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Amazon expands its air cargo fleet
- ChuckMcM 7y agoBet they could get a great deal on lightly used 737-MAX planes available from these sellers. (insert Amazon Marketplace link :-))
- vidanay 7y agoExactly what I was thinking. Similar to how FedEx built its fleet on retired DC-10 aircraft.
- choward 7y agoToo soon.
- samstave 7y agoDIVE DIVE DIVE
- yread 7y agoMAX doesn't have a freighter conversion program yet though.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoThis is the company that famously turned doors into desks. [1] 1 https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/how-a-door-became-a-desk-and-a-symbol-of-amazon https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/how-a-door-be...
- ambicapter 7y agoWell, desks don't fly through the air at 500 mph with ~hundred tons of cargo aboard :/
- zhte415 7y agoWell, Steve Ballmer never worked at Amazon. * Ducks, I'm going to take a karma hit for this
- djsumdog 7y agoMaybe that's how Boeing can salvage their program? We'll buy back all your 737MAXs at a loss, take a tax write-off, rebrand them as 7C-MAX, a brand new plane, with new pilots certification, rip out of the MCAS, and now we only lose a few hundred million instead of a LOT of hundreds of millions.
- makerofspoons 7y agoIncreased use of airplanes is one factor in why US greenhouse gas emissions grew last year after years of decline: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/1/11/18177118/airlines-climate-change-emissions-travel https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/1/11/1817711...
- airstrike 7y agoU.S. airlines != Amazon cargo. How do you propose Amazon ship their products? Rail? Amazon is effectively just replacing UPS / FedEx. In the long run, the net result to society is the same whether UPS, FedEx or Amazon flies the plane (assuming every plane operates at the same capacity and have equal fuel efficiency). The pollution from these planes is a function of how much people shop online, not which company flies the plane.
- makerofspoons 7y agoI propose Amazon and consumers pay for the environmental damage shipping these products using fossil fuels causes.
- Cyph0n 7y agoGood luck calculating that! If you do, make sure to offset that with: (1) the reduction in retail space use for products, (2) the reduced amount of cars on the road, etc. etc.
- penagwin 7y agoNot to mention, even after you somehow take into affect all of the various variables at play here, they can easily claim you miscalculated and just wave off the concerns "Oh Amazon is a Green Initiative Company™.... blah blah blah"
- ericd 7y agoLook into carbon tax proposals if you’re interested in learning about it.
- compsciphd 7y agodrove down from Palo Alto to San Diego up to LA yesterday and I passed so many amazon 18 wheelers. they were by far the most prevelent of a single "trucking company" that I saw (there were a handful of others that I saw more than one truck of, but must have seen at minimum 5-10 amazon trucks)
- djsumdog 7y agoThey're pretty much the new Wal-Mart.
- HillaryBriss 7y agoWal-Mart also wants to be the new Amazon https://wwd.com/business-news/financial/amazon-walmart-top-ecommerce-retailers-10383750/ https://wwd.com/business-news/financial/amazon-walmart-top-e...
- xutopia 7y agoI am scared at the scale that a single company can have nowadays. This is astounding!
- tunnuz 7y agoActually, I know of airlines that have way more than 70 planes!
- Operyl 7y agoExcept, Amazon isn't an airline ..
- tunnuz 7y agoExcept, I was making a joke.
- Operyl 7y agoThe internet is (usually and unfortunately), only text. There are no facial cues, hand gestures, etc. I, like I imagine a lot of people, can't easily detect sarcasm in text unless it's extremely over the top. And even then .. sometimes I have to wonder.
- chrisseaton 7y agoSarcasm has to be the least effective way to communicate anyone could choose to use. You’re begging to be misunderstood and quoted as an idiot by using sarcasm these days.
- SteveNuts 7y agoYou're right for online conversations or around people you don't know. Within friends groups or people that know you well (long-time coworkers) it's an effective tool, at least in my experience. The hard part is not getting taken out of context by someone that overhears your conversations, so you should still exercise caution.
- W-Stool 7y agoHere's a scenario that gives me pause: you as a company goes all in to re-engineer your critical apps to use AWS as efficiently as possible. Your apps are now no longer portable away from AWS without a lot of time and work. Then Amazon enters your business space in direct competition to you. Through your business with AWS you are now funding a large, fierce, and direct competitor. Anyone else think of this, or am I just being paranoid?
- makerofspoons 7y agoThis is already happening to SaaS startups: https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/aws-startups-conflict.html https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/aws-startups-conflict.html
- jessriedel 7y agoWhat is the relevance of funding your competitor? Amazon is so huge that the AWS fees you pay them are a drop in the ocean, and will have negligible effect on the (relatively tiny) unit of Amazon that's competing with you. More concerning would probably be the possibility that your AWS service would be suspended or otherwise purposefully disrupted.
- pova 7y agoThat's not an argument. People say the same thing about voting or polution, it adds up. Also, AWS is not a smart part of Amazon, AFAIK most of their profit comes from it. They sell products for cheap, so they can push competitors out to keep growing and then they balance the loss with AWS profits.
- nordsieck 7y ago>>> Then Amazon enters your business space in direct competition to you. Through your business with AWS you are now funding a large, fierce, and direct competitor. >> What is the relevance of funding your competitor? > That's not an argument. Sure it is. It's a great argument. Do you somehow think Amazon is limiting itself to copying businesses on the AWS platform only? No: they'll copy any successful business anywhere. Unless your business is Netflix, you, by yourself, are not contributing enough to their bottom line to boost their efforts to compete with you. And guess what: Netflix doesn't believe that the money they're paying AWS is enough to hurt their competitiveness with Prime Video. The 10 VMs your company is going to run aren't going to matter.
- Bokanovsky 7y agoI wonder if Amazon will offer any up any spare freight capacity on their planes? After all if they're not using they can always sell that capacity.
- turtlegrids 7y agoA logical eventual extension of https://freight.amazon.com/ https://freight.amazon.com/
- Bokanovsky 7y agoThat makes sense. I wonder how much a slot would cost compared to regular airfreight? I'm not even sure how much the regular Amazon freight service costs compared to regular truck freight.
- petra 7y agoAccording to recent news, Amazon freight is about 30% cheaper.
- hadlock 7y agoSouthwest Airlines and United both offer freight services to the public, I'm sure most others do as well. United Freight in particular has a dedicated pet transport service. Other than pets, you just walk up to the freight counter, pay the clerk and your freight arrives at the freight counter other end. Greyhound and Amtrak offer these services as well to the public. I saw a family ship a refrigerator halfway across Colombia via bus back in 2014 for $10 under a passenger bus. If they're offering it to the public, no reason not to offer it at a corporate rate.
- peter303 7y agoTechies who dont have Prime and dont buy something every week, please raise your hands. Five hours later: still waiting for first hand.
- tomschlick 7y agoOmega Co is expanding.
- Theodores 7y agoSince they own the planes can they move stock around rather than packaged parcels, doing the boxing at the remote end? If they could do this then they could pack so much more stuff on the planes than a commercial parcels company could.
- sct202 7y agoI'm surprised they're pushing this out so fast considering one of their planes crashed outside of Houston fairly recently.