(FORTUNE Magazine) – Airlines may fail, but their planes are continually snapped up by new startups, which get them for a song. Now even the names are being recycled.

Take Pan Am, a name dating to the mid-1920s, now being reinflated by Martin Shugrue, who presided over Eastern's liquidation, and Charles Cobb, who bought Pan Am trademarks at a bankruptcy sale. "Pan Am is second only to Coke in terms of worldwide name recognition," says Cobb, the new chairman.

The difference is that consumers enjoy Coke. (See cover story.) The old Pan Am went under because it deserved to. The name may still have some residual good will, though. Besides, it's expensive to develop a new name. New Pan Am plans to run a domestic operation linking international passengers arriving in big cities to other large U.S. destinations.

Then there's former Midway Airlines, named for the Chicago airport, one of the first low-cost startups--and failures, in 1991. A few years later the name was refloated with a different owner. Three iterations hence, the company operates from Durham, North Carolina, as a north-south carrier with the same name. "Our colors include Carolina blue, and we had the advantage of being midway between the North and the South," explains senior vice president Jonathan Waller. Uh-huh.

Colorado-based Frontier made a similar return in mid-1994, much to the delight of Denver passengers, who welcomed a rival to United.

Kansas City-based Vanguard Airlines was hoping to ride the nostalgia trend too. Vanguard CEO Bob McAdoo, former chief financial officer for People Express, tried unsuccessfully to get the name from its owner, Continental. "We settled on Vanguard because we wanted to give people a sense of being out front.''

Just how do you go about naming an airline? "What you want is a name that's going to sit well with passengers," says Naseem Javed, founder of ABC Namebank International in New York City. That must include names that no longer fit. "What airline dominates the Cleveland-to-Baltimore market?" asks McAdoo. "Southwest."

--Ronald B. Lieber