Amazon Debuts “Prime Air” Plane

As Amazon continues to grow as an online retail giant, the company has officially unveiled its first ever “Prime Air” plane.

With how many packages Amazon delivers to customers on a daily basis, it was only a matter of time before the online retail giant began to acquire its own airplanes to deliver all of its products.

Back on Thursday, the company officially unveiled its first ever “Prime Air” plane in Seattle, Washington. The plane, a Boeing 747, has been converted into a freighter so that it can deliver as many packages as possible in one trip.

Earlier in May, Amazon had announced that it had struck deals with two major aircraft companies in Atlas Air and Air Transport Services Group. The deal was to allow Amazon to double its fleet of aircraft so that they could continue increasing their delivery speeds across the United States and overseas.

While Amazon has 40 planes that will involved in transit over the next two years, this is the first to be unveiled as a “Prime Air” plane. While 40 planes may sound a bit excessive, the idea is to have enough capacity for peak periods of sales, specifically around the holidays in the winter and Amazon Prime Day in the summer.

“You can almost think about the difference between commercial flight and private flight,” Amazon senior VP of operations Dave Clark told Recode. “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.”

Amazon continues to grow as a company, so expect more big moves like this in the future.