How does losing approx. 10% of UPS' fleet affect day to day operations?
Posted by Flat-Barracuda1268@reddit | aviation | View on Reddit | 11 comments
According to professor Google, UPS owns/leases 290 aircraft, 26 of which are MD11s. Supposedly they have "contingency plans" to deal with the grounding of the MD11s, but what is the real life implication of this?
Do they abandon the MD11s after a certain period of time? I find it hard to believe that an AD addressing the pylon mounts would come out before the final NTSB report, which means they're likely grounded for at least a year.
Do they have enough capacity to have the other planes in their fleet pick up the slack? Do they have to lease additional aircraft to cover the gap?
I'm just curious how something like this plays out.
ak_kitaq@reddit
The Anchorage Fedex hub would normally have 2 airplanes arrive to be sorted and loaded and 3 leave over the course of a day. Increasing during the holiday rush.
With the MD-11s not operating, they are seeing one or two arrivals every day and one or two departures each day.
The ULD area would normally have ~one plane’s worth of containers at the start of the day before loading the first aircraft
They have roughly 2.5 planes’ worth of ULDs at the beginning of a day instead of one plane
Sauce: friend who packs ULDs for Fedex
boomstereo@reddit
also 10% of fleet doesn’t mean 10% of capacity. maybe a lot less than that.
mduell@reddit
It may be more if MD11 is larger than their average fleet size.
fly_awayyy@reddit
I’ll try to dig up the article. But UPS and FedEx has provisions in their pilot contracts to contract out flying to other carriers. So the ACMI world is working pretty hard with whatever slack they have covering some of their flying from varying carriers. There’s a 727 from IFL doing some UPS short in and out of SDF for example. Seems like they’re restructuring their network for the time being by pulling off larger planes on those smaller routes. Also was mentioned they bought more belly space capacity on from Airlines, and lastly they upped their ground network aka truck operations to pick up slack too.
YOURE_GONNA_HATE_ME@reddit
Those ACMI agreements were in place in July, not new for 5X. It takes specific planning to get them in place and not everyone can take them despite the same aircraft types being used.
And they always sent a ton of air via ground. This hurts 5X the least.
fly_awayyy@reddit
Ahh plenty of those planes from ACMIs if you look them up have not been doing flying for either before this grounding. The IFL 727s alone hasn’t been doing obvious network flying for UPS in the weeks prior. I doubt that was a previous agreement.
ottergoose@reddit
Peak season kicks in around Thanksgiving every year, and is what the other commenter is referring to - that extra capacity is planned for well in advance.
fly_awayyy@reddit
“UPS recently engaged Cargojet to operate several Boeing 757-200 freighter aircraft and Amerijet to operate at least one Boeing 767 freighter on domestic routes. Both aircraft types are smaller than the MD-11”
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/md-11-freighters-face-extended-grounding-for-inspections-airline-says
Facing a structural capacity gap due to FAA inspections, UPS and FedEx are saturating the ACMI market with contracts for Cargojet and Amerijet. With no planes to offer, Western Global Airlines begins pilot furloughs.”
https://www.aviacionline.com/english/cargo/md-11-grounding-triggers-wet-lease-surge-while-western-global-cuts-workforce_a69259be444f9b700e80c1798
Unless I missed something and correct me if I’m wrong but it looks like they’ve been aggressive in immediately securing additional capacity which is not the “peak” surge that was already and normally contracted for.
YOURE_GONNA_HATE_ME@reddit
MDs haven’t been run hard in a long time. They’re known internally to break fairly often. The benefit they have is that most of the flights are within a couple hours. It absolutely hurts, but the distances they flew were close enough that they can double trip aircraft.
One thing people also don’t realize is peak in the air network is actually pretty short. It’s basically the week leading into Christmas, especially as a lot of Amazon has left the network. That week they have a lot of whats called “early out” flights to the hubs to get volume in earlier. Those will relieve some of the strain, especially as a lot go out fairly empty.
ForsakenRacism@reddit
They can also add big rigs domestically
sunsetair@reddit
Why would I hate you?