute for all the TWA people.

<_< ------- Flying low,------- Maybe you can explain to me?------ It's been ten years now, and people like Hopeless still feel threatened buy TWA, and it's former employees? I said threatened, because why else would I get a reaction like that simply over a post about an Airline that no longer exists? TWA is gone! Most of it's employees are also!-------- So why such a hate charged comeback? It simply does not compute! The TWA employees didn't ask to be bought/merged with AA! In fact most were against it!--------- But than again, the employees of both AA, and TWA, really didn't have much of a say about it at the time now did we?

 

[Flying low]

<_< ------- Flying low,------- Maybe you can explain to me?------ It's been ten years now, and people like Hopeless still feels threatened buy TWA, and it's former employees? I said threatened, because why else would I get a reaction like that simply over a post about an Airline that no longer exists? TWA is gone! Most of it's employees are also!-------- So why such a hate charged comeback? It simply does not compute! The TWA employees didn't ask to be bought/merged with AA! In fact most were against it!--------- But than again, the employees of both AA, and TWA, really didn't have much of a say about it at the time now did we?

I really have no clue why the hatred between TWA & AA. Maybe EX TWA upset with the way things were handled, upsetting there lives and forced to move and basically start over. Maybe AA employees feeling threatened by the TWA guys? What was the main reason for closing MCI? I'm under the impression (from the rumors I heard) that it was mainly the maintenance and up keep of the hangers. AA certainly could have used MCI to catch up on the 757's and the 737's that are falling down plus third party work. I've always heard good things about the quality of work at MCI.

What is, is what it is. People just to admit it and get over it.

 

[chris perry]

The problem here with TWA was......Carty he was so stuck upon himself and looking to make a hero out of his ego !!!!!!Carty completely loss sight of eveything. He was on a spending spree like no one had ever seen at AA. The fact remains AA is still digesting TWA's assets and people. AA would have faired much better buying new aircraft,but hindsight is 20/20. Now we have at least 5 different configuration MD80's that were never maintained to AA ( prior standards) or modified to our current fleet configuration.We have a fleet of misfit Md80's. We bought all those assets and today have the same number of flights as pre 911 days. Im still convinced that bankruptcy was the only option for AA business wise. The current way bankrupty is conducted in my opinion is
being abused by corporations.....Delta etc used it to gain the competitive edge.....Now here we are at a crossroad again....?

 

[nbmcg01]

The problem here with TWA was......Carty he was so stuck upon himself and looking to make a hero out of his ego !!!!!!Carty completely loss sight of eveything. He was on a spending spree like no one had ever seen at AA. The fact remains AA is still digesting TWA's assets and people. AA would have faired much better buying new aircraft,but hindsight is 20/20. Now we have at least 5 different configuration MD80's that were never maintained to AA ( prior standards) or modified to our current fleet configuration.We have a fleet of misfit Md80's. We bought all those assets and today have the same number of flights as pre 911 days. Im still convinced that bankruptcy was the only option for AA business wise. The current way bankrupty is conducted in my opinion is
being abused by corporations.....Delta etc used it to gain the competitive edge.....Now here we are at a crossroad again....?

Bottom line, the video was wonderful to watch, a tribute to a wonderful airline. Many of us just plain miss it, no more, no less.