Amazon New Regional Air Hub in FL
 

https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/region-polk/lakeland-strikes-100-million-deal-with-amazon

Can someone explain how a hub in Florida would be utilized? Will they fly 737’s out of it to various other airports in the area?

There goes Sun N’ Fun

"Air Hub" doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna cross-dock stuff there between aircraft. "Air Node" or "Focus City" might be a better description. They will use LAL to move stuff to and from other air destinations. There is a huge Amazon DC right there by LAL, and there is a lot of Amazon distribution infrastructure between Tampa and Orlando. They're talking total 8-10 daily flights in the next 1-2 years. Everything at TPA is going to move to LAL, and then they will add to that. Depending on how things go in the future, they have set the deal up to have significant flexibility to expand or not. So while I wouldn't exclude the possibility that some stuff may move between aircraft there, a large part of this is going to be packages coming in by air to be distributed regionally by ground, and packages packed in the region going out by air for distribution nationwide. How the move to Amazon-organic 1-day delivery affects this, I'm not smart enough to know.

One article indicated that the initial construction will be a "7-jet cargo hangar" (whatever that is), but it gives you an idea of the initial facility size. It looks to me like a whole lot of automobile parking, landside doors for 30-50 trailers, and an apron outside the building for 7 aircraft. What seems to be missing is parking for more aircraft than that, but that may be part of the potential expansion. I'm not confident enough in the scale of the drawings to know whether those are seven 767s or seven 737s, although it seems most likely to be the former, based on the size of the aircraft drawings compared to the width of Runway 9-27.

Drawing of the now-approved facility: https://i0.wp.com/www.lkldnow.com/wp...lity.png?ssl=1

It's 8-10 flights per day initially. I think I read somewhere that they have already planned to minimize or eliminate interference with Sun N' Fun.

I hope it won’t affect it too much. It’ll be interesting on how that works out

$102k every 5 years per acre seems a bit steep

For commercial property at an airport....seems cheap! Anyway who cares....

Thanks for the info.

Is it a possibility FedEx will put some 208's there to supplement? Been thinking about a move to FL and continue flying the 208.