There was a time when airlines flew 747s domestically. Once the market became saturated with airlines and aircraft the larger aircraft gave way to smaller and smaller aircraft. I once heard a pilot say in 2001 that there should never be anything with less than 3 engines doing transcons.

For delta, what may be going on here or has gone on here is they saw the freight market was saturated andthey pulledthe plug. If we had a large freight operation stuff like this would have us in a horrible mood today. But there ain't nothing to stop the gulf carriers from this massive expansion in a location that foreigners were once making a killing.

Really, this sucks but it's inevitable. Truth is dal lost freight a long time ago and could've restarted it with nwa's operation but by then the cost and risk probably were too high to justify continuing with 742s or buying 744s.

counter-to-counter freight is good money and a unique product that FedEx and ups don't readily have. I know, i used to ship aircraft tires that way. and that's maybe a reason why we should have 88s replacing nonstop rj service with multiple leg hub and spoke operations so that real freight can be carried to places like ROA, BTR, GSP, LRD, GSO, ALB, BTV, HPN, CRW, SDF for not a dime more.

Still think we should have 1 or 3 744Fs.