Jetrader - July/August 2008 - 9

any airplane, the use of older, inefﬁcient aircraft is becoming suspect. The days when 75 percent of the world’s air cargo aircraft were converted airplanes I think is a thing of the past. I think the number of more fuel efﬁcient airplanes must be added to the system because the economics of operating some of the older aircraft, even at lower utilization, no longer works. If you look at what has transpired with Boeing and Airbus, with the delays of their respective programs, airplanes that might have been converted like the Boeing 767 and more A300-600s have not been available. By the time this delivery situation has somewhat straightened out, most of the aircraft that become available will be, in our opinion, too old with too many hours and cycles and secondly won’t be the most fuel efﬁcient airplanes. Today we are seeing a large number of 747-400P/Fs on the market, and most of the MD11s have already been converted, so it is a function of where the operating economics used to favor older airplanes but in the future will deﬁnitely favor newer airplanes. We believe there will be a smaller number of used airplanes being converted and more new airplanes ﬂying. An adjunct of that is that freight that is not absolutely necessary to move by air will not move by air, because it is certainly more expensive to move freight by air then it is by truck or by ship. There will be more of a sorting out of what must travel by air and what can not afford to travel by air. So in terms of airplane types as good candidates, I believe that after the 747-400, the 767-300ER, A300-600 and the A340-300 are the most likely to be converted. thought the cost of fuel would increase we had no idea, at that point, that it would do what it has done. More importantly, at that time, with the delay of the A380 and the cancellation of the A380 freighter program, the likelihood that Airbus was going to shut-down the A300-600 freighter line and that Boeing was curtailing production of 767-300 freighter line, that if you needed a intermediate wide-body airplane that was efﬁcient, there would be generally only one airplane, and that would be the new A330-200 freighter. We felt that the market for a new medium-sized wide-body was deﬁnitely there and the airplane having superior economics to the new 767-300 freighter and with freight handling capabilities that are much more versatile than the 767, we made the decision to buy the 20 new A330-200Fs. J: What type of cargo operator is a good candidate for the A330-200 freighter and why? RA: First off, the plane was designed by Airbus to be a very versatile freighter, responding not only to the high-yield integrator operation but as a general market freight airplane as well. Now that fuel is increasing in cost in the manner that it is, it’s very difﬁcult for many of the operators out there to justify ﬂying low-yield freight. So, you have the general market freight operators of the world, and you have the integrators. The general market freight operators typically have high utilization of their aircraft over long ranges, and it’s a necessity to have the most efﬁcient aircraft possible. Equally challenging is the yield necessary to support ﬂying the freight by air. Secondly, there are large imbalances of freight to and from Asia and Europe and the United States. As fuel cost rise and there is a shift of lower yield freight off aircraft, frequencies in many markets will be cut to ensure ﬁlling the larger aircraft. The Jetrader 9 J: Why did you (Intrepid) decide to place the largest order for 20 aircraft of the Airbus A330-200 Freighter model? RA: At the time we were looking at expanding the used aircraft side of Intrepid and while we

Jetrader - July/August 2008

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