Los Angeles Travel Art in the Golden Age - Trans World Airlines

Trans World Airlines is the third national airline I'll be looking at which called Los Angeles home in the 1960s. It was a golden age of advertising, the Jet Age as airline companies switched to jet engines, and vacation travel became cheaper and easier. 

Unlike United and American, who were also formed by merging regional airlines in the pre-WWII era, TWA no longer exists. Like United and American, TWA formed in an era where cargo was the main air business. The postmaster general wanted bigger airlines to give airmail contracts to, and thus Transcontinental Air Transport combined with Western Air Express to form Transcontinental & Western Air. 

Back when it was Transcontinental and Western Air, TWA was known as The Lingbergh Line as Lucky Lindy had a hand in the running of an "airline run by flyers". The Lindbergh route which started service in 1930 was one of the first all-plane coast to coast services. It took 36 hours with an overnight in Kansas City. 

These early trips to San Francisco through Los Angeles helped paved the way for LA as a travel destination. By 1940 TWA had four daily flights going west: the Sun Pacer, the Sky Chief, the Thunderbird, and the Grand Canyon. Still with an overnight in Kansas City, the Thunderbird also made stops in Pittsburgh and Chicago before arriving in Los Angeles the following day. 

1941 saw TWA add Boeing 307 Stratoliner service, the first commercial aircraft with a pressurized cabin allowing for flight at an altitude of 20,000 feet. TWA had five such planes, with the war effort requiring faster long distance travel. Same day arrival in Burbank for New York was finally possible. 

This bit about Burbank is something else I just learned. These 1940s flights weren't coming into Westchester, they were coming in at Burbank and Glendale. In 1939 Burbank's Union Air Terminal had 16 departures a day: eight on United, five on Western, and three on TWA. American Airlines used Grand Central Airport in Glendale as its base of operations. The switch down to LAX happened around 1946. 

Howard Hughes gained a controlling interest in the company in 1941, and went after Pan Am's designation as the sole international commercial airline. In 1946 TWA changed it's name to the Trans World Airline to advertise this new international serive, with Cairo the first overseas destination. Soon TWA was advertising Polar Route service from Los Angeles to Europe taking a jet stream "over the top". 

This poster is dated circa 1956, definitely after 1950 when TWA officially changed its name to Trans World Airlines (added the s). The illustrator was Bob Smith (not the singer). It has the palm trees and a mission to invoke Southern California, as well as the golden sky. David Klein also had a golden sky design with a mission during the era which is much more progressive. 

This one is pretty great, with the abstract golden sun, the birds flying into this Mexican inspired design, the golden sky and the bells of the mission tower. There are even palm trees in the background, but a more interesting spiky version. This Klein art collection puts the poster at circa 1959, but the Jets line makes me think it could be further into the sixties when TWA became the first all jet airline. There's another popular David Klein Los Angeles travel poster from that era. 

  
Here we get another bit art, depicting the Hollywood Bowl. The searchlights have the Los Angeles night sky in various shades of blue, and the patrons in the bowl are represented by glowing stars. 

There's also a version of that poster with fares and flights superimposed. The daily SuperJet flights left once in the morning, once in the evening, and then a red eye flight. With both posters advertising SuperJets, I imagine they're both from around the same time in the 60s. 

TWA was also a title sponsor at Disneyland, with the TWA Moonliner the tallest structure in the park's Tomorrowland. The Moonliner stood outside the Rocket to the Moon ride, which later became the Mission to Mars in 1975. The Moonliner only lasted until 1967, as the Apollo project had gone in a different direction than the rockets imagined in the 1950s. This would be one of the ongoing problems with Tomorrowland which was redesigned in 1967, and then again in the 90s, consistently finding its future predictions had become outdated.

The Disneyland-TWA poster also depicts the park's other lands: the Jungle Cruise of Adventureland, Sleeping Beauty's Castle of Fantasyland, the Fort of Tom Sawyer Island part of Frontierland, and Main Street Station representing Main Street USA. 

Disney needed to shuttle people from all over the country to his theme park, so an airline partner was necessary from the beginning. Inside these brochures were maps of the park and paragraphs on each land.