If Northwest Dies.....?

[PhilDernerJr]

It is not looking very good for Northwest lately. If they were to face extinction, what would become of them?

Is there an airline that they might merge with? If they got broken up, what airlines would tkae what pieces?

[T-Bird76]

Oh talk about a feeding frenzy! No one is going to merge with Northwest the fleets are just way way to off. America West and U.S are having enough trouble merging those two airlines and they have similar fleet types. No, Northwest's gates, routes, slots, capital equipment, and planes will be sold off at flea market prices. Budwiser will prob get the DC-9s, if you know what I mean ;)

There was a discussion on A.net about AirTran mergeing with them, god I almost choked on my Coke. I'm not going to play armchair Airline CEO but airlines like American may see this as a great opportunity to finally expand into the Pan-Asia market. The LCCs will probably jump all over DTW, MEM, and MSP, but remember none of them are going to launch full scale hubs. The LCCs will look at what is going to make them money and operate those routes and that's it. What would be interesting is this might be good for Boeing, if NW does go down and Southwest and AirTran pick up some new routes they'll need planes and some of those options might be converted to orders. The same holds true for Airbus with jetBlue.

[STT757]

It is not looking very good for Northwest lately. If they were to face extinction, what would become of them?

Is there an airline that they might merge with? If they got broken up, what airlines would tkae what pieces?

AA and CO are the only players with the trust of investors to get financial backing for a asset purchase, no way anyone is going to merge with a NWA or even DL consider the financial and labor mess.

There are only two assets of any worth at NWA, the NRT hub and rights and the DTW hub.

I could see AA and CO splitting the pie:

AA takes most of the Narita slots and Beyond rights

CO takes the DTW hub, all the Asian routes from Detroit (Nagoya, Tokyo, Osaka etc) plus something like SEA-NRT to give CO a launching off point for West Coast-Asia flights.

[cancidas]

there is not much that thier assets would do for them either. nobody flies DC-9s ad DC-10s anymore. the 747-200s might get sold off for freighter conversion. the -400s would probably be a bigger bargain. all the older douglas equipment will most likely end up in the desert unless there are some small operators looking for cheap equipment.

i don't know much about thier airbusses, but aren't they all financed?

[PhilDernerJr]

NW is looking for an extension for the reorgnization plan.

http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/060103/airlines ... .html?.v=1

[T-Bird76]

NW is looking for an extension for the reorganization plan.

http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/060103/airlines ... .html?.v=1

Extensions are very common in Chap 11 cases in large companies, don't read into that much. Delta just recently filed an extension request and well United, ah United filed about 100000000000000000000 extension requests in the last two and half years under Chap 11.

Basically when you enter into Chap 11 you have time limits to file a plan but with large companies there's a lot to consider so generally it takes longer then then from the time you first filed for Chap 11 to the time you must file your re-org plan.