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A local Amazon manager told the news outlet that the Honolulu operation has exceeded expectations for the first year of service and expanding to next-day delivery happened faster than anticipated. Meanwhile, Amazon’s one-year-old wholesale air cargo business that sells excess airfreight capacity to third-party shippers, is moving thousands of Maui Gold pineapples from the state to the mainland every week in under 12 hours, local TV station KHON2 reported in September. Much of the unused space Amazon offers on Amazon Air flights is on backhaul flights to logistics hubs, which are mostly empty because Amazon operate a one-way, B2C parcel shipping network In July, Air Premia, a passenger airline based in South Korea, entered into a transportation services agreement with Amazon Air Cargo under which it transfers belly cargo to Amazon at Honolulu airport for onward carriage to the continental United States. Once at U.S. hubs, the Air Premia shipments are relayed to 45 cities, including Atlanta and Houston, through the Amazon Air network. Amazon Air Cargo also offers service to Columbia and the Dominican Republic. Avianca Cargo, the cargo division of Columbia-based passenger airline Avianca, is booking shipments on Amazon flights returning to the U.S. New Kaua‘i warehouse In related news, Amazon appears to be moving forward with plans to build a distribution center on Kaua‘i, another Hawaiian island, according to Honolulu Civil Beat. A real estate development firm has plans to buy 14.6 acres in Līhuʻe to develop the 42,000-square-foot warehouse in a planned business park. The real estate firm behind the warehouse project is Phoenix-based BH DevCo, which specializes in large e-commerce distribution facilities and has developed Amazon warehouses in Las Vegas, New Mexico and Oregon. Documents filed with the county for the project don’t name Amazon but include details unique to Amazon and multiple sources familiar with the project identified Amazon as the company, according to the report. An Amazon spokesman neither confirmed nor denied efforts to develop the facility. Connecticut fulfillment center Thousands of miles to the east, Amazon last week broke ground on a 3.2 million-square foot fulfillment center in Connecticut, according to a blog post by CBIA, the state’s largest business organization. The facility, which will have the ability to process 800,000 parcels per day at full capacity, It will be the seventh Amazon’s seventh fulfillment or sortation center in the state. Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch. Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com. RELATED STORIES: Amazon Air extends third-party cargo service to Dominican Republic Amazon launches dedicated cargo service to Columbia with 21Air Amazon airline prioritizes bigger aircraft to handle third-party cargo
