From: Harold Brattland <habrattland@arvig.net>
Sent: Friday, November 7, 2025 1:03 PM
To: Brattland, Mike * <mgbrattland@gerlecreek.com>
Subject: Aviation Week ::Flight Friday: The Fading Resilience Of The MD-11
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UPS MD-11F
Credit: Aviation Visuals / Alamy
With the recent news concerning the tragic MD-11F accident at Louisville, Kentucky, this week’s Flight Friday looks at flight cycles of the last tri-jet aircraft built for commercial service.
The last delivery of an MD-11 was a freighter-built aircraft for Lufthansa Cargo in early 2001, 11 years after the first MD-11 delivery, which was a passenger aircraft to Finnair. Two hundred MD-11s were delivered by McDonnell Douglas, later Boeing, and almost 70 remain in service today, with some additional aircraft in storage.
Looking at utilization since 2019, the freighter MD-11 utilization was unfazed by the COVID pandemic, bucking the trend of similarly sized widebody equivalent passenger aircraft.
The data shows that utilization remained consistent through to the end of September 2021, which was the end of the Northern Hemisphere’s summer season, and Lufthansa Cargo removed its remaining MD-11s from service.
<Numbers chart not copied Sorry>
The end of the summer 2021 season saw FedEx and UPS, the two largest operators of the MD-11, also begin to remove the expensive, less efficient, tri-jet from service, as replacement twin-engine 767s and 777s entered service.
The MD-11 maintains an important role for these operators, but now the jets are used to do some of the shorter trunk routes, and act as part of their “flex fleets.”
FedEx had originally planned to remove the MD-11 from its fleet before the end of this decade. However, due to difficulties in getting new aircraft, the MD-11 was given a small reprieve, and it will be phased out in the early 2030s.
UPS had started retiring some of the oldest MD-11s and it is considered that these, likewise, will fly until around the end of this decade.
This data was put together using Aviation Week’s Tracked Aircraft Utilization database.
Daniel Williams Based in the UK, Daniel is Director of Fleet Data Services for Aviation Week Network. Prior to joining Aviation Week in 2017, Daniel held a number of industry positions analyzing fleet dat