FORT WORTH, Texas — Last October, BNSF Railway had filed a suit over a start-up airline’s effort to use the name “Northern Pacific.” As of Sept. 8, 2023, a temporary outcome has surfaced.
Northern Pacific Airlines (NPA) has received a preliminary injunction — a “temporary relief” to keep things the way they are until the court makes a final decision. NPA can stay in business but must cease using the moniker Northern Pacific.
Forced to rebrand, it appears the airline will now be called New Pacific Airlines. The original website currently only has an “N” on it, and the NPA’s previous X (formerly Twitter) account and Facebook accounts have been removed.
The website Simple Flying said after trying to contact BNSF for comment, they received the following statement, “We don’t comment on pending litigation but would refer you to the court documents where the federal court in [Los Angeles] granted our request for an injunction to stop Northern Pacific Airways from using the ‘Northern Pacific’ trademark. To read more about the suit over trademark infringement, [see “BNSF sues airline over use of ‘Northern Pacific,'” Trains News Wire, October 25, 2022].
Simple Flying says, “The airline announced today [September 8] that it would be rebranding to a name not a million miles from its original one. New Pacific Airlines has already started to be used in company headers and email signatures, but its official changeover will come only with regulatory approval.” DOT and FAA approval will be needed prior to an official name change but it seems that NPA is working on it, and will not be appealing the case.
The big “N” used as a logo will stay. What will change with the new name is the ticketing platforms, marketing materials, and the livery such as repainting the fleet. NPA’s CEO Rob McKinney spoke to Simple Flying in this article and said “We’ve started the process. We’ve done as much as we can to move towards adopting the new name, and we’re taking it seriously.” It’s just going to take time for everything to be completely legalized and situated moving forward.
“Anytime you pick any name, you go out to the marketplace, and there’s a spectrum between little risk and 100% risk — there’s never zero risk. The report that we got suggested this was low on the risk scale, and it was actually lower on the risk scale than other things that we were considering at the time. So you just have to make a judgment call, and in this instance, we made the wrong one,” McKinney said to Simple Flying.
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