(FORTUNE Magazine) – Airplanes are cheap. Interest rates are low. Labor is plentiful; loads are up--and so are ticket prices. ("Fish are jumping, and the cotton is high...") In short, things may finally be coming together for airlines, especially for those nimble enough to take advantage of a tailwind or two.

Take Trans World Airlines. TWA has twice been through Chapter 11, and many had completely written off the St. Louis carrier. Now it appears reborn. Last year TWA had its first operating profit since 1989--$25.1 million.

And if you'd had the perspicacity to buy TWA stock August 7, when it emerged from Bankruptcy Part Deux, you'd be flying high. The newly issued shares sold for $5.75 each. Their current price: $17.75.

"Nobody really thought we would survive through last winter," says Robert Peiser, TWA's chief financial officer. "We wondered ourselves." Yet Peiser is a big reason the company survived. The CFO engineered an imaginative debt restructuring that cut TWA's interest expense by 44%, freeing up about $65 million a year to make investments like updating the airline's aging fleet and hiring 2,100 workers this year.

How'd he do that? By persuading holders of some $575 million in TWA debt to swap those notes for equity. Understandably leery creditors signed off on the deal only because Peiser guaranteed them additional shares if the stock didn't meet a specified price. If the stock had crashed, creditors could have owned the company. Now their equity is up more than threefold.

No wonder Peiser has been in a partying mood. Conveniently, TWA is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its inaugural transatlantic flight with a series of fetes abroad. The first one, in mid-February, was a glittering, champagne-soaked soiree for 300 at the American embassy in Paris. The setting was appropriate. On an upper floor of the embassy is the bed where Charles Lindbergh, hired by TWA after his landmark flight, once slept.

- Anne B. Fisher