Northwest Airlines Flight 5 was a regularly scheduled, multiple stop flight from Chicago Municipal Airport to Boeing Field, Seattle.

It had intermediate stops at Minneapolis; Fargo, North Dakota; Billings, Montana; Butte, Montana; and Spokane, Washington.

On October 30, 1941, on the flight's leg between Minneapolis and Fargo, the Northwest Airlines Douglas DC-3A-269 operating the route crashed into an open field about 2 1/2 miles east of the Fargo airfield, just after 2:00 am local time.

[1] The flight's captain Clarence Bates, the sole survivor, would end up dying himself a year later from another aviation accident in St. Paul, Minnesota, test-flying a Consolidated B-24.

The cause of the crash was determined to be an excessive buildup of ice on the aircraft's wings.