Author: Scott Norris

REFLECTIONS Extra – Passages: Narita Opening 1978

What would have been lengthy coverage in Northwest’s house newsletter as well as mass media worldwide in April-May 1978 was quickly interrupted by the carrier’s four month long pilots’ strike. Passages had a delayed publication date and in August published only a two-page spread about Narita opening, with no celebrating… Read the coverage below:

REFLECTIONS Extra – Narita route history in maps

From its opening in Spring 1978 to just before Delta’s exit in March 2020, here are maps showing the extent of Northwest’s passenger network through NRT every five years:

Longer-range 747s and the long runway at Narita allow for Chicago nonstops, the first of many extended-distance routes to come!
Premier nonstop routings to LAX and JFK come on line, as well as the tourist pipeline to Guam.
Post-merger Northwest sees the Detroit hub start its growth, and the intra-Asian network becomes all nonstop from Tokyo instead of multi-stop. (Dotted lines in the US represent same flight number but change-of-gauge operations.)
In the early 1990s the Northwest Asian network competes on all the heaviest East Asian international sectors out of Tokyo.
The Minneapolis/St. Paul hub finally gets nonstop service, and Anchorage and Las Vegas are trialled. (Who knows what NWA might have done with these routes if the 787 was completed on its original schedule?)
Narrowbody flying (first with A320s, then 757s) resumes with the aim of opening-up secondary destinations such as Busan, Korea, and Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
New York is sacrificed (but was expected to return when Boeing 787s were delivered). Portland gets its long-awaited link to Asia. Some fine-tuning of the narrow-gauge deployment continues with Guangzhou notably representing the first Chinese destination served by a US carrier outside the trinity of Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing.
New York and Atlanta come on-stream post-merger, and vacation flights to Micronesia commence using 757s.
Eventually Manila would be the only ‘beyond’ route. Pre COVID-19, the plan was to shift MNL flights on Delta metal to route through the Delta/Korean Air Seoul-Incheon hub and then to a US destination.

REFLECTIONS Extra – NWA advertising on Hong Kong trams in the mid-1970s

The NWAHC Archive holds dozens of storage boxes and file cabinets’ worth of photographs from across the history of the company. We recently received several pages of slides taken in Hong Kong in 1973-74 documenting the painting process performed on one of the island’s iconic double-decker trams to create a full wrap-around advertisement for Northwest Orient and its new 747 service there. We’ve printed some of these in the December 2019 edition of REFLECTIONS, and are showing even more here at larger size. Click on the image to enlarge.

REFLECTIONS Extra – Republic Express promotional flyers from Saab Aircraft

We’ve never seen scans of these documents up on the Web before – sales and marketing brochures prepared by Saab in 1986 to promote the SF340 to Republic Airlines customers as well as to prospective airframe buyers. The center spread of “Republic Expression” has a nice ramp shot at Memphis, and in smaller photos there are ramp and gatehouse shots from Jackson, Mississippi as well. Aircraft-interior shots are in both documents, showing off the grey, burgundy, and dusty rose color scheme.

These are large, European-sized documents – click on the links below to open them in PDF form.

Click here to open this six-page flyer
Click here to open this two-sided flyer

REFLECTIONS Extra – Republic Express write-up in Professional Pilot

Supplementing our September 2019 issue of REFLECTIONS, we’ve found some contemporary articles in aviation journals for extra insight. Here’s one from the September 1985 issue of Professional Pilot magazine:

Click here to open the full-page PDF article

Professional Pilot granted reprint rights to Express I / Republic – we are republishing under Fair Use doctrine. We’ll give a plug, though – to subscribe to the magazine, go to https://www.propilotmag.com.

REFLECTIONS Extra – Republic Express write-up in Aviation Week

Supplementing our September 2019 issue of REFLECTIONS, we’ve found some contemporary articles in aviation journals for extra insight. Here’s one from the July 29, 1985 Aviation Week & Space Technology:

Click here to download the full-size two page PDF

AW&ST granted reprint rights to Express I / Republic – we are republishing under Fair Use doctrine. We’ll give a plug, though – to subscribe to Aviation Week, including access to their 100 Year Archive, go to https://aviationweek.com.

WordPerks – September 2019

Our feature article in this quarter’s REFLECTIONS is all about the evolution of the Memphis hub – from before Southern’s launch to after Delta’s dismantling. Let’s take a trip there with words and explore the city:

Click on this link for a printable PDF copy

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REFLECTIONS Extra – From Metros to Convairs – the Routings

Expanding on the article “Convairs to the Rescue” in the June 2019 REFLECTIONS, I used timetables from our online archive to reconstruct the scheduled routings for Southern Metroliners before the merger and Republic Convair 580s for two periods after.

Southern intended to work the Metros hard, with high-frequency / fast-turnaround service from smaller markets into Atlanta and Memphis. SO based most of the fleet in ATL, so the first flights of the day were early outbound runs likely nearly empty.

The 580s needed more time for turnarounds and their higher capacity meant high-frequency service was impractical. Gradually the Convairs replaced a few DC-9 services as well.

The linked Excel spreadsheet has three tabs, with each tab listing the itineraries of ATL/MEM prop operations, sorts them into the order each aircraft worked the schedule with a color-coding key, and displays their arrivals and departures at both Atlanta and Memphis using that color-coding, to help you trace each aircraft’s movement.

Click here to open the file in a separate tab.

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