DontGetHooked

Why no love for NWA legacy livery on a Delta aircraft? United has a Continental aircraft, American has a TWA one among others . I think it would be cool to see that livery again in the system.

Mesabah

Not likely to see that happen, given Delta’s branding strategy.

Jaww

Waste of money imho. Passenger can’t tell one airline’s pilots from another. Like they know or care about livery. They just want a cheap ticket and to be on time.

iaflyer

I like the retro liveries. British Airways has done a great job - I "Asked Ed" but of course he answers like 2 questions a month.

1Taco

It was an “ask Ed a question” last summer. He said it’s not how we represent our brand. Or something like that.

snowdawg

Delta has had the widget, which is mainly blue and undertone of red. Northwest Airlines has always had the red tail. In 2007 Richard Anderson joined our board of directors. And sometime there after but before the merger our paint job changed to what is today from Leo Mullins wavey flag paint job. This is the first time in Delta's history did our widget go from mainly blue to ALL red widget. The widget points forward (Meaning, going forward) and is an incomplete trade mark. The left hand corner points Northwest.

So there may be more Northwest livery in the design than you realize and this design was created and announced in April of 2007 by Gerald Grinstein, who was only short term CEO after replacing Mullins and his crappy paint job of wavey flag. Shortly after RA joined the BOD at Delta.

Perhaps a lil bit of pre-merger conspiracy theory but it's all very interesting how it lines up, total red widget and all.

JamesBond

Delta put some thought into the livery. United made theirs up on the way to the presser to announce the merger.

Baradium

Delta's history includes much more than just NWA and many of the logos are unavailable even if we wanted to use them (for example, the Pan Am name and logo are used by a railroad now). American has one of each of their historical airlines included. Even if we wanted to do it, we wouldn't be able to do it "right."


And of course, as otherwise noted, our branding strategy is to increase brand awareness when it's our own aircraft. Not that I think all the code sharing helps with that.

gloopy

I'd rather get the historic NWA "airmail" wings than any of their ugly paint job(s). Even if we keep the widget as our wing centerpiece, the wings themselves should be real wings, not some abstract cheap gas station ice scraper looking thing that looks like the guy who taped a banana on a wall made it.

Jaww

Imagine how Spirit pilots feel literally flying a banana.