Merger of Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines
airline merger
On April 14, 2008, Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines announced a merger agreement. The merger of the two carriers formed what was then the largest commercial airline in the world, with 786 aircraft. The Delta Air Lines brand was retained, while Northwest's brand officially ended in 2010.
Leading up to the announcement
It had been reported as early as January 2008 that Delta and Northwest were in merger discussions. News reports covering the event and the official press release reported that the new airline would use the Delta name and have its headquarters in Atlanta. The proposed merger partners lost a combined $10.5 billion in first quarter 2008, an amount that exceeded their combined market capitalization.
When the airlines combined, the "new Delta" would be based in Atlanta, Delta's long-time home. Before the merger, Delta had hubs at Atlanta, New York–JFK, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles, while Northwest had hubs at Memphis, Detroit, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Tokyo–Narita. Northwest also called Amsterdam and Paris–Charles de Gaulle as hubs, but these were joint venture hubs operated by partners KLM and Air France.
“Merger of Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines” enters the record as airline merger. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Merger, Delta and Lines can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5254559. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Merger of Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.