Amazon’s senior vice president of operations, Dave Clark, announced last week that the Seattle-based retailer had just added a parcel of land to the site of its future air operations hub at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport (CVG), following last year’s plans to invest US$1.5 billion into the project.
“Amazon Air [is] getting ready for take-off in KY!” Clark tweeted. “Just added 210 acres of land as part of the future CVG air hub.”
The e-commerce giant is currently building a massive air freight hub at CVG, with construction due to start in 2019, according to airport officials. Before the expansion, the project originally was going to involve 900 acres to handle up to 100 aircraft at once.
Amazon’s future airfreight hub, just 650 kilometers northeast of FedEx’s Memphis (MEM) hub, has stoked rumors that Amazon is on a path toward direct competition with the integrators. Now sized at more than 1,100 acres, the planned CVG hub will be similar in size to the global hubs of the biggest cargo airlines. FedEx’s MEM hub is just over 900 acres.