Boeing 757 – Finding a niche
The Boeing 757 has a unique story in aircraft model development. Basically, it was designed to be a narrow body version of the Boeing 767 and was planned to replace the extremely successful but (by the late 1970’s) inefficient B-727 on domestic routes.
Boeing developed this fleet with the anticipation that there would be a demand for increased capacity on board domestic flights. However, the B-737 became the aircraft of choice for emerging low-cost carriers during the 1980’s. Boeing ceased production of the aircraft in 2004 to focus on the popular B-737 family of aircraft.
The aircraft was a good idea that never really found much success on domestic routes outside of the United States. Although British Airways was one of the launch customers of the fleet in 1983 (56 delivered) and operated the fleet until 2010.
Only a relative handful of the fleet were delivered to Asian airlines with the last built aircraft of the fleet delivered to Shanghai Airlines in November 2005. My own personal experience with flying on a B-757 was a flight from Beijing to Kunming, China on China Southern Airlines in 2008.
The aircraft did find a niche, however, as the choice of several fledgling charter operators, cargo operators and a few very high-profile business executives.
I picked two of the aircraft that have had interesting careers. Registration C-FXOF originally entered service with Canada 3000 in April 1990 and remained in their fleet until the airline ceased operations in 2001.
It was then acquired by ILFC (International Lease Finance Corporation) and went through quite a few re-registrations and paint jobs for the next ten years. Below is a sample life-cycle of a charter service aircraft.
| Delivered | Airline | Registration | Country |
| 30-Apr-1990 | Canada 3000 | C-FXOF | Canada |
| 1-May-2002 | National Airlines | N544LF | USA |
| 1-Sep-2003 | North American Airlines | N753NA | USA |
| 1-Mar-2005 | Rubloff Jet Express | N753NA | USA |
| 7-Aug-2006 | Aerosur | N753NA | Bolivia |
| 19-Mar-2008 | Zoom Airlines | C-GTDX | Canada |
| 13-Dec-2008 | Air Slovakia/Albanian Airlines | OM-ASG | Slovakia |
| 25-Jun-2010 | Mint Airways | EC-LHL | Spain |
| 31-Mar-2010 | PAL Airlines (Lease) | EC-LHL | Canada |
| 23-Sep-2011 | Thomas Cook UK (Lease) | EC-LHL | UK |
| 1-Nov-2011 | Mint Airways (Return off Lease) | EC-LHL | Spain |
| 1-May-2012 | ILFC (Scrapped) | N101LF | USA |
The next aircraft was originally delivered to Sterling Airways of Denmark in 1991 and would later be purchased by Vulcan Northwest Enterprises and become the corporate business jet for Microsoft Co-founder Paul Allen.
Since 2011 has been the property of DJT Operations (under registration N757AF) and is (perhaps sarcastically) referred to as Trump Force One.
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References:
Boeing 757 at Wikipedia
C-FXOF at Airfleets .net
N757AF at Airfleets.net