Last September, Mike Maynard, an airport planner for Cincinnati-based engineering firm CDM Smith, was checking out the flight activity at nearby Wilmington Airpark (ILN) in Ohio, when he noticed something odd. As a former network analyst at DHL, Maynard had a habit of reviewing innovative routes, and this one, in particular, jumped out at him. U.S.-based aircraft lessor Air Transport Services Group (ATSG) had launched what it called a \u201ctrial ACMI express network\u201d at ILN, leasing four 767 freighters to an unnamed client.
\nIntrigued, Maynard looked a little deeper and found that the trial was based out of ILN\u2019s 1.1 million-square-foot facility that used to house DHL\u2019s ill-fated express hub in the U.S., operating four flights a day to Allentown in Pennsylvania; Dallas\/Fort Worth; Oakland and Ontario in California; and Tampa in Florida.
\nClearly, some kind of test was taking place, but who leases that many 767s for a \u201ctrial\u201d network? FedEx, UPS and DHL all denied involvement. ATSG wouldn\u2019t comment.
\nAs aviation experts began analyzing the routes, a clear pattern emerged. Each of the airports the 767s flew into were remarkably close to distribution centers run by e-commerce giant Amazon.com. Insider press reports said the ILN network was known at only the upper echelons of Amazon as \u201cProject Aerosmith.\u201d
\n\u201cWe also gleaned some interesting routes in the West,\u201d Maynard said. Alaska-based carrier Northern Air Cargo had begun operating a Boeing Field in Seattle-Boise-San Bernardino-Boeing Field route \u2013 not exactly a common trade corridor, but one that is small enough to go unnoticed and also close enough to several Amazon distribution centers to be of use.
\n\u201cRumor is this West Coast network is called \u2018Project Alpha,\u2019\u201d Maynard added. \u201cAnother rumor is there are other Amazon secretive networks and routes \u2013 all named after rock bands.\u201d While the rock-band-name rumor may not have borne fruit, at least one more Amazon air express trial route was found in Europe in November, with aircraft flying five times a week from Wroclaw, Poland, to Luton or Doncaster in the U.K., and Kassel, Germany.
\nSo what\u2019s with all the cloak-and-dagger secrecy? Part of the answer is that the main player is Amazon, which in infamous for revealing nothing about itself. But the real reason is the enormity of the stakes Amazon is playing for: Supremacy in the relatively new arena of global e-commerce logistics.
\nFrom China, the Asian counterpart to Amazon \u2013 Alibaba \u2013 has been more forthcoming about its plans to dominate the logistics industry on a global scale, much as it has already done to Chinese domestic e-commerce. It logistics arm, called Cainiao, was only formed in 2013 and just two years later, during the 2015 \u201cSingles Day\u201d promotion in China, helped Alibaba rake in a staggering US$14.3 billion in a 24-hour period (See more about Cainiao’s numbers here).
\nThe winner of this battle for market share between e-commerce titans not only will rewrite the rules of express freight, turning former clients UPS, FedEx and DHL into competitors. It may also reinvent the freight forwarding industry as we know it.
\nSource: aircargoworld<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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