What's going on at DHL?

[Mintraman]

Hi everybody,

I just heard from a friend last week that 3 DHL A300s will be operated under Air Contractors AOC within Europe (and 2 in the middle east) and all the aircraft will be painted in DHL colours.
Just curious to know why can't DHL Germany grow and what is the future of DHL UK? It looks like DHL UK (now fully based in Germany) will slowly reduce its fleet and Air Contractors is aiming to replace DHL UK eventualy. Can anyone bring any info on this topic? Thanks.

[deltahotel]

Out of interest, what's your interest. DHK is hardly fully based in Germany - ac are G reg, HQ in UK, some pilots based in Uk. No knowledge of EAT.

[Mintraman]

Deltahotel

You are talking about the old-old-very old contracts. Those guys will not be replaced and all positions have been LEJ base for a few years now. You should know that.

[SMT Member]

Air Contractors have been operating on behalf of DHL for as long back as I can remember. At various times they've been rumoured to replace EAT, and it wasn't long after DHK had sprung rumours started floating they'd replace them too.

DHL has always had a policy of having a mixed bag of owned and not-owned airlines operating for them. They are also not afraid to move metal around, and I don't think DHK had to search very hard to crew the 757 they had based in SYD (or was it AKL?) for a year or so. Neither did EAT find it difficult to crew A300s flying into places hot, sandy and unwelcoming from BAH, even after the bad guys got lucky.

A third party carrier is not there to 'steal' jobs of wholly owned DHL airlines (of which there are quite a few). Either it's because of traffic rights, geography or for growth and to keep e.g. DHK bosses sharp in the competition to grab some of that. That's the mechanism which landed the 767s with DHK years back, in sharp competition with EAT, '3rd party' and ABX from across the pond.

[deltahotel]

Mintra.

I know exactly how many are based in ema and lej and have a pretty good idea how it will go in the future.

Again, just out of curiosity, what is your interest in this?

Rgds