Prime deliveries: Amazon cargo flights appear at VIA
May 10—HARLINGEN — Yet another airline is now flying into Valley International Airport.
The livery of the new planes is white, with a large blue "Prime Air" down the side.
Amazon Prime is now delivering and shipping cargo out of Harlingen, with the first flights occurring last week.
"Actually, they're contracted with DHL currently," said Marv Esterly, VIA's director of aviation, referring to major cargo transporter DHL. "We continue to work with them and try to see if it's possible to be on their own in the future, but at this point they're coming in for DHL."
Despite the "Prime Air" still printed on the sides of the planes, Amazon has renamed its in-house package air delivery service "Amazon Air," to differentiate it from its drone delivery service, "Amazon Prime Air."
Whatever Amazon wants to call it, it's a welcome sight at VIA since the airport's cargo tonnage has fallen off over the past few months, despite being a bright spot during the pandemic-related economic slowdown as home-bound consumers purchased online.
In March, for example, total cargo was off 30 percent at the airport, although most of that was attributable to DHL turning one of its two flights from Monterrey, Mexico, into a non-stop directly to Cincinnati. Both flights used to land at VIA, and one of them continues to do so.
"What's been interesting about that is, yeah, we're down a little bit," Esterly said. "But DHL looked at this picture and said, hey, we have enough cargo to be two separate flights: one non-stop from Monterrey and one non-stop from here to Cincinnati."
"One thing is, we're lower in cargo, but because of it we're not carrying the Monterrey cargo, but on the other hand we're both standing alone now," he added. "We have more belly weight free so that we can bring more cargo in and out. It's going to be positive as we go to the future."
Amazon Air debuted in 2015 as part of Amazon's strategy to meet its one-day and two-day package delivery goals.
Currently, the cargo fleet is making around 150 flights a day, and Amazon officials say they hope to grow that to more than 160 daily flights by June.
