Spacepope wrote:wjcandee wrote:Flying-Tiger wrote:
I saw that. Apparently, they perceive a market for the thing. It didn't sell well as a new-build freighter, but I guess the 767 didn't initially sell particularly-well as a new-build freighter, either.
The line at Dresden was supposed to do 12-14 conversions a year as I remember, but the first few years they never got close to hitting capacity. 20 is a huge order for this line.
Giving it some more thought, ATSG is highly-opportunistic. They always reserve a lot of slots at IAI, who is happy to give them to them. (I was intrigued to see in the CargoFacts article that they have 32 slots at IAI still. That's a lot; 10-12 per year.) The cost to reserve 20 A330 slots at EFW is probably pretty-low, given the excess capacity of that line, and there are probably escape clauses if ATSG can't find lessees or suitable feedstock.
Still, it's a bold move, just like optioning those ex-AA 767s from Jetran was.
The media all said that ATSG "bought" those 767s, which wasn't really true: what they did was, for a relatively-small investment, obtain options to buy as many as 20 of the retiring aircraft, within a time frame, at a fixed, favorable price. Smart. As it turned out, very-smart given the ultimate demand for those aircraft and slots. As orders came and slots were available, ATSG bought the aircraft one-by-one until they went through all 20.
So it will be interesting to see what kind of orders CAM gets (I assume, actually, that they have some in the pipeline if they're pulling the trigger), and we can see where CAM starts acquiring feedstock. Fun!
The article says ATSG plans to place 9 767-300s on lease in the second half of 2021. That seems a bit ambitious. I can see 8, but 9 is a lot.
You have 233AZ and 239AZ both now delivered to Amazon in June. So that's two already.
Then you have 399AN, which is the one for DHL UK that was just painted in Malta. Three.
Then you have 432AX, which is painted and ready to go to Amerijet. Saw that one in ILN last week. Four.
At TLV, you have 391AA (since Jan), 398AN (since Feb), 397AN (since March), 396AN (since May), and 391CM (since July 5). The first four could be ready by year-end, but the July one is ambitious, if you consider that it's usually 2 weeks at least at ILN for post-conversion maintenance and then 2 weeks at a painting contractor. She would have to be out of TLV by November 30 to be ready to lease before year-end. Four months is a bit fast for TLV. The norm is six. I have seen it done as fast as five.
Maybe I'm missing an aircraft that they're counting as a second-half delivery, or maybe there's one at TLV that I missed. In any event, it will be interesting.
Last edited by
wjcandee on Sun Aug 08, 2021 2:19 am, edited 1 time in total.