McDonnell-Douglas MD-11
Ordered in 1987 as the last act for CEO Mitsuharu Kudo before retiring, the new MDD long-range trijet would have helped to cement Koko Airways position on international routes. Kudo's vision was to erode Koutei's market on US bound flights by offering a domestic competitor were the flag carrier had always enyojed a monopoly. The new directive however had different ideas, thinking that doing the same on the southeast-asian market would have been more profitable. The idea was not totally wrong, but a few errors were made. First, al fourteen orders were not deferred and delivered as planned between 1991 and 1996 despite the early 90s downturn caused by the gulf war. With less revenues, this caused a bit of strain in the Airline cash flow, nothing apparently troublesome, that wuold have led yo much serious consequences later on. Second, US-bound routes were completely neglected -only Los Angeles was added, as late as 1996- while Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei and Jakarta were added to the airline destinations. The Asian economic crisis of 1997 turned all those routes into istant-loss makers, so much that all but Shanghai had been axed by 1998. The severe losses suffered by KOA's finances could not be mitigated due to the lack of reserve cash suffered in the early 90s. The airline tride to return on the original path by having the MD-11s fly to the US, opening routes to Seattle, Chicago and New York. The move worked at first, so that singapore was added again to the trijet destinations in 2000. Things turnet worse aonce again after 9/11 however. Flights to NY were stopped in early 2002 and the MD-11 reurned to fly the Hoshiguma-Beijing route but -Koko Airways kept bleeding out. As the older DC-10s were retired, the MD-11s replaced them as route curs continued. Between 2004 and 2006 service to Seattle, Chicago, Beijing, Singapore, Shanghai and Los angeles was discontinued. The MD-11 ended up flying the former routes of their older siblings: Honolulu, San Francisco, Seoul, Hong kong, Tokyo and Osaka. The last Koko Airways flight operated the day of the shutdown -july 9th 2007- was an MD-11 from Osaka to Hoshiguma.
All fourteen were later converted to freighters and went on flying with UPS.