At a media event in Seattle last week, Amazon unveiled its first “Prime Air” branded plane. A Boeing 767 owned by Atlas Air, this plane has been converted into a freighter.
Amazon had earlier announced deals with two aircraft leasing companies – Atlas and Air Transport Services group, or ATSG, to fly as many as 40 dedicated cargo planes in the near future. While, eleven are already in operation; “Prime Air” will be the first one that has been painted. The purpose is to provide Amazon abundant shipping capacity for peak periods and flexibility for normal operations as its Prime business grows, said Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president of Operations to Recode.
“You can almost think about the difference between commercial flight and private flight,” 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.”
Apart from vertically integrating its business, it has also invested in numerous logistics technologies and is buying or leasing truck trailers and cargo ships to fulfill its local delivery services, as well. Moreover, Amazon has also built its own cloud-computing and web-hosting platform and designed its own electronic devices that hold the potential of being the future of shopping.
The aircraft is mostly painted white with “Prime Air” branded on both sides, a blue bottom that leads up the fuselage into a stripe and a dark gray tail with Amazon’s “smile” logo on it.
