Farewell to Northwest Airlines

Say goodbye to NWA this year:

Delta Air lines Inc. has received government permission to operate its namesake service and its Northwest Airlines subsidiary as a single carrier, a Delta executive said Thursday.

The single operating certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration allows Delta to put its code on Northwest flights and phase out the Northwest name. That process will be complete in the first quarter of 2010.

It is, at best, an ignoble end to Northwest. NWA will be about 74 years old when it goes. It was originally Northwest Airlines, flying airmail between Minneapolis and Chicago. Northwest sponsored an exploration trip to China by Charles and Anne Lindbergh, which Anne Lindbergh wrote about in her 1935 book, "North to the Orient". After the war, NWA, then known as Northwest Orient Airlines, was one of the few airlines to operate the Boeing Stratocruiser, when most other airlines chose to fly Constellations and DC-6s. NWA shifted to jets as soon as they could.

One thing that Northwest has been best known for in recent years is probably the shittiest labor relations in the aviation industry, which is not known in general for giving a shit about its workers. The merger of personnel following NWA's absorption of Republic Airlines in the 1980s did not go very well, with stories of "red-bookers" and "green-bookers" (based on the color of the cover of the employee manual from the old airline) hating each other. The management and the workers at NWA also regarded each other as enemies. As a result, it's gotten the rep as being a pretty lousy airline to fly, though to be truthful, USAir and Untied are even worse. About the only airlines that treat their passengers worse than USAir and United were Soviet-era Aeroflot and, currently, JPATS.