Delta Northwest Merger Enables Matching Capacity to the Right Aircraft

(MoneyWatch)  Plenty of people have speculated on the fate of Northwest's narrowbody Airbus fleet now that the historically all-Boeing/Douglas Delta has taken over, but few have really looked at how this new Airbus fleet fills some of its holes. They've already started to flex this muscle a little by putting a Northwest A319 on the previously Delta 737-800 LAX-Tampa route.

Delta has had a problem at the lower end of its narrowbody fleet for some time. Up until recently, the smallest plane they flew (not counting the sub-80 seat regional fleet) was the MD-88 which holds 142 people. From 80 to 142 people is a pretty large hole. The gap widened even further when looking at transcontinental flights. The MD-88 doesn't have much range on it, so long haul flights couldn't be flown by anything smaller than the 160 seat 737-800. That's a lot of seats to fill.

Many assumed that the 737-700 with its 124 seats would be the plane to fill that gap, but they only have 10 on order. I believe this plane will primarily be used on thin international routes to places like Central and South America. They still don't have a smaller plane to fill those long, thin routes.

Enter Northwest. Northwest's 50+ strong fleet of 124-seat A319s can now slide in and fill some of those longer hauls routes that can't fill 160 seats. The first of these appears to be LAX to Tampa. Delta is now the only airline on the route with a single flight daily, but that will switch to a Northwest A319 in February 2009. This market appears to be better sized for an A319, an option that Delta never previously had.

This brings a couple of questions up. What now-abandoned routes will Delta look to reconsider? Some of those long haul LAX flights hung around for awhile before being killed, but now they may come back. Also, what will they do about terminal facilities? If they're going to start swapping flights between airlines, they're going to need to have a consolidated terminal presence quickly. This mixing and matching of fleets will get very confusing for customers where the airlines are nowhere near each other, so it needs to be addressed very soon.