Fri Dec 10, 2021 3:31 am
First time posting, long time lurker!
This thread brings very fond memories. Sadly, I only flew TWA once (or twice if you count the return flight.
Even though this wasn’t my first flight on a widebody, it definitely was the first one I remember so vividly, as insss fll little to remember the first time I did when I was still a baby.
On August 20, 1993, my mother and I flew on TWA for the first time, from SJU to JFK. I remember the agent at the ticket counter being very friendly, and she even wrote “gate 39” on the ticket jacket. The inside of the jacket displayed TWA’s slogan from back then: “The most comfortable way to fly”.
Eventually, we made our way to gate 39, and I saw our carriage to JFK, an L-1011, parked at the gate. I was only 11 at the time (now you all know my actual age!), but I remember most details quite vividly because I was very excited about this trip. Even though this wasn’t my first flight on a widebody, it was the first one I remember since I was too little to remember the first 1-2 times when I was a baby/toddler.
At last, the gate agents made the boarding call for TW 11, departing at 12:55p. I was sorta disappointed I didn’t end up on a window seat - I was on 16C. We took off on runway 8 for the 3 hour, 18 minute flight. Everything about the flight - from the flight attendants (one of them gave me one of those plastic wings I still possess to this day), to the projectors above the seats for the inflight movie, to how smooth the flight was, to the inflight meal (rice with beef), to the way that plane touched down at JFK. I am not 100% sure which runway we landed on at JFK, but I somehow think it was 13L. Even our deplaning was special - that was the only time in all my years of flying that we deplaned from the right side (I remember reading somewhere that TWA’s Terminal 5 or 6 at JFK had a jet bridge designed like this - anyone knows what gate number was that?)
We ended up missing our flight on our return to SJU because of very heavy traffic due to a car accident on the Grand Central Parkway. We were supposed to get on TW 94, departing at 5:45p, and this time I was assigned a window seat (26A), but since we missed the flight, that was no longer going to be the case (an 11yo’s first world problems, haha).
We were rebooked for the following morning, September 1, 1993. At 8:00a, TW 12 was pushing back on a very gray JFK. I was on 34D. The little I could see out the left window from my seat was a couple of AA DC-10s and MD-11s as were taxiing towards runway 13R. Morning rush hour traffic at JFK delayed our takeoff by 30 minutes, and the dark clouds made our takeoff/climb quite bumpy. I wasn’t used to turbulence, and my seat being directly underneath engine #2, the whirring sounds I kept hearing as the plane suddenly dropped, along with everyone’s chatter turning into absolute silence as we flew a through that cloud, intensified how scared I felt at that moment, even though they were light to moderate chops but nothing severe. The reminder of the 3 hour, 1 minute flight went by smoothly, and we landed back in SJU’s runway 10 and arrived at gate 40/41.
So those were my only two flights with TWA - I am so heartbroken that our boarding passes, ticket jacket included, got lost somewhere. Mom always saved her boarding passes from every flight she’d been on, and I adopted the practice. And, although I’m almost sure this will be impossible, I also wish I could know the registration number for both L-1011s I was on for flights 11 and 12. It’d also be interesting to find out what equipment I’d been on had we made it on flight 94.
