Amazon, which once promised air delivery by drone to your front door is now moving ahead on a different direction with air delivery, expanding its fleet of freight planes and building a new air cargo hub at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport.
With this week’s purchase of seven retired 767s from Delta, Amazon is now operating seventy planes in its Prime Air livery, in addition to contracting for flights by other carriers, including Sun Country which operates ten freighters for Amazon. The 767s will undergo conversion to freighters. Amazon also has a dozen other planes on order.
The Cincinnati cargo hub, which will open later this year, will be able to handle 200 Amazon flights a day. Fedex and UPS also operate large hubs in strategically-located mid-size cities. UPS Air is based in Louisville, Kentucky, with FedEx at Memphis. UPS and Fedex are each among the world’s largest air fleets, with well over 500 planes each. Between them, they are keeping the Boeing 747 and 767 production lines open with orders for freight models.
