Steamy Atlanta, from June 24-27, was the location of the annual Airliners International enthusiasts’ show as well as the annual meeting of the AAHA – Airline Archivists/Historians Association. The NWAHC sent Bruce Kitt, Collections Manager, and Scott Norris, Vice-Chair to this year’s gathering.
The AAHA is currently a casual un-incorporated federation of independent, university-run, and airline-run museums that focus on commercial aviation, and also includes researchers, authors, and photographers not part of a bigger institution. It provides a forum for researchers and directors to share ideas and successes, commiserate over challenges, and open channels of collaboration.
The first full day of the conference, Wednesday the 25th, started with a field trip to the College Football Hall of Fame in the Olympic/Convention Center district downtown, where the group learned about how that museum uses video and AI applications to personalize visitors’ experiences and boost ongoing marketing and engagement.
Afternoon sessions were held at the Delta Flight Museum campus and on their static Boeing 747-400 N661US which flew with Northwest from December 1989 onward. We learned about techniques for preservation and storage of textiles from the Atlanta Public Museum and heard about large-object storage tactics used by our hosts at Delta.
We also heard updates Wednesday from several of the AAHA members, followed up Thursday morning in a session at the Renaissance Hotel where esteemed transportation photographer George Hamlin presented rare 747 slides and the organization held its annual business meeting. The 2026 get-together will be hosted by our compatriots at United at their downtown Chicago headquarters.
Before lunch, we had the opportunity to go “behind the scenes” in the Delta Flight Museum archives at Hangar One, as well as in the basement of another nearby building on the Delta headquarters campus.
Following the AAHA meeting, most attendees immediately jumped into the Airliners International collectibles show being held in the museum’s freshly-updated hangars – well worth a visit if you are in Atlanta.
The new-exhibit highlight for most historians and Northwest alumni would be the ‘wall of color’ along the north side of the building. Uniforms, service items and technical gear, bags and posters, tags and timetables are arrayed from all the carriers part of the Delta family, including allies like Aeromexico, Virgin Atlantic, and Air France; merged carriers like NWA, Western, Northeast and their links like North Central, Bonanza, and Pacific Northern; as well as elements acquired from Pan Am. Most items are actual artifacts, though some pieces such as timetables are photo reprints to hold up better under light and gravity, and some items like posters were reproduced at smaller size to better fit into the assembly. One could easily spend an hour just taking it all in!
Of course, we were also on the floor to pick up fresh finds for our museum! Manuals, menus, annual reports, magazines and more were all on our hunting list and we came home very happy.
Photographs have already been scanned and imported onto our website:
And while other shows have seen a better haul of timetables, we were still very pleased with the results. Our Delta friends set us up with a box of surplus issues as well – these have also been scanned and uploaded to the website. (Our Northwest listings are noticeably larger in the late 1970s in particular!)
Bruce and Scott had a chance to interview Ellis Chernoff for a couple hours about his adventures helping start up Express I with operations and pilot training – they had to kick us out of the building as it closed up – and we’ll bring those tales to you in upcoming newsletters.
Scott checked in with other top-tier timetable collectors Arthur Na, David Stringer, Dave Keller, and Perry Sloan as they all assist each other in cataloging. Perry’s website, airtimes.com, has been an invaluable resource to collectors and historians, and he has started adding PDF files to his lists of issue dates for worldwide carriers. He has also graciously granted us use of those PDFs to supplement our own website’s postings – and so we’ve been able to add a significant batch of listings to Southern, West Coast, Southwest/Pacific, Bonanza, and Wisconsin Central this summer! (Scott is sending files of the many carriers he’s digitized to repay the favor.)
Of course, this should whet readers’ appetites for more collectible show action – and we are excited to cue up our own event in short order! Mark your calendar for Saturday, October 11 at the Wyndham Hotel – Mall of America – and visit https://northwestairlineshistory.org/aviation-collectible-sale-event/ for details and the ability to book your admission in advance.
