The Northwest Airlines History Center

Northwest Airlines History Center Preserves The History Of Minnesota's First Hometown Airline And Its 13 Legacy Partners - Celebrating 22 Years in Operation, and Planning for Growth to Serve New Generations!

The ability to go anywhere in the world your business travel required - or your vacation plans led you - Northwest Airlines was the one airline that would fly you directly to that destination from the Upper Midwest. Without the comprehensive and convenient regional, national, and global service provided over the past century by NWA, Republic, North Central, and their associated carriers, the Twin Cities and North Country would never have attained the high standard of living and concentration of top-tier companies, cultural institutions, and educational centers we enjoy.

Northwest Airlines is gone. Northwest's legacy, however, lives on, and you can visit it, touch it, and re-live it at the Northwest Airlines History Center. Our compact museum location, on the 3rd floor of the Crowne Plaza AiRE Hotel, East Bloomington, near the Mall of America and MSP International Airport, is where the history of Northwest - and the history of the 13 legacy airlines that were part of Northwest's corporate family tree - are waiting for your visit...no boarding pass required! 

So far in 2025, with your support we not only recovered from a major flooding incident in the Crowne Plaza AiRE Hotel, site of our museum, but came back with new layouts and exhibits, a volunteer training curriculum, and hosted several on-site events to better engage our longtime supporters and attract new visitors and volunteers from the Twin Cities aviation and history communities!

We continue to build our internal capabilities for fundraising and cooperating with educational, aerospace, government, and nonprofit organizations with the long-term goal of constructing and operating a large hangar-sized facility. But we are also working on intermediate steps to grow experience and community engagement - such as opening a "mini-museum" kiosk at the Eden Prairie Center this fall for a six-month trial.

Growing our ability to house, preserve, and document our growing archive of donated materials - and making them available to the public through our exhibits and at our website, www.northwestairlineshistory.org - is also critical to our mission! We've rented additional space at our archive in the ClubJet building at Flying Cloud Airport: this space allows us to set up a photo booth, scanning and copying equipment, and our microfilm reader and VHS-to-digital converter, as well as hosting fundraising events and consolidating our off-site video, radio, and film assets under one (air-conditioned!) roof.

We have a lead on a dozen metal "flat file" cabinets that will be coming up for auction this fall from a publishing company in the Twin Cities that will be going out of business - these usually sell for $700-950 each but we should be able to win the whole lot for about $2000. These will be perfect for housing maps, posters, construction diagrams and even signage. We will need to hire professional movers to get them out of their current home and across town to Eden Prairie and into our archive space - this will likely run $2000 to $3000. Our GTTM goal this year of $5000 will underwrite this important step forward to professionally store and maintain one-of-a-kind materials!

Help us properly preserve, present, and promote Minnesota's commercial aviation heritage. Be a friend of the museum and archives by donating today, and by spreading the word! Our all-volunteer organization appreciates your generous support. 

Northwest Airlines History Center

Archives and Administration Office

10100 Flying Cloud Drive, Suite A306

Eden Prairie, MN  55347-4016