Tower Air

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Tower Air (IATA: FF, ICAO: TOW, and Callsign: Tee Air) was a low-fare and charter U.S. airline that operated from 1983 until 2000, when it declared bankruptcy and was liquidated. The airline later competed with People Express in the high-density U.S. domestic market, but began operations with international flights.

It was co-founded, owned and managed by Morris K. Nachtomi, an Israeli who had moved to the United States. After a 30-year career with El Al, Nachtomi joined a wholesaler and tour package operator called Tower Travel Group in 1981 and co-founded Tower Air one year later. The other co-founder, Arthur Fondlier, perished on Pan Am Flight 103.

The company won many contracts from the United States Department of Defense to transport U.S. armed forces personnel to overseas locations: it also flew refugees out of Kosovo in the 1990s, and was often chartered to fly groups of Muslim pilgrims to Mecca.

Tower Air's main base of scheduled operations was John F. Kennedy International Airport in Jamaica, New York. At one point it had its own terminal, the former Eastern Airlines Terminal, which it departed from at JFK. Its main focus was its many flights to Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, and was a major competitor of El Al and British Airways in the US-Israel market. It also flew to France, Greece, Puerto Rico, and Brazil as well as domestic destinations. It used Boeing 747-100 and -200 series aircraft exclusively.

Early in its history and certainly by the mid-1990s, Tower Air became notorious for poor service and questionable maintenance. By 1995 it ranked fourth in the number of complaints per mile among leading U.S. airlines. The 1997 Zagat Survey placed Tower Air 59th out of 61 ranked carriers, only edging ahead of Valujet and Aeroflot.^[1] In February 1998, the Federal Aviation Administration proposed two civil penalties totaling $276,000 for continuing to fly aircraft that required maintenance action ^[2]. The Department of Defense Commercial Airlift Review Board suspended Tower Air military charters from January 27 to February 12, 1999, pending an on-site review of their operations. At the same time the airline lost an arbitration brought by the Association of Flight Attendants, claiming that Tower Air had begun lodging its flight attendants in dirty Tel Aviv hotels with poor security and bed bugs. Because of its reputation of poor service and maintenance issues, "Tower Scare" was a common nickname for the airline.

Tower Air filed for protection under Chapter 11 bankruptcy on February 29, 2000, ceased all scheduled service on May 1, 2000, and surrendered its FAA air carrier operating certificate on November 28, 2000 ^[3].

[edit] Other facts of interest

Tower Air was prominently featured in such movies as Liar Liar and Turbulence. The latter featured one of their 747 aircraft in the full colors of fictional TransCon Airlines.
Many former Tower Air airplanes have been stored in Marana, Arizona.
Major artifacts from the World Trade Center are housed for safekeeping in the former Tower Air Hangar 17 at John F. Kennedy International Airport.
An old Tower Air website is still functional but has been abandoned since the carrier went bankrupt [[1]]