Trans World Airlines

That private jet was shaking.

I said, nigga, we should have been on TWA.

I said, because if I die, everybody's going to be happy.

That nigga dead now.

We'll have Spike Milligan jumping through the bottom of a boat.

Staying with Sellers, he made a series of three commercials for TWA in the mid-70s.

What do you know about these? As I say, I presume you would have been sort of au fait with these, were you, before I came along?

Well, au fait, maybe pushing it, but I was aware of them.

I'm guessing they were made around the time...

He was becoming big again with the return of the Pink Panther because it was around 75.

And it's more or less, it's an advert trying to promote TWA, which is an American airline.

A taste of Europe flying in the USA was the tagline.

I hadn't made that connection, but oh my, Mary's right.

Carl Icahn is hated by some in the industry for his destructive takeover and asset stripping of TWA in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

He gained control through a leveraged buyout.

He sold off the crown jewels.

He gave himself a lucrative ticket-selling deal where he could sell tickets on his own website at a 45% discount, stripping TWA of revenue, pricing power, and everything, and ended up pushing TWA to two bankruptcies.

Icon did better at JetBlue more recently.

He bought a minority stake, had two seats on the board.

In this envelope, Mr. Jordan, is a one-way air flight ticket to New York City.

A TWA plane leaves the Cairo airport at 3 o'clock tomorrow afternoon.

I suggest that you be on it.

Let me get this straight here at bay.

But in my childhood, Pan Am was...

With TWA, those are the two big American airlines.

And Pan Am was the most professional of them all.

It was a luxury airline.

Braniff, Eastern Pan Am, gone.

TWA ends up inside American.

Northwest in Delta, Continental with United, over and over the same arc, consolidate or disappear.

This wasn't adaptation, it was weakness shuffling the pieces.

Who's coming after you? Are you building a machine so dependent on today's conditions and on you personally that it turns into a relic the second they shift? Or are you creating something that will evolve in other hands? The irony is brutal.

The old guard carriers in Chasing Permanence turned into spectres.

Pan Am, TWA names echoing in merger paperwork.

The little bakery by centring a perfect cake and the people who bake it found the endurance the giants wanted still open a landmark.

Yeah.

You always think of the 60s as being the TWA, Pan Am.

Yeah.

Luxury in the sky kind of era.