Originally Posted by
forgot to bid
I was talking to a friend who is an MD-11 Captain at FedEx and goes to my church.
He mentioned that they're madly in love with the 777, obviously since they're ordering 60. It is allowing them... please take this as second hand info nothing more... but it is allowing them to leave Asia 2 or 3 hours later than UPS because it can fly nonstop back to MEM while other cargo aircraft will make the stop in ANC.
In a business day the 2 or 3 hours later is tremendously popular.
But 60 777s. We got combined 34 or 33 super premium widebodies in our 777 and 744 fleet. They're double that. And if you throw in the 64 MD11s they're 4X larger. There is absolutely no money in freight.
While I agree that there is money in freight, a valid comparison between Delta and FedEX/UPS consists of the fact that we move similar metal back and forth safely. Fed Ex and UPS make their money in overnight small packages, and have mostly the corner on that market--with the associated infrastructure--a huge infrastructure. While they are getting into the bulk freight business at an increasing rate, their bread and butter is essentially an overnight mail service. We can't do that without enormous capital outlay.
Now if we are talking dedicated freighters and belly freight, yeah, I'll buy that argument--although there are a lot of dedicated freight haulers out there.