Following the horrific crash of a 34-year-old McDonnell Douglas MD-11 flown by UPS in November, the transportation giant has taken the reasonable step of permanently retiring all of its MD-11s. In any case, it was the intention that these older aircraft would be taken out of service in the coming years; it is now clear that they should have been drawn already. UPS takes a hit of $137 million.
The loss will put pressure on UPS’s business as MD-11s account for 9% of the company’s air fleet. NBC News. The world is also facing a dire shortage of freighter aircraft in general, as aircraft makers such as Boeing and Airbus prioritize passenger jets over freighters in their production schedules. In fact, that production crisis is a big part of the reason why more and more freight companies are keeping their planes in the air well past the typical retirement age of 25. That remains a risk and the devastating consequences are now clear.
The fate of freight
Hopefully UPS won’t be operating with a smaller fleet for long. It should receive eighteen Boeing 767 freighters in the next fifteen months. Although this is a decades old model, the actual planes will be fresh from the factory. But Boeing has more than 5,000 planes on backorder, many of them passenger planes, which are also desperately needed to replace aging planes. Demand for air services is just rising above production capacity, and this situation appears to be getting worse, not better.
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