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Colleagues and Collectibles: the Museum’s visit to Airliners International 2025 in Atlanta

Most of the AAHA attendees posing before Delta’s restored DC-7 outside the museum.

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 AAHA had a table on the show floor with this large poster explaining its mission and members.

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.

Scott Norris of the NWAHC poses with Delta Ship 41.
The ex-Northwest 747-400 has been converted into a museum itself, parts stripped bare to demonstrate the systems of the ship, others still in their final passenger configuration. There is also space for conferences and presentations, which the AAHA used Wednesday afternoon 6/25/25.

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.

Bruce Kitt of the NWAHC discusses work toward an AAHA website, morning of 6/26/25

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.

In the depths of the Delta Flight Museum archives
Large-model storage in the Delta Flight Museum archive
Heavy storage in the basement of a Delta headquarters building
Heavy storage at Delta HQ

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!

The newest installation at the Delta museum – the wall of colors – incorporates materials from all the airlines merged into, allied with, and purchased from over DL’s timeline
Custom mounting points were manufactured and painted on-site to carefully hold even the heaviest of materials while leaving them available to use in other ways in the future.
“Speed” Holman’s Waco 10-9GXE, Northwest C4776, formerly hung from the NWA Gold Concourse at Minneapolis, moved to Atlanta after the merger and suspended in the Delta museum’s theater.

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.

The floor of Hangar One was filled with vendors offering vintage ephemera as well as brand-new materials

Photographs have already been scanned and imported onto our website:

Thumbnails of the dozens of slides we picked up at the show

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!)

A sampling of the timetables acquired at the show

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.)

Scanned timetables added to our website through the courtesy of Perry Sloan and other contributors

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.

Just landed! Express I / Pinnacle dedicated page

The encyclopedia of experiences in the vast history of Northwest Airlines can be daunting to open, especially as we continue digitizing our archives and adding new categories of materials like staff newsletters and biographies. Even the main trunks of this website such as “timetables” and “aircraft” have dozens of branches and hundreds of files attached! And while our “timeline” pages offer one great big unified narrative of events, trying to follow the story thread for any particular carrier can be frustrating.

So, as another way to approach all this material, we have started to build “landing pages” for specific carriers. These pages feature a full corporate history, plus organized links across the website to materials specific to that carrier, such as financial reports, aircraft photo galleries of the specific types they flew, newsletters, route maps, and timetables.

We are already well underway in this process with recent “landing page” additions for the Airlink carriers of Mesaba, Big Sky, Compass, Fischer Brothers, and Pacific Island Aviation. Today’s entry adds the important carrier of Express I/Pinnacle – built from scratch in 1985 to feed the Republic hubs at Memphis and Minneapolis/St. Paul, and a key piece of Republic’s “Heartland Strategy” that turned the company’s fortunes around.

N305PX in flight, from a magazine advertisement by British Aerospace.

Express I would remain an important part of Northwest’s hub strategy after the merger, and through boom times and lean years adapt and re-position itself, eventually adding regional jets. It was acquired by NWA, spun off, allowed to fly for other competitors, change its name to Pinnacle, and finally become family again after the Delta merger as a wholly-owned subsidiary now known as Endeavor Air.

Twin Cities-based Endeavor Air has frequently sent aircraft such as this CRJ-900 to participate in the annual Girls in Aviation Day event. This appearance was from the 2018 iteration. Photo by Scott Norris.

We’ll be rolling out more pages like this for all the other carriers in the NWA Family – and possibly beyond as we explore the full impact of commercial aviation here in the Northland!

HELP WANTED: seeking to double the size of our Board of Directors

We are facing two urgent volunteer staffing needs to ensure our museum can continue operating and being open to the public:

  1. A treasurer / bookkeeper: our current director and his wife are sailing the Intracoastal Waterway for a year + at the end of February. We use Quickbooks for accounting, and manage about $150,000 of assets at present. As our fundraising goals and expertise grow, careful investment and accurate tax reporting for our nonprofit is vital. 
  2. A museum manager / volunteer coordinator for scheduling, training, and recruiting docents, being a contact for group visits, and interacting with the Crowne Plaza for maintenance and events. Being on-site is not necessary, but one should be able to swing by the museum to check in with staff or handle issues and projects on occasion.

Additionally, both to spread out responsibilities and also to tap into broader skill sets and personal networks, growing our Board from its current 7 to ultimately 15 members in 2025-2026 is a necessity. 

Beyond the two functions listed above, key areas of know-how and enthusiasm our organization needs include:

  • Collaborating with Twin Cities K-12 school districts and nearby colleges to use our archives and history to develop curriculum & materials for STEM and social studies subjects.
  • Organizing community-building and fundraising events such as panel discussions, themed parties, movie nights, seasonal surplus sales, and behind-the-scenes tours.
  • Building relationships with Minnesota aerospace companies to better communicate their future workforce needs, educational objectives, obtain their technical assistance & material donations, and advocate for our growth.
  • Meet with local governments, the Metropolitan Airports Commission, state agencies, community groups, and other nonprofits to build interest and support (both moral and financial) for our mission.
  • Find and apply for grants for specific projects and staffing.

We invite you to contact northwestairlines @ comcast. net if you are interested in joining our Board in any of these or other capacities that match your talents and experience.

New Pages for Northwest Cargo

Freight was always a key revenue source for NWA, and during World War II the company gained invaluable experience with dedicated cargo operations. Military lift contracts and charter flights contributed steady revenue, and from the mid 1960s Northwest ran its own scheduled freighter network. We have launched two resource pages to help enthusiasts and researchers better study this important part of the company:

First is a collection of cargo schedules – grids from passenger timetables as well as standalone publications, starting with the first published grid from October 5, 1964, and going all the way to the end of 2008. As our general timetable scanning project continues, this page will also keep growing.

Then we also have a library of route maps we have created based on the timetable data, again running from 1964 to 2008 with the aim for at least one map per year.

As more Cargo-related documents and stories come together, we intend to create a “discovery page” to thread the Museum’s materials together for easy reading and linking. If you worked with the Cargo division and have unique materials to share, please get in touch!

Navigating the Crowne Plaza AiRE Hotel to reach our museum

Getting to our location at the Crowne Plaza AiRE Hotel in Bloomington, Minnesota is convenient – by car, take the 34th Avenue exit off Interstate 494 and go one block south to American Boulevard. By transit, use the METRO Blue Line, American Boulevard station. The hotel also has a free shuttle for pickup and drop-off at both terminals of MSP Airport.

The NWAHC Museum is located on the hotel’s third floor, above the pool area. For patrons able to climb stairs, there are two straightforward ways to access our facility:

From the Parking Ramp:

Park on the top level of the ramp and access the building through the marked entrance. Doors are open and unlocked during normal business hours.

Proceed past the pool overlook, and note a staircase going up on your right.

This staircase gives access to the third floor. Take either the ramp or the short flight of stairs through the double-doors toward the exercise area and our museum. This area also includes some large airliner-themed artwork.

From the Front Desk:

If dropped off at the hotel’s ground floor entrance, proceed left past the check-in desk to the main staircase and head up to the second floor.

There are display cases set up by our Museum as well as other large-format artworks on this floor celebrating commercial aviation and the history of MSP Airport – worth taking a moment to appreciate!

Proceed to the right along this promenade into the Second Floor main hallway, and walk until you come upon the pool area.

On your left you’ll see that upward staircase to take you to the third floor.

For Patrons with Mobility Concerns:

For patrons with mobility concerns, access to the elevators to reach the 3rd floor so as to avoid stairs is controlled by the hotel’s front desk for guests’ and residents’ security. Museum staff are not able to operate the elevators. The hotel’s front desk telephone is (952) 854-9000 if staff are not on hand to assist.

The elevator bank is located to the right of the check-in desk on the main floor. Hotel staff must need to accompany you to the elevator and use their keycard to give access to the third floor.

From the third floor elevator bay, turn left into the main hallway and travel to its end. The security door there opens onto a ramp going up to the foyer where our museum and the exercise room are located.

When departing, museum staff can key fob you back into the third floor where you can access the elevator back down to the check-in desk area on the ground floor. Access to any other floor is not allowed.

There are no elevators from the second-floor pool area up to the third floor where our museum is located.

1957 Airventure Guide to Hawaii

An abnormally warm winter this year in Minnesota has had the state’s inhabitants thinking of springtime two months early, and among the places Minnesotans have loved to visit on Spring Break, the islands of Hawaii have been a long time favorite. And NWA was taking Northlanders all the way there since the end of 1948:

Center fold illustration from Northwest’s December 1, 1948 system timetable.

Initial services started with just three weekly roundtrips using Douglas DC-4 equipment, but NWA would route the double-deck Boeing 377 Stratocruiser to Honolulu in the early 1950s, and the Douglas DC-6 in the late 1950s.

Northwest had already applied for Tokyo – Honolulu – Los Angeles route authority in the late 1940s, but it would take another twenty years for that dream to be realized.

We recently picked up this little gem of a brochure at an antique show, enticed by the images of its cover and back. The 46 pages inside are excerpted from the hotel guest magazine Here’s Hawaii, from the Tongg Publishing Company of Honolulu, with a copyright date of 1957. Subsequently we have seen a similar publication with a Pan Am cover, so it looks like Tongg Publishing ran custom runs of the same basic information.

Inside, there are segments for each of the main islands talking about what to see and do, where to eat and stay, and how to get around, with the most pages dedicated to Oahu. The resort destinations of Kona on the Big Island, and Wailea and Ka’anapali on Maui, were not even conceived of when this guide was published – and even on Oahu, most of the hotels and restaurants famous since the Jet Age had not yet been constructed. So the booklet is a window in time back before statehood and the Elvis films brought truly mass-tourism to the Islands, so hard to see today without getting well away from the main cities and beaches.

Read the full brochure for yourself at https://northwestairlineshistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Brochure-NWA_Airventure-Guide-to-Hawaii_1957.pdf

Aloha!

Track those aircraft! 100 editions of fleet lists now online

A recent generous donation has netted the Museum 19 new fleet list issues we did not previously have in the collection. These have just been digitized and posted to our Fleet Lists page, bringing us up to 100 editions!

The break-out of issues by decade right now is:

  • 2000s 34 entries
  • 1990s 34 entries
  • 1980s 5 entries
  • 1970s 2 entries
  • 1960s 25 entries

So we are missing very few issues in the ’90s and ’00s -specific issues from those decades we are still looking for are:

  • 2007 – April
  • 2006 – January and April
  • 2005 – October
  • 2003 – October
  • 2000 – July
  • 1998 – January, April, and October
  • 1992 – September
  • 1991 – December
  • 1989 – December

We are really short in the 1980s and 1970s – with only one Republic-issued list, and no official lists from North Central, Southern, or Hughes Airwest.

And of course, while Captain James Borden kept his NWA lists from the 1960s, we really hope to uncover similar documents from all the other predecessor carriers. Als0 – outside of the 2009-2010 entries, we do not have lists from the Airlink / Express carriers – these would be of high interest to aviation fans and researchers!

Our collection depends on contributions from friends and families – if you’re going through your basements or attics, please keep an eye open for company documents! And when you have materials to contribute, please contact our collections manager at bruce.kitt@northwestairlineshistory.org.

REFLECTIONS Extra – Patricia Moran and the Crash of NWA Flight 293

Following up from our article in the June 2023 REFLECTIONS relating the memorial dedication in Washington State for those lost on NW293 in the North Pacific on June 3, 1963, we present additional photos:

Greg Barrowman, who was the driving force to establish a memorial, gives remarks at the Flight 293 dedication on June 3, 2023 at the Tahoma National Cemetery. Photo by Bruce Kitt of the NWAHC.
Retired Northwest F/A Darlene Jevne gives remarks at the Flight 293 dedication on June 3, 2023 at the Tahoma National Cemetery. Photo by Bruce Kitt of the NWAHC.
Honor flyover during the memorial dedication. Photo by Bruce Kitt of the NWAHC.
The memorial plaque joins others on the grounds of the Tahoma National Cemetery. Photo by Bruce Kitt of the NWAHC.
The memorial plaque joins others on the grounds of the Tahoma National Cemetery. Photo by Bruce Kitt of the NWAHC.
Detail on the memorial plaque. Photo by Bruce Kitt of the NWAHC.

Conversations at the Museum brought up the memory of one of those who perished, Patricia Moran, who had been a flight attendant at North Central from 1955-1957, left to complete her degree in early childhood education at the University of Minnesota, and hired on at Northwest right after graduation in 1959. The sky was her home, and she even wrote a book of poetry with aviation themes, “Come Fly With Me,” published in 1962.

Pat Moran with James Wonsettler, a US Navy pilot, whom she married in March 1963. This would have disqualified her from flying with Northwest, if the company had known. Their family also knew that Pat was two months pregnant at the time of the crash – sadness compounded.

Our Museum’s first editor, Anne Kerr, had collected stories about Pat Moran, and published them in her “Lady Skywriter” blog ten years ago:

http://blog.ladyskywriter.com/2013/03/remembering-patricia-moran.html

http://blog.ladyskywriter.com/2013/03/pat-moran-follow-up.html

http://blog.ladyskywriter.com/2013/04/the-patricia-moran-chronicles-part-3.html

http://blog.ladyskywriter.com/2013/04/patricia-moran-chronicles-conclusion.html

Pat would not have been on that flight if the rules had been followed – not all stories about a love of flight end up as happy ones.

Clipping from the Minneapolis Morning Tribune, June 5, 1963.

Maps of Northwest’s Boeing 747 routes over the years

Northwest’s first 747 routes in 1970 allowed for plenty of resting time at MSP, but covered the key trunk routes that would define the carrier’s strategy for the next 15 years.
By the mid-1970s, passenger 747s had effectively displaced the 707-320 fleet, and new all-cargo ships (noted in dashed lines) made Northwest the most important air-cargo player over the North Pacific well into the 1980s.
While the new Atlantic routes were of course an entirely new line of business for Northwest, the better range of the -200 series was just being tested on NWA’s first “hub bypass” routes past Tokyo to Seoul and Osaka.
Both passenger and cargo routes have experienced steady growth in the early 1980s. The Atlantic network has stabilized and a Seoul mini-hub is starting to form.
Post-merger Northwest is adding trans-Pacific routes at a steady pace, while the Atlantic side has slimmed down and largely transitioned to DC-10 equipment. Los Angeles has 747 nonstops to Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, and Taipei, and the Seoul hub is starting to approach Narita’s size. The first routes from Detroit give a hint of that hub’s potential.
The brief and incredible foray to Australia in 1992 is well-illustrated here – while California is an expected gateway, NWA’s most audacious and controversial route is the real star of this map: New York JFK – Osaka Itami – Sydney. No other airline had tried this routing and the Japanese government was not happy with NWA’s reading of air service treaties. But without connecting feed at either end this was fated to be a brief experiment.
By the mid-1990s the Seoul hub had been abandoned, but Detroit was spinning up with long-range nonstops to Asia, and the first 747s to the KLM hub at Amsterdam demonstrated how much traffic the new alliance could generate.
The pre-9/11 map of 747 services shows how well NWA had tuned its operation to flow massive amounts of traffic through its key hubs. While Airbus equipment was starting to fill in on lower-density services, this is the 747’s high point.
The post-9/11 environment and ramp-up of A330 equipment, plus the growing realization that Tokyo’s value as a premium traffic hub had waned, put the writing on the wall for the 747 even before Northwest’s bankruptcy and eventual merger with Delta. While Northwest Cargo continued to pull in steady business and operate reliably, its aging 747-200Fs were going to need to be replaced – and it was facing much heavier competition from dedicated cargo lines like Polar, UPS, and FedEx, as well as much stronger Asian competitors. After the merger had been executed, NWA Cargo was terminated and its fleet retired. Delta would radically redeploy the remaining 747-400 frames with heavy rotation out of Atlanta and JFK in addition to Detroit. Asian service would increasingly bypass Narita in favor of alliances with Korean Air and China Eastern. Delta’s 767-300 and 777-200 craft were initially better suited for Pacific service, and were able to completely replace the 747-400 before the pandemic.
Last holdouts for the Queen of the Skies under the Red Tail.

An invitation to join our Board of Directors

Over 2023-2024 we intend to roughly double the size of our volunteer Board to fifteen members, as we dig into the work of business planning and making our case to government agencies, potential donors and partners, and the community at large to help us site and construct an exciting new facility in the middle part of this decade. Airline work experience is not necessary! And in fact, we are seeking a broad range of backgrounds, as we aim to serve an even broader range of visitors and students.

Click here to read the full-size PDF of our recruitment flyer! If you know of someone who might be interested in joining our team, pass this post along – and if that someone is you, please drop us an email at 4info@accessphilanthropy.com!

REFLECTIONS Extra – Photos of NWA’s final DC-10 departure

Photos and documents from Flight 98’s departure from Honolulu on January 7, 2007, contributed by “thezipper” from his archive on Flickr. As an enthusiast and moderator of the NWA board on FlyerTalk forums in the past decade, he flew a number of inaugural and final flights on NWA. These photos are reproduced with his permission.

Honolulu farewell to the DC-10
Taxiing up to the gate along the main terminal
Honolulu farewell to the DC-10
The famous 1970s aesthetic and equipment at Honolulu was on full display at the gate
Honolulu farewell to the DC-10
There was cake!
Honolulu farewell to the DC-10
This flight shows that not all DC-10 frames were painted in the final livery. Many consider the “Bowling Shoe” arrangement one of the most handsome to grace the Ten.
Honolulu farewell to the DC-10
One last message from the Honolulu base on the jetway
Honolulu farewell to the DC-10
Commemorative card handed out to all passengers with the crew’s signatures
Capt. Stewart also signed certificates for enthusiasts
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