ASL Airlines Australia continues expansion with purchase of Airwork’s New Zealand and Australia freight business. (They fly freight for FedEx)

Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.

https://www.aircargonews.net/business/2026/05/asl-continues-australasia-expansion-with-airwork-purchase/

 

They took over from a bankrupt company. Another scope boogeyman. ASL contracts for multiple other companies like Amazon.

 

Were we irrational when ASL took over the 757 flying in Europe?

Is it irrational to fear that FedEx could outsource all international flying and there’s nothing FDX ALPA could do about it? But they would never do that, right?

 

If they were going to do it then why would they spend all the time and money bringing back the MD11 and buying more planes.

Who flies UPS freight inter Australia and to New Zealand from Australia and back? Here’s a hint, they don’t have brown tails.

FedEx services over 220 countries and territories. How many of those are serviced by mainline? I know every thing should be carried by purple tails!

 

OMG this is cracking me up. Did you also hear about the UFO's that were going to pick up our freight??? They are going to take away all 777 flying because they fly at 8000 knots.

 

I get that this is your drum to beat. But if you want to have some credibility, I suggest you do some research on freedoms of the air and route authority. Asia is not the EU with open skies. FedEx can’t just hand off their SYD-CAN or SYD-SIN route to any airline du jour to fly their freight. There are time restrictions to serve these routes and they must be flown by the route authority holder within those restrictions. We just had to request a waiver for a route stop required in DXB that we couldn’t comply with due to the local hostilities. Your doomsday scenarios are not all based in fact.

 

the problem with scope: no one trusts, and those in the know are terrible at explaining it to the pilots or they just don’t care to. even if our top scope guy at fedex engaged with a newsletter, most pilots wouldn’t read it and those who would read it wouldn’t understand it.
so jibber jabber becomes our exercise in futility.
i know this about scope: it’s good for bad breath. or does it cause cancer like everything else these days?
bottom line: our union scope geek needs to watch the company scope geek who answers to the letter of the law, whatever the hell that so happens to be on any given day.
its enough for us to fly it down to mins in the goo and hit the three wire. funny how we never talk about actual pilot $hit in this forum. funny ha ha, like a clown aka sandybeach aka max aka TC.
True Romance is on Netflix now. if you haven’t seen it yet you should.
peace.
jmd

 

Council 22 (both current and former reps) say they can, thus it is gospel.

 

Why are they bringing back the MD? Because there is limited charter slack in the global system and its going for champagne rates? To curry favor with Boeing who is facing a massive liability on the aircraft that could last decades? Because Raj and Rich wants it for a plan for total global air cargo dominion? We don't know. It could be any or all of these things, simultaneously.

That said, we do have the actions of the recent past, where mainline flying (as defined as turbojet aircraft > 60000 MGTOW) that was done by MSL pilots is now being done by ASL pilots. I mean, that is a fact. We can deny it, and EMBFlyer can kick and scream that its all a huge conspiracy theory Council 22 in his tiresome fashion, but here we are. We don't know definitively why the MD was brought back, and we likely never will.

And Fedex doesn't have many planes on order but the fleet is remarkably static given the growth in global air freight which analysts assess at about 4.5% YOY. As far as fleet losses, I believe that BWI A300 and SGF 757 will both be scrapped. Fedex continues to shop for aircraft publicly, and accept deliveries from orders over a decade old. So I don't know if your assertation that Fedex is a actively buying aircraft is as strong an argument as you believe it to be. Taking delivery? Sure. But certainly on the tail end of that.

And, for all the talk of hiring, Fedex hasn't added a pilot to the MSL, since, when exactly? Remember when Fedex opened and closed its hiring website within 24 hours a few months back? I do. I think regardless of the reasons, it was a stunt intended to demonstrate what we see in this thread, namely the cultivation of hope in the absence of evidence.

 

The details of these discussions almost don't matter. The names and the news stories will change.

The important thing to take away from these discussions is that there are about three FedEx pilots who trust this company (and somehow two of them are Sandybeach and Max).