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Amazon, which is constantly rolling out new facilities to grow its supply chain network on the ground, is likewise bolstering its capabilities in the air.
The retail e-commerce giant announced on January 5 that it has purchased 11 Boeing 767-300 aircraft that will be converted to hold cargo rather than passengers. Amazon bought four of the jets from WestJet, and those jets will join the company’s fleet this year, while the other seven were purchased from Delta and will be added to Amazon’s Air cargo network in 2022.
It brings Amazon’s fleet to 85 total jets that will be ready by 2022, but the expansion is the first time the company has bought planes instead of leasing them. In a blog post, Amazon Global Air’s vice president said that having a mix of leased and owned aircraft allows the company to better manage operations of the growing fleet.
Though Amazon will own the new jets, they will be operated by third-party carriers, as the company has done with all its aircraft thus far.
The aircraft purchase marks the first fleet expansion for Amazon Air since the company announced the leasing of 12 Boeing 767-300s from Air Transport Services Group on June 3, 2020.
Image Credit: By Adam Moreira (AEMoreira042281) – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
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