. Facing us was a mock-up of the office of Trans World Airlines boss and playboy Howard Hughes. I couldn't resist sitting at his mahogany desk, giving the globe a spin and picking up the old-fashioned phone to demand we 'beat PanAm'. We had arrived at the TWA hotel at JFK airport, a gleaming, curvy, mid-century architectural marvel. When, as an aviation geek, I had told my wife Laura the first night of our mini-break to New York would be spent at the airport hotel you can imagine the eye-roll. Think airport hotel and you think grim, budget accommodation off a bypass then a miserable, overcrowded bus to the terminal and people drinking pints of lager at 4am. Well, the TWA Hotel could not be further from that — a groovy reminder of the golden age of flight. From 1962 to 2001 the building with its wings-shaped roof was the TWA terminal where passengers checked in before walking down tube-shaped, red-carpeted corridors to the departure gates. Everywhere there are reminders of an age when flying was glam. The old check-in desks are now where you check in to the hotel, while a bubble car and old luggage truck complete the look in reception. There's a display of flight attendants' uniforms of old, and some classic phone booths: 'Just ten cents to get connected.' They shot a scene here from){kind=link}
IT WAS like stepping into a time machine.
As the doors slid shut we looked at the two buttons in front of us, one marked Present Day the other, 1960s TWA Hotel.
A few seconds later my wife and I stepped out of the airport lift and had indeed been transported back to the Sixties (1962, to be exact).
Facing us was a mock-up of the office of Trans World Airlines boss and playboy Howard Hughes.
I couldn’t resist sitting at his mahogany desk, giving the globe a spin and picking up the old-fashioned phone to demand we “beat PanAm”.