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.

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.

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

It appears that my predictions were half right. Cincinnati is shrinking rapidly (including a recent cut of 24 daily flights), but Memphis is actually holding strong. Who would’ve guessed? Let’s look at some graphs.

Here you can see Cincinnati’s rapid decline. I looked at the number of daily departures on a random Wednesday during November for 2007, 2008, and 2009. During that time, the number of Delta/Northwest departures from the airport have been cut in half from 416 to 208. Mainline flights have dropped from 62 to 28, and now you’ll see mostly little 50 seaters buzzing around. Can it be much longer before the cuts continue? I think not.

Then we have Memphis. Check this one out.

Memphis has held strong. There are now only 203 flights compared to 221, but that’s a much smaller decrease than what Cincinnati has seen and it’s in line with the general capacity cuts we’ve seen around the system. It has lost a lot of mainline – 78 to 42 departures – but that is still a fairly large percentage of the total operation. Most importantly, Memphis has not seen a loss in the number of destinations served, so it’s really just a frequency reduction. Meanwhile, Cincinnati has seen the number of destinations served drop from 116 to 77. See for yourself.

So we see a mixed bag here, that’s for sure. Delta appears to be finding some level of success in Memphis while Cincinnati suffers from death by a thousand cuts.

[Updated 7/7 @ 1118a: Transposed Memphis departure numbers were fixed]

Between the time that we booked this flight and the time we took it, there were no fewer than five schedule changes. What a pain in the butt. When we booked in January for $219.20 a ticket (yeehaw!), we had a morning nonstop eastbound and a midafternoon nonstop westbound. First they canceled the afternoon westbound and put us on a connection. Then they changed the eastbound to a redeye so we went on a connection on that as well. Then we realized that the remaining morning westbound had been moved to an early evening trip so we switched to that. Add in a couple flight number and time changes and my head was spinning. But let’s get on with it.

We got to the airport about an hour before the flight, realizing that this would be our last time flying Northwest out of LAX Terminal 2. A Northwest employee confirmed that the airline moves to Delta’s Terminal 5 on June 29. The terminal was absolutely packed (at left), as they put a Detroit and Minneapolis flight side by side.

The flight was a little late coming in from Honolulu so we were told we would be 10 minutes late on departure. Um, not quite. They started boarding early enough to get us out 10 minutes late but apparently the TSA planned otherwise. They were said to be doing some gate searches and that soon turned into a huge backup.

By the time we got to board (we were in the last group called) there were no more searches happening but the boarding line snaked out of the jet bridge. It took more than 40 minutes to board, and we didn’t get out of there until about a half an hour late.

This was my first time on a 757-300 and man, is that one long airplane. I’m pretty sure the last 10 rows were actually boarded from Burbank. Somehow, I failed to consult SeatExpert or SeatGuru when I booked and found myself in row 22 which was missing a window (at right). What a bummer.

It was shortly after takeoff that I got my first sign that Delta was making changes to the Northwest product (or lack thereof). They told us we had a movie onboard. Whoa.

Most Northwest aircraft that fly domestically have no inflight entertainment system installed. But the 757-300s have overhead screens for the Hawaii flights. They used to leave them dark when they flew over the Continental US but Delta has thankfully reversed that policy.

But that wasn’t the only change. The next one? The flight attendant came by and offered me peanuts or biscoff cookies . . . for free. This is not Northwest any longer.

The crews were great and they came by frequently with water refills and Delta’s fresh buy-on-board throughout the flight. I had a chance to talk to a couple flight attendants in the middle of the flight and they said that not much had changed yet, though they did love the new uniforms. They were really just waiting for the upcoming union election. Northwest flight attendants will be strongly pro union thanks to years of (earned) mistrust of their management. Delta, on the other hand, has a long history of its flight attendants going without a union. One of the groups will be in for a shock when the outcome is decided.

After the movie (decent family movie, Race to Witch Mountain), I just stared out the window at the beautiful scattered clouds over the plains below. It was a very smooth and peaceful ride, and soon it was time to descend. Once we got below 10,000 feet, the peacefulness was gone. It was sunny in Minneapolis with just a couple poofy clouds (that’s a technical term), but it was pretty gusty. We looped around and came in for landing, or so we thought.

Just as we passed over the airport fence, one wing dropped as a gust shook the plane. Within seconds, the throttles were up, the gear was retracted, and the flaps were stowed for our go-around. Now, if I’m not traveling in a storm, I like go-arounds. There’s nothing like feeling the power of those 757 engines as we rocket up before getting a low tour of the city. Besides, if the pilots have any doubt, I strongly prefer to go around and be safe.

Others, however, looked a little concerned. Within a few seconds, the flight attendant came on and told us that everything was fine, the captain just wanted to be “prudent” and go around. Then a couple minutes later, the captain came on and apologized and I think that calmed the uneasy passengers. Air traffic control actually had us circle around and land on a different runway this time so maybe we got caught in a shifting wind on our first attempt.

Once on the ground, we had about an hour to get to our connection (thanks to an extended connection time added during one of our schedule changes) but it was clear across the airport. If you ever need a workout, just go from the F gates to the C gates in Minneapolis.

MSP has all the Delta branding up these days and it looks really good. We got to our gate, caught our breath, and then boarded our next flight to Indianapolis.

This was supposed to be a DC-9 originally, and I was bummed when they swapped us to a plain old A319 during one of the schedule changes. But of course, it would get us there just as well.

We took our seats behind the wing and taxied out on time. We may have had to walk a long way to get to the gate, but the runway was right next to the terminal so we were airborne quickly.

We bounced our way out of MSP and once again things smoothed out at altitude. It was a pretty standard 1 hour flight. One drink service and that was that. Peanuts and biscoff were handed out again, and other than that, the only thing remarkable was the excellent view of a very sunny Chicago off the left side.

Just as we passed Chicago, we started our descent into Indianapolis. We landed to the northeast and within a couple minutes, we were at the gate. For those who have spent hours upon hours taxiing back to the old terminal, you’ll know how nice it is with the new one.

Though I toured the new Indianapolis terminal before it opened, this was my first time actually flying into the airport. Over on the A side where Delta/Northwest lives, it was pretty empty. It looks like there are plenty of gates going unused right now.

But hey, it’s still a nice place. We headed out to the curb where my father-in-law picked us up. We drove for about 10 minutes before we arrived at the exit for the old terminal. Yep, the drive takes a little longer for most of the metro area.

After a fun-filled weekend of movies, food, and a visit to Conner Prairie, it was time to come home. The weather had been fantastic while we were there, but when it came time to leave, it clouded up and got more humid. Sounds like the perfect time to come home.

We arrived at the airport about an hour early. We had left a little extra time in advance since it now takes longer to get to the new terminal, but we arrived with plenty of time to spare.

When we walked in, I noticed that there were a lot of empty ticket counters. Plenty of room to grow in the future. We walked toward security and we were both surprised to see a lot of people eating and relaxing in the rotunda shopping area outside security. I figured people wouldn’t want to hang out outside security, but, at least yesterday, I was wrong.

Going through security here is a pleasure because they’ve really built the area big enough to handle TSA regulations. We were through in no time and we went to the gate to wait for the flight.

The flight was completely full (good news for those of us who hope to keep the nonstop flight around), but we boarded quickly. We pushed back early, and the pilots apparently decided to make up for it by taxiing slower than a snail to the runway. Fortunately, they decided to speed up when it was time to take off.

There were a series of storms on our way home, so there was plenty of zigzagging around the weather. Looking at our flight path, you’d think the pilots were drunk if you didn’t know that they were just working hard to stay away from the bumps. We actually had very little turbulence, though there was plenty of speeding up and slowing down as we encountered areas of predicted rough weather.

The flight attendants were up the whole time and they did frequent passes through the aisles. My wife wanted to get a glass of wine and the fruit and cheese plate. She noticed in the menu that when you order the two together, you get a $2 discount. The flight attendants didn’t know that. They were really thankful that my wife pointed it out so they ended up comping the wine for her. Great service (and totally unnecessary but welcome).

Once we got to the Rockies, we had a great view of the snow capped mountains down below (at left). The flight attendants did yet another service about an hour out of LA. This crew was really stellar. We passed the Grand Canyon and slowly descended into LA. There were some high clouds, but it was mostly clear when we touched down.

This is just the first of three weekend trips this month, so stay tuned for more trip reports.

JetBlue and Others See Higher Complaints in March
I said above that “most” other airlines didn’t have rising complaints. JetBlue, ExpressJet, and Hawaiian, however, did.

Premium Traffic Down 19 Percent, Revenues Down 35 Percent or More
I’m not sure why I keep looking at these IATA premium traffic monitors. The news just keeps getting worse.

American Adds One Way Awards, Cuts Stopovers
American is making their program more flexible for travelers, and I think this is a net positive for both sides.

Continental Starts Flying 737s to Hawai’i
Continental’s first move to fly 737s to Hawai’i highlights the shrinking but still important role of 757s.

AirTran’s Costs Help in the Battle for Milwaukee
At AirTran’s annual meeting, there was one slide that caught my eye. It was a cost comparison, and AirTran looks pretty darn good.

Alaska’s Shows Dropping Demand From H1N1
Alaska’s latest investor update shows some material drops from the flu scare. No surprise, of course.

I think Godfrey made a lot of sense in the video. V Australia wants to partner with anyone and everyone who can benefit them, and that’s a smart way to operate (similar to Alaska, actually). I’m glad to hear that the mystery of why they weren’t partnering with Virgin America has now been solved. It’s simply a technology issue that’s causing the delay, as suggested by commenter Ellis Taylor.

Virgin America was crowing about how great it was that they were doing a lot of their tech work in house, but I think it’s clear that the strategy has been quite problematic. There was never any question that they would want to codeshare with other Virgin airlines from the very beginning, so it now seems that the reservation system choice was a costly mistake.

Meanwhile, V Australia will continue to partner with everyone that makes sense for the airline. As I mentioned in the video, I could see a deal between them and Delta being a smart move. Their flight times are complementary and they could feed each other on both ends. Clearly, Godfrey seems up for that, but it will be interesting to see what happens next.

Click if you missed my overview of the Friday launch event.