Northwest Airlines
Also known as Northwest Airways, NWA
- Cause of death
- Killed by merger
Delta folded Northwest's flights into its own schedule, retired the flight numbers and switched off nwa.com.
Northwest Airways was incorporated in Minnesota in 1926, a few months before Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, and grew into the sixth-largest US airline by passenger miles. It filed for bankruptcy in 2005 and agreed to be bought by Delta in 2008. The brand did not end with a ceremony: over one weekend in January 2010 the reservation systems merged, nwa.com stopped resolving, and eighty-three years of flight numbers became Delta's.
Standing in the archive
Rank 14 of 127 by lifespan. Northwest Airlines outlasted 90% of everything else on file.
Cite this entry
"Northwest Airlines." How Long It Lasted, https://www.howlongitlasted.com/thing/northwest-airlines.
Died nearby
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Sources
- Delta Completes Integration of Northwest Airport and Reservations Systems; Northwest Flight Numbers and nwa.com Retired — Delta Air Lines
- The rise and fall of Northwest Airlines — MinnPost / MNopedia (archived)
- Northwest Airlines — Wikipedia (archived)
Last checked by a human on 24 July 2026