Minneapolis - Northwest Airlines History Center

Navigating the Crowne Plaza AiRE Hotel to reach our museum

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.

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

Capt. Stewart also signed certificates for enthusiasts

REFLECTIONS Extra – DC-10 route history

Supplementing our illustrations in the September 2022 REFLECTIONS, here is a broader assortment of maps showing where Northwest flew its DC-10 fleet between its introduction at the beginning of 1973 until its retirement in early 2007. All these maps are copyright Northwest Airlines History Center / Scott Norris.