Originally Posted by
tdracer
Lets see, Air Canada has 30, Delta 77, United 54, JAL 35. Worldwide over 400 767s are still operating as passenger aircraft (over 700 if you add in the freighters). You have a strange definition of "not many"...
As Admiral notes, airlines like them - they don't take a whole lot of maintenance and make lots of money. Quite a few of the passenger 767s out there have over 100k flight hours and are still going strong.
Yes, there are close to no capital costs, but isn't that more than made up by higher fuel and maintenance cost? Don't the checks cost a lot of time and money once the planes are 30 years old and have 80k+ cycles?
I mean, there must be a reason that solid airlines phase their planes out once they reach about 15 years.
And the main reason, apparently, that Lufthansa and a bunch of others passed up on Condor was exactly that their fleet was very old and in dire need of replacement.