A visit to the TWA Museum today at the airline's former corporate headquarters at Charles B. Wheeler Airport just outside of downtown Kansas City, Missouri.
The propeller of a Ford Trimotor flown by Charles Lindbergh to promote TWA in its early days in Kansas City.
A wicker chair that served as a First Class seat in a TWA Ford Trimotor. This particular chair was sat in by Amelia Earhart, hired to promote the airline to women.
A Lockheed Model 10 Electra, dating from the 1930s, in the working hanger attached to the TWA Museum in Kansas City. The plane is airworthy. The second window from the right, above the plane, was Howard Hughes' office when he ran TWA.
The eccentric oil and Hollywood film tycoon Howard Hughes, himself a record-setting aviator, bought a controlling stake in TWA after World War II and transformed it into an international airline. He is portrayed here (bottom right) in a promotional poster.
As I mentioned, the TWA museum is located in the airline's former corporate HQ. The room here, just off the hangar, was used to train new TWA pilots.
This machine on the wall allowed TWA instructors to give pilots and flight attendants pop quizzes on safety and other procedures. If you press the correct answer, the green light turns on; the wrong one, the red one does.
The rooms contain several simulators and mock-ups once used to train TWA pilots and flight attendants.
This isn't the interior of a real airliner. It's the mock-up used by TWA to train flight attendants in both servicing passengers and responding to emergencies.
The recreation of a first class lounge at the TWA Museum in Kansas City. The museum has plans - postponed by COVID - to offer "Flight to Nowhere" evenings that include a reception here followed by a dinner served onboard the cabin mock-up by former flight attendants.
On the other side of the airport runway in Kansas City stands another hangar, home to a second museum, the Airline History Museum.
It may look kind of sketchy on the outside, as you walk under the tail and wing of an abandoned L-1011.
Check out the TWA Super Constellation - the majestic pinnacle of propeller-driven airliners just before the arrival of the jet age.
Inside the Super Constellation:
And right next to it, the legendary DC-3.
Can anyone identify what this early metal single-engine airliner is?
Some more glimpses of the Super Connie.
A large but relevant change of gear: the childhood home of Amelia Earhart, on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River in Atchison, Kansas.
As a young girl, Amelia Earhart was raised by her maternal grandmother, who disapproved of her tomboyish ways. Amelia's room was the large center window over the front door.
The view of the Missouri River across the street from Amelia Earhart's childhood home in Atchison, Kansas. Almost like you are flying.
Atchison was the eastern terminus of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad (now part of BNSF), which helped drive the settlement of Kansas.
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