We all know that A/C maint. at NW is in question right now but reading airline reviews (like the one below) will show that other problems may exist. I've not had many problems with NW staff but apparently the writer below had a different experience.
Back to A/C maint. More coming today.
Readers Choice for Worst Airline, and winner of Ask the Pilot's Golden Pretzel Award...
Northwest Airlines
Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a polite semitropolis built on cold Scandinavian sensibilities. It's the home of Husker Du, the Replacements, and Walter Mondale. How much awful, really, can be wrought from the Mini Apple? What could be worse than Prince?
Your answer: Northwest Airlines, the city's most well-known commercial export. Not even that sparkling new concourse in Detroit was enough to save Northwest from an abhorrent last place finish in my poll. Fifty million people flew the carrier last year, just about all of whom sent me emails, their assorted and endless agonies documented in weepingly painful detail.
"Brusque, apathetic service, annoyed flight attendants, terrible food, no thought for comfort or enjoyment."
"Northworst personnel -- at the check-in counter, the gate, and onboard -- are often downright rude. Very rarely have I had a trip without a put-down from at least one of them."
"I ask for milk, as opposed to creamer. 'We are saving it for breakfast,' I'm told. 'Oh, just give it to him,' says a more senior attendant who happens to walk by. Last October coming from Amsterdam, I walk to the galley and ask for orange juice an hour before landing. 'We're closed.' Oh, and the pretzels are now thrown at passengers; the food trays slammed down. You'd think that half the cabin crew on any given flight have just lost their mothers and are working through their tears."
"Flight attendants serve a meal 20 minutes after takeoff, then hide for seven hours."
"Unsmiling, unhelpful flight attendants. They taunt me with their prices, convince me against my better judgement to buy another ticket with the hopes it'll be different this time, and then make me hate myself two hours into a ten hour ride to Tokyo."
"Horrible; surly service in the air, inattentive and dismissive gate personnel."
"To Europe on a DC-10! Are you kidding?"
Northwest has been phasing in Airbus A330s, but for now continues to use graying DC-10s across the ocean. It is the last major to operate '70s-era widebodies on intercontinental passenger routes, and the carrier's fleet ranks eldest in the world. Aviation history buffs can appreciate that Northwest is the oldest (large) carrier in the United States, founded in 1926, but clearly this is taking the honor a bit too literally. One thing to make clear: this is not a safety issue, but these planes lack the entertainment systems and other accoutrements to keep them competitive on longer-range services.
But more importantly for the airline, if one consistent thread wove its way through nearly all of the anti-Northwest mail I received, it was that of the demeanor of its employees, particularly cabin staff. My poll reveals how certain airlines have cultivated their own special areas of disappointment. At Delta it's unkempt planes; at American it's hub delays. At Northwest, judging from your remarks, it's a collective personality disorder bordering on violent psychosis.
Am I going too far with this? Just when I congratulate myself for avoiding gratuitous bashing, I decide to bash gratuitous. I'm just having fun, and besides I have an axe to grind: As part of Northwest's recent livery makeover, one of my all time favorite corporate trademarks -- the ingenious "NW" compass, devised by Landor Associates and in use since 1989 -- was uglified beyond recognition. As I described it in a column last year, it was "bastardized into a lazy abstraction."
I've had plenty of good (and a few bad) rides on Northwest, including several to Europe during the 1990s, when I always found the crews welcoming and hospitable. With my own recollections helping to demonstrate, let's bear in mind last week's lesson about first impressions and the fickle subjectivity of airline loyalties. To whit...
"I vote Northwest as the best airline in the US. Almost always on time, decent service, decent planes."
"They've won me over by doing nothing fancy, but getting me where I want to go, at a reasonable price, with reasonable comfort and reasonable service and friendliness."
Runners-up, Readers Choice Hall of Shame...
America West
I remember that delay as if it were YESTERDAY. I'm no mechanic but ... what I understood was some nut got loose and hit the tire and damaged it to the point that it would be unsafe to land on, according to the F/O.
