Another milestone was reached in Northwest’s integration into Delta on January 3 and 4 when the last six airplanes in Northwest colors left the fleet. This also marked the airline’s retirement of its small remaining fleet of DC-9-40 airplanes. The airplanes were all sent to Orlando’s Sanford airport, and a friend was able to fly one of those airplanes down.

The Northwest compass logo was always one that I loved. It was simple, clean and highly descriptive. It also just looked good. I imagine Delta’s skyward-pointed widget got some inspiration from this design.

The DC-9-40 was one of many stretches of the original version. It sat in between the -30 and -50 in size but with only 71 examples produced, it wasn’t one of the most popular variants. It did, however, serve Northwest well.

As you can see, this example was built in 1968. I imagine it could have kept flying for many more years. Douglas used to build tanks in that sense. These things can fly forever. And Delta continues to fly them in the form of the larger DC-9-50 but only with Delta colors. So now the -40 is gone and so is the compass logo. Delta has made quick work of this transition from a painting perspective, and that’s good. But a little nostalgia is well-deserved.

[Photos via Sara Gradwohl]

The year is almost done, and you know what that means. It’s time to review the airlines we’ve lost in 2010. The good news? We had fewer airlines disappear this year than last and many of them were piddly little guys that I won’t even bother discussing here. (Strategic France, anyone?) But we did have some big names disappear as well as some quirky little guys. Let’s get going.

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Blue Wings (again) – January 13, 2010
Wait, didn’t Blue Wings already shut down last year? Yep. It sure did, but it was able to rise from the grave only to be pushed right back in again soon after its resurrection. The airline had plenty of money woes throughout its short life in Germany and now it appears to be gone for good. (Then again I thought that was the case last year as well.) Now we can finally avoid all those problems of passengers mistaking Blue Wings for Blue Wing Airlines in Suriname. Man, that was always such a tough one to deal with.

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Taban Air – January 24, 2010
Anyone heard of Taban Air? Probably not since it was in Iran and that’s literally an aviation graveyard since the airlines can’t get new airplanes from the west (or parts for that matter). Taban got off the ground in 2006 and had a motley fleet of 1 Russian-built Tupolev along with a couple of leased birds of other types. Things were going swimmingly until flight 6437 had a problem. The plane was holding over Mashhad, waiting for the weather to clear up, when a passenger got sick. Instead of waiting for the weather to clear or diverting, the crew decided to just land the thing anyway. Not smart. The plane cracked up but everyone lived. Good for the people, bad for the airline. It’s certificate was revoked.

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Northwest – January 31, 2010
Some argued that Northwest truly went away last year, but I didn’t see the real end until this January when the website was shut down and the NW code disappeared. While there is still work to do and I’m sure there are some little props flying around with the old Northwest colors, that truly was the end of an airline with a long and storied history. Now it exists in a little corner of the Delta Heritage Museum and that’s about it. I never had much love for Northwest myself but any airline that survived that long certainly deserves some recognition.

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Tafa Air – February 2010
Raise your hand if you have the worst idea for a low cost carrier. Now put it down, because Tafa Air has to take the cake. The idea was to bring Albanians living outside of the country back and forth. Germany was the primary market, but let’s be honest, there just aren’t that many Albanians in the world. The airline started just before Christmas 2009 so it probably had a couple of good weeks. But then it realized that Christmas travel can’t sustain you all year. The airline lost its aircraft lease in February and tried to come back, but it never did. Tafa was doomed from the start.

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Viva Macau – March 26, 2010
You have to love an airline that shuts down in March but still has a live website by the end of the year. Viva Macau was an, um, interesting airline. Macau was the Portuguese equivalent of Hong Kong that really has been best known for its gambling. Air Macau has a stranglehold on the city but Viva Macau fought hard to start up and bring low cost flights throughout Asia and Australia. That was its first mistake. There was an agreement that allowed Air Macau to veto any routes that Viva Macau wanted to fly, so the airline never could do what it wanted entirely. In the end, the government got involved, canceled the agreement between Air Macau and Viva Macau, and then said Viva Macau was unfit to fly so it revoked its certificate. Great place to operate an airline, it would seem.

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Skyservice – March 31, 2010
Apparently if you aren’t Air Canada or WestJet, you’re doomed to failure. (And don’t start on Porter – have you seen their numbers?) Skyservice was a charter operator in Canada, as so many others have done, and it failed, like so many others. In that truly kind Canadian fashion, it didn’t shut down until after the busy Spring Break season and it was a relatively orderly demise. Gotta love those Canucks. The death of Skyservice has opened the door for primarily regional operator Jazz to step in. It is now flying big jets on behalf of Thomas Cook. Canadians need to get to the sun somehow.

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Sama Airlines – August 24, 2010
Sama was an airline with a plan . . . a plan that changed weekly, it seemed. The airline was one of the first of two low cost carriers to start up in Saudi Arabia. It initially focused on domestic flying, but then it shifted to an international focus. I use the word “focus” loosely because it went in and out of markets on a fairly regular basis. In the end, it couldn’t find any strategy that actually resulted in a profit, so it shut down. Not exactly the easiest place to run a low cost carrier, to be fair, but now there’s only one. Nasair will have to carry the torch for now.

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Mexicana – August 28, 2010
Ah, Mexicana. This is another airline that we might see on the list again next year if it gets re-started as supposedly planned. Mexicana is probably the highest profile failure this year and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer airline. Briefly known as the Worst Airline Ever, Mexicana had so many problems that it was better off just going away. There have been attempts to resurrect the airline from the dead, but so far they’ve failed. Meanwhile, airlines like Aeromexico and Volaris have filled in the gaps along with US carriers. Pretty soon, nobody will miss this airline at all.

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Midwest Airlines – October 1, 2010
As with Northwest, there are a lot of dates you could use to show the death of Midwest. Sure, it could have been the day former CEO Tim Hoeksema put the airline on a path to the end several years ago. Or it could have been when Midwest stopped flying its own airplanes and instead outsourced it all. But on October 1, the YX code went away as did the Midwest website. Despite the stray airplane painted in Midwest colors, it’s hard to argue that Midwest still exists in any form other than the cookie that Frontier hands out. After a long illness, Midwest is dead.

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Fred Kahn – December 27, 2010
I’m throwing you a curveball with this. No, Fred Kahn wasn’t an airline, but he was the father of deregulation in this industry. And when he died on Monday, I thought it was only appropriate to include him in this list. After all, the deregulation of the airline industry, while unequivocally the right thing to do, did result in several storied airlines joining the graveyard over the years. Many in the industry say deregulation was a bad thing, and that’s because it probably was for them. But deregulation lowered fares and enabled millions of people to fly and that’s why it was such a good thing. It may not have happened without Fred, so he definitely deserves a salute.

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That’s it for this year. I left off some smaller guys including charter and cargo airlines, as usual. Feel free to chime in with the ones you miss most in the comments section.

There are plenty of milestones in any airline merger, but for me, the Delta/Northwest merger just passed some major ones. I now consider Northwest to be dead, and as a passenger, you should too.

So what exactly happened? First of all, nwa.com has now officially been decommissioned. This was the last view of the site before it was shut down early Sunday morning.

If it were as simple as just shutting down a website, Delta would have done this long ago. But when you shut down the site, there are a lot of other pieces that need to fall into place. First of all, Northwest and Delta reservations are now housed on a single system. So (thankfully) no more mixing of Northwest and Delta confirmation numbers for the same reservation.

Also, the famed NW code is toast. If you’ve seen both Northwest and Delta flight numbers for your flights in the past, you won’t anymore. It’s all Delta, all the time. Before nwa.com died, I looked up flight information to see what Northwest flights were planning to operate between LA and Minneapolis on Sunday.

Yep, none. There is no longer such a thing as a Northwest flight. But wait, there’s more.

Along with these changes comes the end of the Northwest call sign. If you listen to Channel 9 on United, you will never hear a pilot call out a Northwest flight number again. They’ll all be using Delta from now. Also, if you use FlightAware or other flight tracking sites, you’ll need to look for Delta flights.

If you had a Northwest confirmation number for an upcoming flight, you’ll want to go make sure you have the Delta one now. And even if you were booked on Delta, it’s worth going back in to double check your flight number. There have been a lot of changes lately as the airline struggled to squeeze all those flights into the finite range of numbers.

So that’s that. Goodbye, Northwest. Your time is up.

It has been plastered all over the news, but I wanted to wait a little until we had more information on what happened. Now that the NTSB has released its early findings, let’s talk. This is a mess.

You know the story – Northwest 188 from San Diego to Minneapolis decided that Wisconsin was a better destination. Once pilots realized they had gone too far east, they turned around and landed. As far as I’m concerned, the excuses given by the pilots seem flimsy at best.

At left, you can see what happened to flight 188 on October 21 thanks to FlightAware. The last radio communication is said to have occurred around 656p Central Time. That would have been about 20 minutes after they started talking to Denver Center (the air traffic control center that controls that patch of airspace). The plane was at 37,000 feet traveling at a roughly 30 degree heading.

There were a couple of slight course corrections but nothing else until 814p when they got back in touch with air traffic control, well past Minneapolis. They then started turning south and at 817p they started descending. Air traffic control made them do some turns to prove they hadn’t been hijacked, and they ended up landing around 9p. So what the heck happened?

Well, these pilots had ample experience, haven’t had any problems before, and weren’t fatigued after a 19 hour layover in San Diego. The pilots insist they weren’t arguing nor sleeping but rather having a heated discussion. That means that for over and hour, the pilots ignored radio calls and attempted contact from their company dispatcher because they were engrossed in this conversation about their new crew scheduling system.

At one point, the pilots pulled out their laptops, apparently to review the new system. Delta says they don’t allow personal laptop use for pilots while flying, so naturally the mainstream media folks have jumped on this as the headline. It shouldn’t be. But could the new bidding system really have been so exciting to have kept them distracted for over an hour? It’s certainly going to be a complicated topic of discussion, but I find it unconscionable that they would simply forget that they were flying an airplane for that long.

Delta put out a statement on personal laptop use that says:

Using laptops or engaging in activity unrelated to the pilots’ command of the aircraft during flight is strictly against the airline’s flight deck policies and violations of that policy will result in termination.

Sounds like these guys are going to have to fight for their jobs.

I still just can’t believe that for over an hour they failed to respond to any attempts at communication. You could have a live stage show in the cockpit and they still should have heard something to trigger them to actually pay attention for a minute. What did finally bring them back to reality? A flight attendant called up 5 minutes before they were supposed to arrive asking for an estimated time of arrival. That’s when they realized they screwed up.

Even though they were out of contact for over an hour, they didn’t overshoot the airport by that much. The flight the day before was 3:36 while the one the day after was 3:20. This flight took 3:54. I have to assume that had it gone any longer, some sort of fuel warning would have caught their attention . . . or not.

Sadly, we’ll probably never know what happened since the cockpit voice recorder only held 30 minutes of data. It began during final approach, so all the good stuff was missed. We probably won’t know if something else happened instead.

I can’t say this makes me particularly nervous about flying in general, but it definitely makes me think twice about those reinforced cockpit doors. What if these guys had been so engrossed that they failed to answer to any sort of communication attempts? Or what if they both ate the fish? Ted Striker never would have been able to get up there to save the day.

If you’re flying Northwest domestically beginning November 1 or internationally beginning October 24, you’re going to want to double-check your ticket. Delta is changing every Northwest flight number.

This is unfortunately a necessary part of every merger. As the airlines get closer to having everything operate under a single code, flight numbers have to shift. For example, Northwest flight 1 is a historical flight – it’s been the flight from LA to Tokyo for years – but Delta has decided to move that one and keep its relatively new flight 1 from New York to London in place. The LA to Tokyo flight will now be flight 301.

Northwest’s international flights will now be in the range of 250 to 349. Meanwhile, domestic flights will be split between two ranges. All DC-9 operated flights will fall in the 7000-7999 range while all other domestic flights will be between 2000 and 2009 2999.

Don’t think you’ve escaped if you’re booked on a Delta flight number for these Northwest-operated flights. Those may be shifting to some extent as well.

The changes are all loaded, so if you’re flying on Northwest airplanes you’ll want to double-check to make sure you know your flight number. It’s better to figure it out now than when you show up at the airport and don’t see yours anywhere on the board.

Updated 9/23 @ 9a to fix flight number range