Originally Posted by
abxflyr
For those that can and do actually read...This is not a Union thing; never has been. The company, and its parent company, decide when, where, how, for whom, what contracts, jets go here, jets go there. Unions <plural> are not invited into the meeting rooms for those discussions.
N798AX is a -200 who has reached a cycle limit. The aircraft either has to have expensive maintenance performed or be scrapped. With today's market there isn't a viable option for the a/c at this time; therefore it will be taken out of service and most likely scrapped for parts and beer cans. If it gets replaced, the decision will be made from above (although it's not anticipated to be..).
To add to this, management has been saying in their financial filings and on their investor calls for more than a year that they would be having to retire 798AX this year. The retirement has nothing to do with how much business ABX does or does not have.
During Peak, every available ABX ship was gainfully-employed, and they ran 798 right to her LOV, which is 50,000 cycles. They repainted her as recently as March 2019, and she spent a week at ILN for some TLC the same month. She operated as a spare since March and then stepped up the pace in Peak. She ran pretty-reliably right to the end.
As you probably know, while it is technically-possible to fly an airframe once it hits the LOV, by putting it on a special FAA-approved maintenance program, I don't know any operator anywhere that would do that with a 767-200. It's not financially-viable and there are plenty of frames out there that can be substituted. ABX does put the money in to keep these older frames going: as an example, 740AX is the oldest 767-200 still flying anywhere in the world. It's Line Number 6, delivered in March 1983, and ABX gave it 4 months of heavy maintenance this past year, including a lot of sheet metal work and, later, a repaint. And even it has maybe 7000 cycles left before it hits 50k. The highest-time 767-200 at CAM still has like 3500. And CAM has two 767-200 lease returns parked in maintenance that could be put at ABX if ABX needed them. So, sadly, 798 will indeed be beer cans and spare parts relatively-soon.