Tower Air

Tower Air was co-founded, majority-owned, and managed by Morris K. Nachtomi, an Israeli citizen who had emigrated to the United States. After a 30-year career with El Al, he moved to New York to start a passenger operation for Flying Tiger Line, Metro International Airways. After this airline shut down, Nachtomi acquired the "Tower" brand from a packaged tour agency called Tower Travel Corporation. Tower Air began charter service in 1983 and served a number of international destinations, with a focus on charter flights to Israel. Nachtomi eventually bought out his partners to control about three-quarters of the stock.

Arthur Fondlier, son of Sam Fondlier and the former Chief Financial Officer of Tower Air, was a passenger in the first-class section of Pan Am flight 103. His untimely death gave Morris Nachtomi much more freedom in management and cost-cutting.

The company won many contracts from the United States Department of Defense to transport armed forces personnel to overseas locations, and from the United Nations to transport troops to their peacekeeping missions all over the world. Tower often flew charters for groups of Muslim pilgrims to Mecca.

Tower Air's main base of scheduled operations was John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. In the mid-1980s, the airline operated from the British Airways terminal at JFK (now Terminal 7). In the early 1990s, it operated from the former Eastern terminal. In 1993, Tower Air renovated and expanded Building 213, a former Pan Am hangar, to serve as its dedicated JFK terminal, adding three finger gates in 1995.

During the 1990-91 Gulf War, Tower Air evacuated US citizens from Tel Aviv using the otherwise empty return legs of military charter flights to the region. It eventually became the only US carrier providing scheduled service to Israel in 1991, using special war risk insurance provided by the Federal Aviation Administration. It opened a special departure terminal at Ben Gurion Airport in 1997.

The airline began running into financial and operational difficulties in the late 1990s. The airline lost $20 million in 1996. The 1997 Zagat Survey ranked Tower Air 59th out of 61 ranked carriers in terms of maintenance, ahead of only Valujet and Aeroflot, and in February 1998, the Federal Aviation Administration proposed two civil penalties totaling $276,000 for continuing to fly aircraft that required maintenance. The airline had attempted to cut costs by cannibalizing its own engines for spare parts, but was forced to borrow money to acquire new engines in 1998.

In January 1998 the FAA successfully sought to have the airline remove Guy Nachtomi, son of the Chairman and CEO, 24 years old at that time, from the position of Vice President-Operations. This was done in part because of the airline's maintenance problems, as well as his lack of airline experience (he worked at Twentieth Century Fox until 1994). The junior Mr. Nachtomi continued service with the company in a capacity unrelated to maintenance as Vice President-Office of the Chairman.

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 its operations. At the same time, the airline lost an arbitration brought by the Association of Flight Attendants, claiming that Tower Air was lodging their flight attendants in dirty Tel Aviv hotels with poor security and bed bugs.

Destinations

Destinations at time of closure

Israel

Tel Aviv - Ben Gurion Airport

United States

Miami - Miami International Airport

Incidents and accidents

On December 20, 1995, Tower Air Flight 41 from New York Kennedy to Miami veered off the runway during takeoff in a snowstorm resulting in one flight attendant receiving serious injuries and 24 passengers receiving minor injuries. The aircraft sustained heavy damage and was written off. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that the probable cause of this accident was the captain's failure to reject the takeoff in a timely manner when excessive nosewheel steering tiller inputs resulted in a loss of directional control on a slippery runway.