Northwest Airlines

» see nwa.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Northwest Airways was incorporated on 1 September 1926 and started flying a month later, carrying mail between Minneapolis and Chicago under a Post Office contract. Colonel Lewis Brittin assembled it with Detroit money, which is how an airline named for the northwest ended up spending its entire life with its home field in Minnesota. Passengers arrived later, well behind the mail.

Asia is what made it a different animal from the other American carriers. In 1931 the company sponsored Charles and Anne Lindbergh on a survey flight to Japan via Alaska, scouting the great circle line that cuts a couple of thousand miles off New York to Tokyo, and on 15 July 1947 it became the first airline to fly a scheduled service between the United States and Japan. The aircraft was a DC-4 called The Manila. From that year until 1986 the tails said Northwest Orient, even though the legal name never changed.

On 1 October 1986 it bought Republic Airlines in what was then the largest airline merger anyone had attempted and inherited hubs at Detroit and Memphis on top of Minneapolis. Amsterdam came in 1993 when the KLM partnership received antitrust immunity and became the first real transatlantic joint venture. Then the decade turned. Northwest filed for Chapter 11 on 14 September 2005, one day before a $65 million pension payment fell due, and did not emerge until 31 May 2007.

Delta announced it was buying the airline on 14 April 2008 and closed the deal on 29 October. From Turkey the brand was only ever legible through Amsterdam. Northwest never flew here. Its flight numbers reached an Istanbul travel agent's screen only as the far leg of a KLM itinerary, and I could not have picked the red tail out of a lineup.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pacific route ~

Route authority is not something an airline can build. It has to be granted, and for decades Northwest held the best American set for Asia. Tokyo from 1947, then Seoul, Manila, Hong Kong, Osaka and Bangkok over the following decades, all flown out of a state with fewer people in it than Istanbul. The fleet followed the map: Northwest was the launch customer for the Boeing 747-400 and took the first one on 8 December 1989.

At the other end of the fleet it ran the world's largest DC-9 operation, peaking at 178 of them in 1997. Passengers complained about those aircraft for twenty years and Northwest kept flying them because they were paid for.

~ the last twenty months ~

Merging two airlines is mostly paperwork, and the paperwork took a year. The FAA issued the single operating certificate on 31 December 2009, which made Northwest a legal part of Delta, and the reservation systems were cut over on 31 January 2010. That was the day the name stopped existing: after the cutover there was no Northwest flight to book and no NW code to book it under. The last one was 2470, Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

WorldPerks had gone first. The frequent flyer program was folded into SkyMiles on 1 October 2009, so members woke up with a different balance in a different currency and no say in the conversion.

~ what the code became ~

Delta kept what it paid for. Amsterdam is still a Delta hub through the KLM joint venture, Detroit is still a Delta hub, and the Asian network Northwest spent sixty years assembling became Delta's Pacific operation, although Tokyo as a connecting point has since been traded away for Seoul and more direct flying. Memphis was shut as a hub in 2013, four years after the merger, having peaked at over 300 departures a day.

The regional flying went through several owners and ended up as Endeavor Air, a Delta subsidiary. The Eagan headquarters was sold. The last piece to go was an airplane: on 6 January 2014 a DC-9 registered N773NC flew Delta 2014 from Minneapolis to Atlanta, the final scheduled DC-9 service by any major American airline. It had been delivered to North Central in October 1978 and reached Delta by way of Republic and Northwest. Both pilots and the purser had been Northwest employees before the merger.

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