When I was your age, I got to fly on North Central Airlines, the famous line of the "blue goose". The Delta paint job on this aircraft is at least the fifth one on this aircraft, as the NC undoubtedly refers to North Central. Its name described its route system, and it flew "milk runs", consisting of several stops on turboprops such as the Convair, and short haul flights between business centers on DC-9s. A "milk run" might originate at CLE, then fly to DTW, LAN, MKG, MKE and ORD. Another such flight might originate at ORD, and end up at RAP, after having stopped at JVL, MSN, LSE, RST, FRM, OTG, SFY, MHE and PIR.

In the early days of airline deregulation, North Central merged with two other regional "feeder" airlines, Southern Airways and Hughes Air West, to form Republic Airlines. Republic aircraft had the blue goose on the tail.

Republic and Northwest Orient merged sometime around 1985-86; this merger was somewhat contemporaneous with the mergers of Delta and Western (which took place in 1986) and TWA and Ozark. The resulting airline dropped the "Orient" and simply became Northwest. This aircraft probably was painted with a plane red tail; later, it picked up NWA's "compass" logo