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.
