We’ve known that Amazon has plans for drone delivery which they referred to as Prime Air back then, but now it looks like Amazon has decided to slap the Prime Air branding on something else. The company has recently taken the wraps off their latest Prime Air endeavor in the form of an actual cargo plane!
Now before you think that Amazon is getting into the airline business, no they’re not. These Prime Air cargo planes are basically part of Amazon’s plan to create their own air cargo network, meaning that the company is hoping to streamline the delivery process even more. This also means that Amazon is looking to reduce their reliance on other delivery services, which in turn allows them to control their deliveries better.
The company will have at least 11 Boeing 767-300 planes at the start that will make up its fleet and they have been leased from some of Amazon’s shipping partners. Amazon also plans to expand that number to around 40 over the next couple of years, so it will be interesting to see how all of this plays out.
Speaking to Recode, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Operations Dave Clark said, “We have the ability, with our own planes, to create connections between one point and another point that are exactly tailored to our needs, and exactly tailored to the timing of when we want to put packages on those routes — versus other peoples’ networks which are optimized to run their entire network. We add capacity, we add flexibility, and it gives us cost-control capability as well.”
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