Northwest Airlines

Get a fucking Taurus and come back and get me.

I'll be in the Northwest Airlines lounge reconsidering my decision to employ you.

It sounds harsh, but Nash had a way of admonishing me that mostly made me laugh.

Was I a buffoon, or were his expectations unrealistic? The answer was the same to both questions, and we both knew it.

And then you turn your attention to the sky because the Lake Michigan Triangle does not confine its appetite to ships.

On the evening of June 23, 1950, Northwest Airlines Flight 2501 departed LaGuardia Airport in New York City, bound for Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The aircraft was a Douglas DC-4, a four-engine propeller-driven transport that was the workhorse of the American commercial aviation fleet in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The DC-4 was a large aircraft for its era.

It did not transmit a distress signal.

No mayday call, no emergency squawk, no radio transmission of any kind after that last request to descend.

Northwest Airlines Flight 2501 simply vanished.

It was there on the radio, talking to the ground, and then it was not there.

When he got on a plane in Portland, Oregon last night, he was just another passenger who gave his name as D.A. Cooper.

But today, after hijacking a Northwest Airlines jet, ransoming the passengers in Seattle, then making a getaway by parachute somewhere between there and Reno, Nevada, the description on one wire service, master criminal.

Welcome to Reimagined Radio, a program about sound-based storytelling.

With each episode, we explore how dialogue, sound effects, and music can engage your listening imagination and promote storytelling.

I look at the technology investments and innovations.

pioneered by airlines like American Airlines, TWA, even Delta, and Northwest Airlines in the 80s and the 90s post deregulation that were involved with creating the modern day frequent flyer program or co-chairing program or pioneered the joint venture program.

What I feel like I saw was that the commercial strategy of the airline and the technology strategy were in lockstep.

And coming to later eras where post 9-11 and with the internet evolution and the accumulation of tech debt, when the airlines finally merged and got out of their painful 2000s era, and I'm specifically kind of honing in on the US airlines, when they got out of that era, and we're talking now the 2010 go-go years, if you look kind of sequentially, Delta and Northwest married their technology stacks super well to get the best of the best.

A strong U.S. global carrier.

Delta Airlines merged with Northwest Airlines, creating the world's largest airline.

They still are, too.

They rank as the largest and most valuable airline by revenue and marketplace capitalization.