Delta Northwest Merger

I am an aviation enthusiast. I grew up with airplanes. In my college years, I went to airports, parked my car along an airport runway, with my VHF radio tuned to the tower and watched airplanes taking off. It was fun.

I am a programmer by trade and have never worked in the aviation industry. In my spare time, I am a keen observer of the aviation industry and try to make some sense out of all the news that surface from time to time.

I create this blog to widen my reach to those who share my interest in the aviation industry. It is a vast subject and should be interesting. I welcome postings from web users of different backgrounds.

It is my intention to keep this blog as clean as possible. As the administrator of this Blog, I reserve the right to remove any postings that I deem to be improper.

Today, we wake up to the merger news between Delta Airlines and Northwest Airlines. Newspapers cover most if not all the conventional wisdom that associate with all airline mergers, e.g. reshaping the airline industry, becoming a more efficient airlines, etc. They totaled up the airplanes in their fleets and concluded that Delta Northwest merger will create the largest airline in the world. What about their combined route structures? What about their existing hubs?

The combined route structure between Delta and Northwest will be far reaching. Aside from its southern focus, Delta has its reach in Europe, Japan, India, South America and Carribean. Northwest's main focus is in the mid-west, central / northwestern United States and Hawaii. Northwest flies to Europe and Asia. It certainly looks like United Airlines' route structure when it took over PanAm years ago.

While Delta has its hubs in Atlanta, Cincinnati, JFK and Salt Lake City, Northwest has its hub in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Detroit and Memphis. There is no common hub between the two. It will certainly make it difficult to feed traffic from one route structure to the other. In its new setting, does it make sense to have so many hubs in the U.S.? It certainly does not make sense to me to have two close-by hubs such as Detroit and Cincinnati. Right?

What about the types of aircraft that are in their current fleets? As a new carrier, they will have a mix of many aircraft types: Airbus A320, Airbus Airbus A330, Boeing 737, Boeing 747, Boeing 757, Boeing 767, Boeing 777, McDonnell Douglas DC-9 and McDonnell Douglas MD-88. There are other commuter airliners as well. In my opinion, they need to trim down the variety of aircrafts in their combined fleet. It is simply too expensive to keep so many types in their combined fleet. Do you share my opinion?

Continental Airlines used to have quite a variety of aircraft types in its fleet. It retired few aircraft types: Boeing 747, MD-11, MD-80 and MD-90. Now, Continental places emphasis on the Boeing family: Boeing 737, Boeing 757, Boeing 767 and Boeing 777. It is simply cost effective to maintain few aircraft types in an airline's fleet.

I welcome your comments.