Frye and Richter disagreed with the policies of Howard Hughes and his non-flying board. Jack Frye resigned in February 1947, leaving Paul Richter to operate the airline until his resignation from the Board of Directors and Exececutive Vice President in April 1947.
Thus ended the era of "The Airline Run by Flyers". Beginning in 1926 with their Aero Corp. of Ca. and Standard Airlines, a one-plane operation, Jack Frye and Paul E. Richter and Walter Hamilton pioneered Transcontinental & Western Air to a Trans World Airline. TWA had established routes from Europe to Asia during the late 1940s and 1950s, flying its aircraft as far east as Hong Kong.
Throughout the next two decades, TWA suffered constant short-term and short-sighted management, with the exception of the able and highly regarded Ralph Damon. TWA survived partly due to the airline's legal maneuvering of the 40's that eliminated a possible competitive threat from American Overseas Airlines, affiliated with American Airlines, relegating them to non-scheduled charter service only and eventually forcing them out of all European-U.S. service by 1950. As a result, TWA and Pan Am were the only U.S. airlines that served Europe until the 1970s.
In 1950, the airline officially changed its name to Trans World Airlines. Between 1954 and 1958 it moved its executive offices from its landmark downtown Kansas City building to New York City. However, the servicing of the fleet continued to be handled in Kansas City, Kansas. Initially, servicing was at a former B-25 Mitchell bomber factory at Fairfax Airport. When the Great Flood of 1951 destroyed the facility, the city of Kansas City built TWA a 5,000-acre airport on farmland 15 miles north of downtown at what was to become Kansas City International Airport. At its peak, the airline was one of Kansas City's biggest employers with more than 20,000 employees.
In the 1950s the TWA Moonliner was the tallest structure at Disneyland and depicted atomic-powered travel to come in 1986.
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TWA's maintenance hangar at Philadelphia airport, built in 1956, from an undated photo from Historic American Engineering Record.
TWA suffered from its late entry to the jet age and in 1956 Hughes placed an order for 63 Convair 880s at a cost of $400 million. The transaction was to ultimately result in Hughes losing control of the airline because outside creditors financing the deal did not want Hughes controlling development and operation of aircraft.