Amazon will 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.

https://youtu.be/pqvyhKqMLtg

The idea is to provide Amazon enough shipping capacity for peak periods and flexibility for normal operations as its Prime business grows said Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Operations Dave Clark.

“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.”

As one example, Clark said the flights will be helpful for east coast-west coast runs for certain specialized inventory and imports. Amazon can use the planes for both shipments to customers and to move goods between its facilities.

The move comes as Amazon further vertically integrates its business.

In addition to leasing dedicated cargo planes, it has grown its number of fulfillment and sorting centers to more than 145 worldwide, is building out its own local delivery service in some markets, has invested in numerous logistics technologies and is buying or leasing truck trailers and cargo ships.

It has also built out its own cloud-computing and web-hosting platform that is now a $10 billion-a-year business.