Comment by mandevil
19 hours ago
I think that the Mad Dogs only exist as freighters (~or their derivative KC-10 tankers~-Edited to correct that they retired last year) these days. I think the last pax service for any of them was over a decade ago.
And air freight just gets a lot less public attention, I think they are going to keep flying them if they don't get grounded.
The airforce retired the KC-10 in 2021.
Mad dogs are MD-80s.
The KC-10 went out of service last year. None are operating.
Yeah, but DC-10 based tankers for wildfire fighting were still flying until the recent grounding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC-10_Air_Tanker
(Blancolirio points out that the DC-10 tanker is what they modernized to relatively recently -- before that they were flying even more dangerous WW2 airframes for firefighting.)
Damnit, I knew that! Just forgot it in the moment.
Most of the DC-10s in service in the US are used for fire fighting.
And with Omega Air, for contracted air refuelling
https://www.omegaairrefueling.com/
Yes, but there are many MD-11's still flying as freighters. There are four fire-fighting DC10's out of ~8 still flying, but there are 25 Mad Dogs (MD-11) at UPS, 38 with FedEx, and Western Global has 4, so there are plenty of MD-11F's around.
Here are 4 of them. All grounded now.
https://www.10tanker.com/gallery