Originally Posted by
Indrapoera
Chinese new year + Beijing Olympics. Factories closed in China, so low(er) demand for freighters for a few weeks. More than just WGA’s freighters are parked at the moment.
I'm sure you're right about the first sentence. But the second sentence really isn't true about WGN's direct competitors in the US. If you look at Atlas, all of its 9 777s, except a broken one, are flying today, and a survey through Atlas's 3+ dozen freighter 747s doesn't show any noticeable diminution in flying, particularly to/from Asia. They're just blowing and going. Even little Skylease's 2 744-factory-Fs, which rarely have moss under their wheels, are just flying and flying and flying. I'm sure if I look at Kalitta, I'll see something similar. Hence, the question.
But it sounds like maybe Western Global took the opportunity to stand-down the roughly-half of the MD11 fleet that wasn't already broken or in heavy-maint and flew them all back to SHV and RSW for some light TLC. I guess that's one way to do it. Just seemed strange.