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(AP) A bankruptcy judge told Northwest Airlines Corp. and two of its unions to keep negotiating a pay-cut deal on Friday.

Judge Allan Gropper is considering the carrier's request to reject its union contracts with pilots and flight attendants. That would leave the airline free to impose its own pay cuts and work rules. The unions say that could provoke a strike.

Gropper gave them until Wednesday to make a deal. It's his second extension. The first one ran out on Friday. He has indicated he would rather the unions and Northwest make a deal rather than have him rule on the matter.

His one-paragraph order said the unions and the airline have met in good-faith negotiations, and that all sides agreed to the extension.

Pilot voting on whether to authorize a strike wraps up on Tuesday. The flight attendant strike vote ends on March 6. The airline has said any strike would be illegal.

"While the company appreciates Judge Gropper giving the parties additional time to continue to reach consensual agreements, achieving the needed labor costs savings as soon as possible is critical to the success of Northwest Airlines, which is losing $3 million to $4 million dollars per day," Bill Mellon, spokesman for the airline, told The Associated Press.

Mellon said that while the talks with the unions have achieved some progress, "we really need to achieve our labor cost savings target as quickly as possible so that the airline can exit bankruptcy expeditiously. The company remains flexible on the methods our unions might use to reach their labor saving target."

The Professional Flight Attendants Association has disputed that, saying that it has met Northwest's demand for $195 million in concessions but that the airline has not removed its demand to use more non-U.S., nonunion flight attendants on international flights.

Both sides reported progress but talks had not wrapped up when they met with Gropper on Friday in his New York courtroom.

Airline and union representatives met with the judge in his courtroom before breaking into smaller groups to talk about the status of negotiations. Each party in the negotiations then met with the judge separately.

Northwest's Mellon did not give details about the initial meeting in Gropper's courtroom, and declined to say if Gropper was acting as a mediator.

The carrier and its unions are expected to continue their negotiations over the weekend in New York.

Northwest, which filed for bankruptcy protection in September, has said it needs $1.4 billion in annual savings from its labor unions to compete with low-cost carriers and absorb rising fuel costs. The flight attendants are being asked for $195 million worth of cuts in wages and benefits annually, while the pilots are being asked for $358 million worth of cuts in wages and benefits annually.

Northwest, which is based near Minneapolis in Eagan, Minn., will release its fourth-quarter financial results on Tuesday. That day it will also file a monthly operating report as required by a company in bankruptcy proceedings. On Friday it asked Gropper to extend its March 14 deadline for filing documents listing its assets and liabilities and its finances until June 1.

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Northwest Airlines was founded in 1926, when it began carrying air mail from the Twin Cities to Chicago on a pair of rented, open-cockpit biplanes. The company began transporting ticketed passengers almost a year later.

(© 2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)