Every airline has a few in-air horror stories in its history, but there are two commercial carriers whose public image is dominated by their catastrophe-related headlines.

TransAmerican Airline first came to public prominence in 1980, when nearly every passenger, including a very ill young girl who looks remarkably like the captain’s daughter on Love Boat, on board a flight bound for Chicago fell ill from food poisoning. Miraculously, the airline was able to withstand the ensuing class-action suit and FCC fines. But in 1982, TA couldn’t keep its name out of the papers when its Mayflower One lunar shuttle not only got locked onto a collision course with the sun, but was just nowhere near as funny as the original.

Meanwhile, there’s poor ol’ Oceanic. Many of you will know the carrier from the story of the Oceanic Six, the half-dozen passengers who miraculously survived the crash of an Oceanic flight from Australia to Los Angeles, only to then disappear again… or something; it all got kinda confusing there at the end.

If you haven’t figured it out already, this is not a post in our Worst Company In America 2011 series, as these companies don’t actually exist.
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