Amazon’s old planes make green pledge hard to keep

Bloomberg

While flight shaming and the coronavirus pandemic have spurred airlines to hasten the retirement of their oldest, fuel-guzzling aircraft, not all those planes end up in boneyards in the desert. Many find a second life in the fleets of Amazon.com Inc and other cargo carriers.
Amazon has been among the biggest lessors of converted Boeing Co 767s in the last five years as demand for online shopping has soared—more so since Covid-19 struck. A limited choice of converted planes and efforts to cap costs have left the online retailer with some of the freight sector’s oldest aircraft, many of them older than the company itself.
In June, Amazon said it was expanding its 70-strong fleet by leasing 12 converted Boeing 767-300 passenger jets, including a 29-year-old model it took delivery of in May. For haulers like Amazon Air, FedEx Corp and United Parcel Service Inc, increased demand means more of these aging planes in the air and, hence, higher emissions, making it harder to shrink their carbon footprint and meet climate pledges.
“There’s certainly a trade-off between the environment and economics when it comes
to freighters,” said Andreas Schafer, a professor of energy and transport at the UCL
Energy Institute in London
and an authority on aircraft
carbon dioxide emissions. “While there’s a sound economic case for using older aircraft for freight, it may not be a great case for the environment.”
Amazon, which has pledged to make 50% of its shipments net zero carbon by 2030, operated 38% more flights in the US in the first half of 2020, compared with the same period last year, according to Luxembourg-based Cargo Facts Consulting. Emissions from its jets rose 35% in 2019 as it shipped 1.9 billion pounds of cargo on 40,163 flights, the consulting firm estimates. Amazon declined to comment on the
numbers, saying that for the company as a whole, carbon emissions rose 15% last year.
The commercial aviation industry’s piece of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels — predominantly from passenger airlines — jumped 32% in the five years to 2018 to 918 million metric tons, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation in Washington. It accounted for 2.4% of such outflows. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the industry could account for as much as 27% of the global carbon budget by 2050, according to a 2016 CarbonBrief report.
Emissions data on the impact of air cargo carriers on the environment is patchy. But airlines say their newer generation jets are 20% more fuel efficient than the models they’re phasing out, some of which end up in the fleets of haulers. Still, the economic case for buying older aircraft remains compelling. A 20-year-old 737-800 converted freighter costs between $21 million and $23 million, according to London-based consultant IBA Group. That compares with over $100 million for a new Boeing 737-800 at the 2019 list price. A 16-year-old wide-body 767 is about a third of the price of a brand new one, though that factor narrows after discounts.
“It really is about the
economics,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst at Teal Group. “The utilisation of cargo planes is much lower than passenger jets, so the ratios of capital costs to fuel costs are very different for freight. I can’t see anyone buying a new plane when feedstock is getting cheaper.”