Originally Posted by
NotMrNiceGuy
Regarding Greece, why would FedEx be able to fly 757’s and MD-11’s to Greece, but not UPS?
We could fly to Greece if ups wanted to. They tend to route the aircraft in such a way as to include a cabotage leg on star's and I suppose mng's flying in a way that preclude us. A few years back when Bob Miller was running the show I remember something happened that put Greece and Iceland on the horizon for us to fly. UPS quickly put the kybosh on that.
FDX has route authorities from their purchase of Flying Tigers that have a lot more flexibly as far as cabotage goes. After ww2 pan am, twa, and Tigers had those authorities. I know united got the pan am authorities and for a while operated a hub in LHR, but code sharing with the star alliance put a stop to that.
Finally as a point of information, unless it's changed, the only routes we are guaranteed under our scope were the trunk routes and the original 727 city pairs. The rest ups operates if it makes sense to their business plan. Believe it or not, they do like to fly as much on the brown tails as they can.