At 24 years old, A.J. High took off from Houston as a copilot on the first flight of the newly formed Trans-Texas Airways. It was Oct. 11, 1947, and the former World War II bomber pilot from Cleburne flew a DC-3, a propeller-driven military-style airliner. He knew it as the “Gooney Bird”—an iconic design resembling an Airstream trailer with wings. The plane’s rear landing gear consisted of a small, fixed wheel beneath the tail fin, making it a tail dragger.
The plane, filled with local dignitaries, stopped in Palestine, Dallas, and Fort Worth before landing in San Angelo for a barbecue luncheon. On its return trip, a hydraulic line burst near the plane’s cockpit, soaking High’s double-breasted uniform. “As co-pilot, I knew enough about hydraulics to know that we wouldn’t have any brakes when we landed,” High would later write in his memoir, Meant to Fly, about his 35-year career with Trans-Texas Airways. High told the flight’s captain, Leon Hassler, he’d have to pump the brakes by hand. As the landing gear hit the runway, High jerked the emergency brake lever back and forth. “Pumping and pumping, and still losing pressure, I was physically done in,” High recalled. Finally, the DC-3 rolled to a stop—its nose just short of the Fort Worth airport’s terminal building. An hour later, the plane repaired, the passengers reboarded and completed the route.
Thus began the official operations of Trans-Texas, a small intrastate airline founded in the post-war outset of modern aviation—predating the state’s modern-day freeway system established in the 1950s. Though sometimes derided as “Tinker Toy” or “Tree Top” Airways due to its propeller-powered planes and the low altitudes at which its aircraft had to fly, TTA would grow into one of the world’s largest carriers in the ’70s and ’80s.
Enjoying this article?At the 1940 Air Terminal Museum, a back door leads to the still active runway—the building morphed into part of Houston’s Hobby Airport in 1955. “I flew TTA as a small child,” says Houston-based historian Michael Bludworth, looking out over the runway. “I was carried up the plane’s ramp in my mother’s arms.”
An exhibit explores how the first 16 pilots employed by Trans-Texas Airways helped build the airline—literally. High delivered runway ramp equipment from a Jeep station wagon to airports across the state, while other pilots built a fence at an airport in Victoria to keep cows off the landing strip. TTA’s original fleet of DC-3s bore a navy blue nose with a cloud-white roof, red trim, and a white star adorning the tail fin. The bottom side of the plane was a gleaming silver, befitting their given name, the “Starliner.” After upgrades in 1958, like hiding the landing gear behind wheel-well doors and adding passenger luxuries such as handheld fans in the seatback pockets, TTA changed the name to “Super Starliner.”
TTA’s DC-3 planes had no air-conditioning, pressurization, or oxygen regulation. High sometimes used this to his advantage. The airline’s female flight attendants—dressed in designer boots, Western-style vests, and mini cowboy hats—often suffered sexual harassment from the 1950s male passengers. When it became too much for a flight attendant, High would tell her to “sit down in her jump seat and not answer any call buttons,” he wrote. Then, the crew would utilize supplemental oxygen that wasn’t available to the passengers. High would ascend “up to about 13,000 feet, where there was a lot less oxygen, and after seven or eight minutes, the [passengers] were all asleep.”
In 1966, after the airline acquired its first jet engine DC-9, TTA encouraged passengers to treat themselves to a “Pamper Jet.” A ticket from Houston to Dallas cost $16.40, or about $168 today. Prior to deregulation of the airline industry in 1978, the Civil Aviation Bureau strictly regulated carriers. Ticket prices remained fixed by the federal government.
Because Texas didn’t have much of a highway system in the late ’40s and ’50s, and “certainly not an interstate highway system,” cross-state travel often required long drives on a series of farm roads, Bludworth says. “If you wanted to go to Lufkin, it’s slow. Suddenly, you could get on a TTA flight and go there and back in a day.” Throughout the ’60s, TTA expanded its routes to reach every corner of Texas—Texarkana, El Paso, Amarillo, and McAllen—as well as cities in neighboring states.
After establishing several routes to Mexico in 1967, TTA changed its name to Texas International in 1972; promotional billboards for the airline read, “No more Tinker Toys. No More Tree Tops.” Yet, Texas International struggled financially, accruing $20 million in unpaid debt. A young Harvard Business School graduate, Frank Lorenzo, came in as a consultant to financially restructure the airline in 1971. Instead of paying Lorenzo, Bludworth explains, Texas International’s creditors “gave him the airline”—debt and all.
In 1977, Lorenzo successfully petitioned the Civil Aviation Bureau to let Texas International offer half-price “peanuts fares.” The reduced ticket prices—an effort to compete with a new Texas-based airline, Southwest—proved popular and helped return Texas International to profitability. In 1982, Lorenzo successfully executed a hostile corporate takeover of Continental Airlines. Texas International subsequently became Continental, cementing itself as one of the world’s four largest international carriers.
Federally mandated to retire at age 60, Captain High made his final commercial flight as a Continental Airlines pilot on April 7, 1983. With a fully occupied plane and his family seated in first class, High performed a flyby of the Houston airport, soaring across the runway fast and low. Had the landing gear been down, “the wheels would have been in the concrete,” High recalled.
He circled back into the sky and landed safely, one last time.
