Monday, December 28, 2009

Is it Delta or Northwest?

From delta.com's FAQ page on the merger-

Are Delta and Northwest one airline or two?

Delta has acquired 100 percent ownership of Northwest and is in the process of fully integrating the airline into the Delta family. Customers are already seeing signs of the merger as the Northwest brand is gradually being phased out and replaced by Delta's name and brand. Delta and Northwest will continue to operate their own aircraft until the integration process is complete.
Awfully convenient for Delta, because they can use the Delta brand name when something goes right, and throw out the soon to be defunct Northwest Airlines brand name when they screw up.  Consider the past two big airline stories-

Plane crazy: NWA flight misses MSP by 150 miles

Delta owns the planes, the pilots and the crew, yet Northwest Airlines is announced as the culprit in this case.  All of the news reports that I can find identify the airline as NWA, not Delta.  Yet the official report into the matter is quite different-

According to the report, MSP Airport police officers were called to the department's operations center around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday where they learned the control tower had lost radio contact with Flight 188.
According to the police report, Delta management, TSA agents and airport police met at the gate, where they learned from Delta the flight crew had been "quizzed" by Delta personnel. The flight crew said they were okay and there had been flight deck distractions.
Delta personnel were kept in the jet way and ordered to not make contact with Flight 188 until it was secured by airport police and the TSA.
 Delta management, Delta personnel, Delta plane, yet it was a NWA flight?

The other big story from Christmas-

Northwest Bomb Plot Planned by al Qaeda in Yemen

Again we have a NWA flight, even though the plane and crew belong to Delta.  But it gets even more ridiculous when you see the pictures of the plane involved and the captions the media used-


 Northwest Airlines flight 253 is shown on the runway after arriving at 
Detroit Metropolitan Airport from Amsterdam on Friday.



Northwest Flight 253 sits on the tarmac Friday.

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