The ‘Queen of the Skies’ is back from the dead
Why old Boeing 747s are being snapped up by package haulers
Afunny thing happened to an older generation of Boeing 747 jumbo jets on their way to dusty oblivion in desert parking lots. Instead of being scrapped, they are back in demand as workhorses of global shipping. Booming trade is stoking the need for big, long-range jets to haul time-sensitive goods, from iPhones made in China, to fresh flowers grown in Latin America.
Interest in Boeing’s 747-400 freighter family was rebounding last year, even as Delta Air Lines and United Continental hosted farewell tours to mark the end of US passenger service on the four-engine behemoth nicknamed the “Queen of the Skies”. With Boeing’s factory-fresh models sold out through 2021, cargo carriers are snapping up jumbos that were built from 1993 to 2009 — if they can find them.
“It’s tightened up, that’s for sure,” said William Flynn, chief executive officer of Atlas Air Worldwide. The company is in the process of adding six 747-400 freighters to its fleet. “There’s just a finite number of aircraft,” he said.
Demand is strongest for used 747s originally built as freighters, since they have hinged noses that flip open to load oversize cargo such as oildrilling equipment. Lease rates have rebounded for the aircraft, while the number of stored models has shrunk to the point where almost every airworthy plane is spoken for, said to George Dimitroff, head of valuations for Flight Ascend Consultancy.
Once written off as dead, the converted 747 freighters have shown new life over the last nine months, Dimitroff said. While it’s not quite a comeback, lease rates have climbed for older models.
One sign of the renewed interest: “We’re seeing aircraft get D-checks that were in storage for a long time that we thought were going to be parted-out,” he said, using an industry term for heavy maintenance. The cost, typically more than US$3 million ($4.35m) a plane, is a sign they’ll fly again, instead of being chopped up.
The revival involves a small subset of the 1544 jumbos that have flown away from Boeing’s Seattle-area factory since the four-engine 747 debuted in 1970. There’s no sign of a similar resurgence for brand-new passenger versions of the 747-8, or Airbus SE’s A380 superjumbo.
A global trade war could snuff interest in the older freighters. So would a big increase in oil prices.
“If we get to US$90 a barrel, it’s going to start getting really ugly for the four-engine aircraft again,” said Brian Postel, vice president for aircraft acquisition at Unical Aviation, a California-based supplier of aircraft parts and maintenance. A US benchmark exceeded US$70 a barrel this month for the first time since 2014.
Still, the recent trend reverses the stream of 747s that had headed to boneyards this decade. Airlines switched long-range flying to more
The passenger ones will be gone, the freighters have a chance. Brian Postel
economical twin-engine models, and Boeing last year dropped the 747 from its long-term forecast for passenger planes. The total number of permanently retired or scrapped Boeing jumbos more than doubled, from 442 in 2010 to 890 this year, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence analysis of Flight Ascend data.
“Storage is your slow march to death,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst George Ferguson said of the desert lots where old aircraft go to be raided for parts.
But in mid-2016, air shipments started to rebound slowly, and then in monthly leaps. United Parcel Service negotiated a freighter order that will keep Boeing’s 747-8 assembly line open into the next decade. Atlas Air started lining up 747-400 freighters for customers such as DHL Worldwide Express.
The older models cost a small fraction of Boeing’s US$403.6m list price for a 747-8 freighter. In fact, Chinese package carrier SF Airlines Co. bought two of the youngest -400s for 320m yuan (US$50 million) last year online via Taobao, China’s biggest e-commerce platform.
While air-freight growth slowed in March, demand is still forecast to increase from 4 per cent to 5 per cent this year, according to the International Air Transport Association. That bodes well for new Boeing freighters, as well as for the used models.
The cargo comeback has enabled Boeing Capital Corp, the manufacturer’s financing arm, to shrink the amount of financing it had provided to help support 747-8 sales during the slump. As of the first quarter, the exposure had shrunk to US$481m, from US$1.07 billion a year earlier, according to a federal filing.
“The return of the cargo market has been a factor, along with BCC’s expertise in placing wide-body airplanes,” Joanna Pickup, a Boeing spokeswoman, said by email.
Postel’s company purchased 77 aircraft to be parted-out over the past two years, including a half dozen -400s. “The passenger ones will be gone,” he said of Boeing’s best-selling jumbo variant. “The freighters have a chance.”