Comments on: Northwest Airlines is Dead

By: Bob LaMay

Bob LaMay — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 03:04:46 +0000

As the son of a NWA mechanic/flight engineer from the 1946-66 years, I fondly remember going with my younger brother and my dad, Victor “Slim” LaMay, down to the old NWA hanger (no longer existing) at the Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle, to climb into DC-6B’s, DC-7C’s, DC-4′s and Stratocruiser’s that were hangared for maintence back in the ’50′s. I grew up a NWA brat and loved those years. I am now in my mid-60′s but have a collection of NWA books and documents from those years in my home office.

My oldest niece was a NWA flight attendant for nearly 15 years and is now the same for Delta. I share information on NWA history and stories about her grandfather during his time with the airline. Though she’s with Delta now, she will always be a NWA flight attendant at heart. One of my greatest thrills growing up was being a passenger on a DC-7C flight where my Dad was the Engineer. This was in July of ’63 and the trip took us from Minneapolis to New York. During the flight one of our flight attendants (Stewardess’s in those days) told me that my Dad wanted to see me in the cockpit. I was 16 at the time but what a thrill to open the cockpit door (Yes, you could do those things back then) and have Dad flip down the jump seat and hand me my own headset. What a thrill. I flew the rest of the trip in the cockpit until we started our initial decent into N.Y.

Dad passed on in the late 80′s but this great memory or our time together will always be with me.

Bob LaMay

By: daniel

daniel — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 20:46:20 +0000

The writer has it backwards, deltworst airlines is a disgrace, but Northwest was simply the best. I’ll never fly on that southern piece of crap airline, and look forward to the day when deltworst is out of business. Northwest, you will forever live on as the single best airline in history.

By: Ben

Ben — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:44:22 +0000

My #1 reason for being a Elite customer with NWA was that I’d rather fly MEM, MSP, or DTW than deal with the headaches from ORD, DFW, or ATL. I live smack dab in the center of the US so these worked great going east. I don’t mind DEN at all and fly United going west. Wish that Delta had a better option going west besides a Regional Jet to SLC.

The day that Delta starts cutting my flight options from the first 3 listed above is the day I go back to United or AA.

By: CF

CF — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:21:37 +0000

Max wrote:

Do you know anything about why Delta will now automatically re-route people who book flights through other hubs through Atlanta instead without their consent even when the original flights booked are still available?

I've heard about this a couple times, but I really have no idea why they'd do that. It's one thing if there are schedule changes and they have to rebook you, but it's a whole different story if they're just doing it for kicks. If that happens, you can call Delta and they should put you back on the original flight.

By: Max

Max — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:10:18 +0000

CF-
Do you know anything about why Delta will now automatically re-route people who book flights through other hubs through Atlanta instead without their consent even when the original flights booked are still available? I’ve heard about this ALOT lately and am wondering where they think they get off changing people’s reservations. Do you know of any way to stop this from happening because I hate Atlanta and I’d rather continue to fly through Memphis like I did with NW but I’m afraid to book because of what I’ve heard.

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:09:35 +0000

I’ve never understood why people capitalize an abbreviation for Minneapolis, “Mpls.” It’s not an acronym.

By: Allen

Allen — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:20:27 +0000

@ Dan Webb: Nice catch @DanWebb! I've been back in MPLS for a bit now and I've noticed that more often than not there are more Delta painted planes parked out by 494 than old NWA ones.

By: Ron

Ron — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:30:02 +0000

Additionally, various KLM flights that up till January were Northwest codeshares only, now appear in the Delta timetable as Delta codeshares, though it looks like the range of KLM codeshare flight numbers has actually shrunk. And Northwest is also gone from the list of Delta Connection and codeshare carriers at the beginning of the timetable.

By: Ron

Ron — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:14:50 +0000

Interesting that many of the NW flights got a Delta code only now — for example, half the NRT operation was still missing from the January Delta timetable, but it’s all there for February.

By: David

David — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:25:19 +0000

I’ve heard from NW (now DL) staff that the original plan was to have nwa.com as the customer interface. There were other NW systems that would have had to be used in conjunction with it that couldn’t handle the combined NW and DL systems. I’m told that their plan is to move some of the nwa.com functionality over to delta.com. We’ll see how/if/when that happens though.