Civil Aviation Minister K. Ram Mohan Naidu lags off Amazon Air’s inaugural cargo flight from Delhi to Guwahati, boosting air cargo connectivity for the Northeast, in New Delhi on Friday.
| Photo Credit: ANI
Amazon India added a dedicated three-flights-a-day service to Guwahati, claiming this would make deliveries “five times faster” in the Northeast, as deliveries that travelled by road or rail to the seven States in the region will now land in Assam’s capital city first, shortening the time taken for this. Amazon runs two narrow-body freighter aircraft under its Amazon Air branding, launched in India in 2023.
Amazon has an extensive rail and road transport network, Abhinav Singh, Vice-President for India and Australia operations, said speaking to the press on Friday (March 13, 2026). “For sellers who are in the Northeast of India, they will be able to reach customers through the same network in every single postcode of India, much faster than they were able to earlier,” Mr. Singh said.
The senior executive said that all the capacity in the aircraft is used for order fulfilment, as opposed to replenishing its fulfilment centres in anticipation of regional demand.
Mr. Singh said that the routes that the flights follow each day are not “fixed in stone”. Data from the last few days shows that the aircraft which flew to Guwahati — flagged off on Friday morning by Amazon executives and Civil Aviation Minister K. Ram Mohan Naidu — had stops at Bengaluru, Delhi, Surat and Hyderabad.
Quicker deliveries
Amazon, like India Post, also uses spare cargo hold capacity in the underbelly of commercial flights. Mr. Singh said Amazon has partnerships “with every single airline provider”. Using these aircraft to export goods from India “is something that we are looking at, but it is not the primary reason for the planes to exist,” he added, saying that the main goal was to speed up Prime deliveries for paying subscribers for the subscription service.
Speaking to The Hindu, Mr. Singh said that Amazon Air would add more aircraft in India, but declined to say when. “The lead time to get new aircraft is long because this is not an industry where aircraft are built on demand,” Mr. Singh said.
“Directionally, if you ask me, will this fleet expand? The answer is yes. If you ask me numbers and when, I don’t have anything to share today. But we do long-range planning. So yes, we will look at expanding it when it’s the right time,” he added.
Published – March 13, 2026 06:03 pm IST
