Delta Air Lines

The boll weevil had been eating its way through the cotton of the American South since the 1890s. At a United States Department of Agriculture laboratory at Tallulah, Louisiana, the entomologist B. R. Coad worked out with borrowed Army pilots that dusting insecticide from an aeroplane was the most effective way to treat a field. The Huff-Daland Aero Corporation built the first aircraft designed for the job, and on 2 March 1925 set up a subsidiary at Macon, Georgia, to sell the service: Huff Daland Dusters, the first crop-dusting company in the world. It moved to Monroe, Louisiana, in the summer, and in the northern off-season its aircraft and crews worked in Peru.

The general manager was Collett Everman Woolman, an agricultural extension agent from Louisiana State University who had gone into aviation through entomology rather than through flying. In 1928 he led a group of Monroe investors in buying the dusting assets, and they incorporated Delta Air Service on 3 December. The name was suggested by Catherine FitzGerald, a secretary who later became a company officer, for the Mississippi Delta the aircraft crossed. On 17 June 1929 a five-seat Travel Air left Dallas for Jackson, Mississippi, by way of Shreveport and Monroe: the first passengers. By June 1930 the line ran east to Atlanta and west to Fort Worth.

It did not last. In October 1930, after the Post Office awarded the airmail contract for the route Delta had opened to a predecessor of American Airlines, Delta Air Service stopped carrying passengers and sold its assets to the winner. Without mail there was no airline. A Monroe banker, Travis Oliver, acting as trustee, bought the dusting business back with Woolman and the other local investors and incorporated it as Delta Air Corporation on 31 December 1930.

The reprieve came from Washington. After the airmail scandal of 1934 the contracts were rebid, and Woolman won Mail Route 24 at a low bid, Charleston, South Carolina, to Fort Worth by way of Columbia, Augusta, Atlanta, Birmingham and Meridian. Mail flew from 4 July 1934 and passengers from 5 August, under the trading name Delta Air Lines. The dusting division stayed at Monroe until Delta gave it up in 1966.

Mail Route 24 gave Delta a line but not a network. Until 1941 the airline was an unbranched string of twelve cities from Fort Worth to Charleston; that December it scheduled ten departures a day at Atlanta (three to Fort Worth, one to Birmingham and two each to Cincinnati, Charleston and Savannah) and those ten flights and their returns were the entire timetable. In 1941 the head office moved from Monroe to Atlanta, where it has stayed.

The network then began to branch north and south: New Orleans in 1943, Chicago and Miami in 1945. The company name became Delta Air Lines formally in 1945, and scheduled freight service began in 1946. In 1949 Delta introduced the first discounted coach fares between Chicago and Miami, an early gesture at a market that did not yet exist.

The decisive purchase of the propeller years was Chicago and Southern Air Lines in 1953. For two years the airline traded as Delta-C&S. C&S brought a north-south network from Chicago and Detroit down to Houston and New Orleans, and Delta's first international route: New Orleans to Caracas by way of Havana. Washington and New York followed in 1956.

By the end of the 1950s Delta was a solid, conservatively run trunk carrier of the American South, still led by Woolman, who remained chief executive until his death in 1966. What it did not have was the Northeast: there was no Delta flight between New England and Florida until 1972.

Delta was first with three American jets in seven years. The Douglas DC-8 entered service on 18 September 1959, the first of the type anywhere; the Convair 880 followed in 1960, and in 1965 Delta was the first airline to fly the McDonnell Douglas DC-9. None of this was accidental. A short-haul network of many thin city pairs rewarded an airline that bought the right small jet early, and the DC-9: and later its MD-88 and MD-90 descendants, of which Delta became the largest and, for the MD-90, the only operator, suited Atlanta's connecting banks better than anything larger.

The triangular mark that came with the jets is still on the tail. Adapted from the Greek letter delta and from the swept wing of the new aircraft, the widget was applied with a blue and red cheatline in a livery that survived, with small changes, for some thirty-five years.

By 1970 Delta had retired its last propeller aircraft and was an all-jet airline. It bought five Boeing 747-100s, found them too large for its network and sold them on to China Airlines, preferring the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar; it eventually operated seventy TriStars, more than any other type of widebody it has flown, and they carried its international network for nearly thirty years.

Northeast Airlines came in August 1972. Deregulation in 1978 opened the route map, and in the same year Delta began flying the Atlantic, nonstop from Atlanta to London. In 1981 it started a frequent-flyer programme, which became SkyMiles in 1995.

The airline's self-image in these years is best captured by an aeroplane. In 1982, in the first difficult years after deregulation, three flight attendants organised a collection among employees, retirees and Delta's suppliers that bought the company a Boeing 767. It was named the Spirit of Delta and it flew for the airline until 2006.

Northeast Airlines was a Boston carrier less than half the size of the next smallest trunk airline and had been losing money for years. It first agreed to merge with Northwest Airlines, which walked away in March 1971; Delta announced its own plan the following month, the Civil Aeronautics Board approved it in May 1972 on condition that Delta not fly Miami to Los Angeles, and the merger was completed that August. Delta got New England, the Northeast-to-Florida market, Bermuda and the Bahamas, and its first Boeing 727s, of which it became for a time the world's largest operator of the -200.

Western Airlines, the trunk carrier of the American West, was next. Delta and Western signed an agreement and plan of merger on 9 September 1986; the Department of Transportation approved it on 11 December and shareholders on 16 December, making Western a wholly owned subsidiary of Delta. The Western brand was withdrawn and the two workforces fully merged on 1 April 1987. Delta inherited Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, and with them the Rocky Mountain and Pacific coast networks it had never had; transpacific flying began the same year, Atlanta to Tokyo by way of Portland.

The largest prize came from a collapse. When Pan American World Airways failed, Delta agreed on 1 September 1991 to buy its East Coast and European routes, its intra-European network from Frankfurt and the Pan Am Shuttle, for a total of some 1.3 billion dollars, and took a controlling interest in what was left of the company. Delta had promised further money to keep Pan Am flying and a month later decided against it; Pan Am stopped on 4 December 1991. The creditors' committee sued Delta for more than 2.5 billion dollars, and in December 1994 a federal judge found that Delta was not liable for Pan Am's end. What Delta had bought made it the largest United States carrier across the Atlantic, which it has remained.

The last merger was the largest. Delta and Northwest Airlines announced on 14 April 2008 that they would combine under the Delta name; the Department of Justice approved on 29 October 2008, concluding that the two networks barely overlapped. Northwest flew as a wholly owned subsidiary until its operating certificate was merged into Delta's on 31 December 2009, and the brand was retired on 31 January 2010 when the reservation systems were joined. The combined airline was then the largest in the world, with 786 aircraft.

Northwest brought Detroit, Minneapolis to St. Paul, a Pacific network built on Tokyo and the airline's first Airbus aircraft, which are now the majority of the fleet. The two Midwest hubs it added remain, with Atlanta and Salt Lake City, what Delta calls its core hubs.

The years after 2001 were the worst in Delta's history. Traffic fell after the September 11 attacks, fuel rose, and the low-cost carriers took the domestic markets that had paid for everything else. Delta answered in 2003 with Song, a low-fare airline within the airline, and from 2004 with cuts: seven thousand jobs, a pay reduction of 32.5 per cent for the pilots at the start of 2005 and 14 per cent more in December, and the sale in August 2005 of the Delta Connection carrier Atlantic Southeast Airlines to SkyWest for 425 million dollars, at a price analysts thought well below its worth.

It was not enough. On 14 September 2005 Delta filed for protection under Chapter 11 in the bankruptcy court in Manhattan, owing some 28.3 billion dollars. Northwest Airlines filed in the same court on the same day. Delta cut a quarter of its flights at Cincinnati, moved the aircraft to Atlanta and Salt Lake City, and set out to take three billion dollars a year out of its costs.

In November 2006 US Airways offered eight billion dollars for the bankrupt airline, and raised the offer twice. Delta's board refused, and its employees campaigned publicly against the bid under the slogan Keep Delta My Delta. On 31 January 2007 the creditors rejected the takeover and US Airways withdrew. Delta's plan of reorganisation was confirmed on 25 April 2007 and the airline left bankruptcy on 30 April as an independent company, with new shares, a new livery and a redrawn widget.

The merger with Northwest followed eighteen months later, and the integration ran to January 2010. It gave Delta the scale it had been short of, and the decade after it was the most profitable in the company's history, interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, which in March 2020 cut planned capacity by forty per cent and brought forward the retirement of the MD-88 and MD-90 fleets to 2 June 2020.

The airline has also learned how much of itself is now software. On 19 July 2024 a faulty update to a third-party security product disabled Windows systems worldwide; Delta's crew-tracking system could not be recovered quickly and the airline cancelled more than 7,000 flights over five days, disrupting more than half a million passengers. Delta put its losses at about 550 million dollars, and the affair is still in litigation.

Delta reached its centenary on 2 March 2025, a hundred years after a crop-dusting company was incorporated at Macon, Georgia. Very little of the airline's present shape was visible in its first fifty years: it was a southern regional carrier with a reputation for being well run and unspectacular, and it became a global airline mainly by buying the wreckage of others, Northeast, Western, Pan Am's Atlantic, Northwest.

What it kept through all of that is a particular corporate character. Delta remained non-unionised among its pilots' colleagues in most work groups where its competitors did not, ran a profit-sharing scheme that has paid out more than a billion dollars in a single year, and in 2012 bought an oil refinery, which no other airline has attempted at that scale. The company's own explanation for each of these is the same: it prefers to own the thing it depends on.

The record of the first century is kept at the Delta Flight Museum in Atlanta, housed in the airline's two pre-war maintenance hangars beside the head office. It holds the first Boeing 767 the employees bought for the company in 1982, the oldest surviving Douglas DC-3 airliner, and a Boeing 747-400 from the Northwest fleet: three aircraft that between them cover most of what the airline has been.