Originally Posted by
Dave Fitzgerald
It's really due to other factors. Apples and oranges. How much money do you want to spend on options? The biggest factor was Smizek didn't want to spend money on anything but himself. This caused 2 problems with the
757 fleet.
1. The winglet program was already under way when Smizek happened and he cancelled the installations. Thus we had a mix of winglet and non-winglet planes for quite a while. Never mind that the fuel savings paid for themselves in a year. Same thing happened with the UAL 767-300's. I think finally we got all the 767 winglets installed last year.
2. There were some significant upgrades to the 757 computers and equipment at about the same time. Again Smizek refused to do the updates because this was money he wouldn't get. So, when Smizek left, we had a bunch of P&W planes that were going to be expensive to bring up to date. The decision was to buy the Max instead of upgrading the 757's.
How'd that work out? FedEx said thank you very much and snapped up half our P&W 757 fleet.
Again, apples and oranges. Cargo carriers have always used second hand aircraft from airlines. Different cost structure and easier to make money with older airplanes. Fedex gets an aircraft to fit their niche and we get to unload an aging frame and replace it with a newer product....a win-win for both.
And I know it's easy to blame Smisek (deserves a lot) but it was Glenn that did leave a mess for him to clean up after in the first place with these planes.