Slow Ebay Shipping

[Van Dalton]

Probably never been a better time for Antonov to start (restart?) making that second AN-225 a reality!

[Leo Enticknap]

As Mark points out, there are now so many 20-year old 747s, 767s, A330s and A340s that have depreciated by 80-90% looking for buyers, that I'd be surprised if Antonov could drum up much of an order book. In the last six months, the DC-10s, MD-11s and A300s have all but disappeared from the UPS and FedEx ramps at Ontario. I guess they've been turned into beer cans and replaced with recently retired and converted passenger jets.

[Marcel Birgelen]

As I understand it, A380s are pretty much useless for freighter conversion, because the upper deck's loading capacity can't take the weight of anything close to being useful, relative to the volume of the upper deck space. And you can't simply remove the upper deck to carry large items, because that would destroy the structural integrity of the airframe. Friends and relatives in the aviation industry have opined to me that Airbus made a major blunder by either not thinking of this eventuality at all (that a market could eventually exist for converting A380s to freighters), or taking the gamble that it wasn't worth designing in that ability. Given the number of A380s that were mothballed when the pandemic hit, combined with the huge growth in the air cargo market just as the passenger market contracted, it was a gamble they lost spectacularly, if so.

The conversion is quite a challenge, as it would require cargo doors for the two current passenger levels and it would indeed require strengthening of the floor of the upper deck. Another idea is putting passengers in the top-deck and cargo everywhere else, but this wouldn't be interesting for cargo-only operations.