How Many McDonnell Douglas MD-11 Aircraft Are In Service?

The McDonnell Douglas MD-11 currently occupies a strange and yet extremely fascinating place in aviation history. It was conceived as a modern long-haul widebody for the late 1980s and early 1990s, but its real legacy was written not in passenger terminals but in global cargo hubs. That is the principal reason why the question of how many MD-11 aircraft remain in service today is far more interesting than it sounds at first. This is a lot more than just a fleet-counting exercise. It is a way of tracing how a jet that once promised to be a flagship intercontinental airliner gradually became a specialist freighter, then an increasingly rare survivor of the three-engine era. Today, you will be hard-pressed to find a jet flying with paying passengers onboard outside some very odd edge cases.