enviroian

I'm sitting at IND currently waiting to take an AA flight home. Very nice airport by the way. Anyway, outside I see a lot of PURPLE tails.

Is this their 2nd biggest hub behind MEM?

saxman66

It's probably pretty close to it. Places like Oakland, Fort Worth, and Greensboro are hubs as well, but I'm not sure of their size compared to Indy. The MEM sort facility is insane though.

enviroian

Do you think FX has more flights daily than commercial traffic at IND?

LarryJ

FedEx has a large air hub in Anchorage. I don't know the relative sizes.

Wilbur

One upon a time (80s-90s) United planned to move a lot of their facilities and processes from ORD to IND. UA built a significant amount of infrastructure for aircraft services and maintenance at IND with this in mind.

However, Indiana at the time didn't observe daylight savings time until 2006, and so prior to that it wobbled back and forth between Eastern and Central time, making airline scheduling problematic. The governor of Indiana at the time refused to make the necessary changes so that the state was in the correct time zone and would observe or fail to observe daylight savings time. UA needed IND to be in a set time zone, and the governor would not support the change. Other internal financial pressures at UA also came to bear on the plan as well, but the time zone issue and Indiana government unwillingness to continue to work with UA by providing additional subsidies was a big driver.

Therefore UA abandoned their push to shift to IND, and the hangars and supporting buildings were available to FedEx, who eventually occupied them for pennies on the dollar.

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/b...s-pay-off.html

https://www.ibj.com/articles/23784-a...e-now-bustling

Yoshi212

MEM is their Superhub but for the US IND is their National Hub so a lot of traffic will flow through it. After that their Focus airports are Anchorage, Fort Worth, Miami, Newark, Oakland & Winston-Salem.

mozilla

I've noticed an increase in INTL long-haul FedEx flights from Indianapolis, like FDX30, which transports international shipments that may have never gone through MEM if they originated from the midwest.

IIRC you can tell by one of the letters on the label if it's going to be routed through IND or MEM.

readywhenyouare

MIDWESTERNFLYER

How familiar with IND are you?.......because FX doesn't operate on the side of the airport that UA had their facility on. In fact the United MX facility is leased by AAR/Republic not FX.

In short UA's decision to close the UA MX hub, had hardly any impact on FX's growth at IND. As you can see below, they have built virtually everything themselves

enviroian

Does FX operate any A300's anymore or just UPS? I assume they long retired the DC-8's!

Yoshi212

Last I read about their fleet they had a large number of A300s. Some will be phased out as they age but I think they have the last production aircraft that is under 12 years old.

LarryJ

You can see fleet counts on airlinepilotcentral.com. Here's the link to the cargo airlines.

https://www.airlinepilotcentral.com/airlines/cargo

readywhenyouare

nachosdelux

FedEx got a few DC-8's when they acquired Flying Tigers in 1989, and retired them in 1991.

UPS retired their DC-8 fleet in May, 2009.

LarryJ

I think ATI (Air Transport Int'l) was the last commercial DC8 operator in the US. They retired them in 2012.

NASA still operates a DC8-72.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstro...-050-DFRC.html

Samaritan's Purse operates a DC8-72 Combi on humanitarian missions.
https://www.samaritanspurse.org/media/fact-sheet-dc8/