With Last MD-11 Passenger Flight, Another Aviation Icon Goes Away | IBTimes
While now gone from passenger flights, I regularly see them land as FeDEx cargo jets.
How good are you at distinguishing them from DC-10’s? They have about as many DC-10’s as 11’s. And the -30’s had the extra main gear.
A classic airplane. Tri-jet. Loud, beloved, historic, unloved. Big. And Loud.
It’s been 12 years since I flew on one - American LAX to JFK. Aviation has gotten boring. Now it’s just Boeing and Airbus. Five years ago I flew on an Ilyushin (76, I think) from Moscow to St. Petersburg. I banged my head on the overhead - which had no room for my carry-on, so I kept it in my lap (!). It was a new years’ flight, so the Russians on board were swilling vodka from their carry-on. But I digress.
Farewell, MD-11/DC-10. 
The MD11 was not that widely bought and was not kept in mainline service for very long, relative to other models (we still have 737-300s [model launch 1984] and MD-80s [1980] in everyday duty with the majors and Delta retired its last DC-9-50 [1975] last January). It may have had a problem with there being little market interest in replacing the DC10 with what was seen as a DC10-NextGen for passenger service.
Sure, Boeing has had enormous success with going multigenerational with the 737 platform over 50 years; and McD-D sort of approximated that with the DC9 derivatives for 30+ years, though in their case they sought to at least in name call attention to the evolution by renaming them after the DC9-80 as the MD8* and MD9* series. But I get the feeling that in going from DC10 to MD11 they could not close the sale on either the concept or the actual business deal.
It may just be the trijet widebodies were doomed anyway once the twins grew to comparable size and changes in ETOPS opened oceanic routes to them, especially once the A330 and 777 brought along true intercontinental long range for heavy twins. Maybe the MD11 should have been missing one engine.
Of course, the Boeing merger was the nail in the coffin – why sell MD11s when you can sell 777s made at the home plant in Washington.
Crappy, dangerous airplanes. Good riddance.
The sentence
" The exit from service of the MD-11 marks the demise of the last intercontinental, double-aisle jet made by a Western planemaker other than Boeing or Airbus. "
is very strange.
I would think Boeing and Airbus account for 95% + of widebody intercontinental jets, so this is hardly the end of western aircraft manufacturing.
What are you talking about? There’s still scads of Airbus planes in service.
:rolleyes:
I should probably support my statement with some statistics:
“Crappy”: I found a few numbers for dispatch rate, which is a measure of how many flights are cancelled for technical reasons:
777: 99.3%
A340: 98.3%
737NG: 99.7%
MD-11: 92%
So the MD-11 has roughly eight times as many flight cancellations (due to technical reasons) as the 777.
“Dangerous”: This is from a Boeing “2012 Statistical Summary”, found at www.skylibrary.aero. Hull loss accident rate per million departures:
777: 0.29
A340: 0.73
737NG: 0.26
MD-11: 3.78
The MD-11 has, um, 13 times as many hull loss accidents (per million departures) as the 777.