At a media event Thursday, Aug. 4, in Seattle, Amazon took the wraps off its first “Prime Air” branded plane, a Boeing 767 owned by Atlas Air that has been converted into a freighter. Amazon announced deals with two aircraft leasing companies — Atlas, and another called Air Transport Services Group, or ATSG — earlier this year to fly as many as 40 dedicated cargo planes over the next two years. Eleven are already in operation; this is the first one that’s been painted.
No doubt this is a sign of Amazon’s ever-growing dominance, but I can’t help but think of UPS and FedEx. Both have large presences here in Memphis; FedEx’s headquarters is 20 minute drive from my house. Will Amazon eventually control the entire shipping chain? Here’s Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Operations Dave Clark, as quoted in Frommer’s article:
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.
Today, it seems that Primer Air is just to make as-needed connections, but I can’t help but think this is just the start.