Hawaiian Holdings, the parent company of Hawaiian Airlines (HA, Honolulu), has inked an agreement to operate and maintain a fleet of ten A330-300(P2F)s on behalf of Amazon.com under an eight-year contract. The first converted freighter will arrive early in the northern summer of calendar 2023, with the remainder due by the end of 2024.
"Our agreement with Amazon will provide flight operations and maintenance services as part of Amazon's air cargo operations," Hawaiian Airlines CEO Peter Ingram told an investor's briefing on Friday, October 21. "This new business opportunity allows us to diversify our revenue and provides a new avenue of growth for Hawaiian." According to the ch-aviation fleets module, the carrier presently operates 61 passenger aircraft (including A330-200s) but no dedicated freighters.
As part of the agreement, Amazon will receive warrants to acquire up to 9.4 million (or 15% of) Hawaiian Holdings Inc. common shares over the next nine years. At the same time as the Hawaiian Airlines agreement was announced, Amazon.com Inc. signed a firm agreement to lease the freighters from Altavair. Dresden-based Elbe Flugzeugwerke GmbH (EFW) will do the conversions.
“These A330-300s will not only be the first of their kind in our fleet, they’ll also be the newest, largest aircraft for Amazon Air," said Amazon's Philippe Karam. The online retailer has the option to place additional aircraft with Hawaiian and to extend the contract beyond eight years. Hawaiian Airlines says it will be paid on the number of departures and block hours they operate the A330-300PCFs, with the revenues not being susceptible to the economic and competitive forces that affect passenger operations. Several significant cost items, such as fuel and lease costs, will be passed through.
"We will be expanding our geographic footprint with a new US mainland crew base, maintenance facilities, and operations between airports on the mainland," said Ingram. "We will be hiring hundreds of new pilots and maintenance employees as a direct result of this agreement." The CEO says each aircraft will require ten to 15 pilots to operate. He added that the location of the new crew base and maintenance facilities remained undecided.
"Our expectation is that our performance will provide us the opportunity to provide additional flying," said Ingram. The aircraft will operate from Amazon's product fulfilment centres primarily on the US mainland and primarily fly domestic US routes. Jim Landers, currently senior vice president of technical operations at Hawaiian Airlines, will manage the business.
Ingram says that the ten A330s have been identified and a lease agreement has already been put into place. He says the planes are "relatively young" and have been sourced following the recent dislocation in the passenger widebody aircraft market. He says most are still in passenger configuration but the conversion process at EFW will soon begin.
