Roy Bostock's Other Merger Gets Done

Well, there’s one niggling deal off the desk of Northwest Airlines Chairman Roy Bostock–Delta Air Lines (DAL) and Northwest (NWA) finally agreed to merge after three months of tiresome back-and-forth wrangling.

Sound familiar?

Bostock (pictured here)–apparently, the hardest working man in U.S. corporate board rooms–also happens to be the chairman of Yahoo (YHOO), which is in the midst of a takeover wrangle with Microsoft (MSFT).

So, if he managed to reach some sort of deal–either with AOL (TWX) or Microsoft–that would settle the fate of Yahoo this week, as some are speculating, I think some kind of medal would be in order.

And let’s not leave out the irony of the fact that the former top ad exec is also on the board of Morgan Stanley (MS), which is repping Microsoft!

Roy Bostock=Human pretzel!

Of course, there are still a lot of outstanding issues in the Delta-Northwest deal–including possible employee resistance and regulatory insistence. But getting this far in such a deeply troubled industry as airlines is a good sign that the much easier Yahoo situation can be settled.

Interestingly, under the proposed Delta-Northwest deal, Bostock would become vice chairman of the combined entity, which would use the Delta name.

Also a good sign–a willingness to shed your corporate independence and be OK with it.