From the Cockpit with Amerijet’s Strauss

Miami-based Amerijet International entered a phase of rapid fleet expansion during the pandemic that will continue into next year. After starting 2021 with just eleven freighters, Amerijet is set to end 2022 with a fleet of twenty-seven aircraft, including 757-200 freighters – a new type for the operator. Cargo Facts recently caught up with CEO Tim Strauss, and revisited Amerijet’s fleet growth plans. Cargo Facts : We’re seeing one 757-200PCF undergoing paint in Spokane, Wa., and a couple of other freighters staged around the country linked to Amerijet. What can you tell us about your 757 introduction plans? Tim Strauss : We have six 757s coming into the fleet over the next two months. We made a decision probably eight months ago or so to move into the 757, so we’re just about to get there. We’re in the final steps with the FAA on the certification process to put the airplane on our certificate and then we’ll be off and running, hopefully before the end of the year. We’d like to see the first couple of them in the air in December as they sequence in. To bring them on your property, it takes about ten days — even though they’re on your certificate — for the FAA to walk through them and do all the checks and a couple of test flights, and then they can go into revenue service. We’d like to have all six of them here by the end of January. They were a little delayed, as a lot are globally right now with the supply chains. CF : Apart from supply chain challenges, are issues crewing the flights partially responsible for the delay in introducing the 757 platform? TS : No, and one of the reasons we specifically chose the 757 is the cockpit is common between the 757 and the 767, which we already fly. We’re doing very well on recruiting crews. I mean, it's a challenge in the industry as a whole, but we’re not finding ourselves in a difficult spot as some are. CF : On which routes can we expect to see Amerijet-operated 757-200PCFs? TS : We expanded pretty quickly last year as the industry popped, and to help grab market share and protect market share in some cases, we brought outside aircraft in to help fly to augment the system. So some of the aircraft coming in will allow us to displace the aircraft flying for us on a temporary basis. We’ll bring a number of airplanes into what we call our scheduled system — Central/Latin America and the Caribbean Islands — and add at least one of them as a spare to the larger systems so that we have enough aircraft. We also fly a lot of routes for the integrators and some of the other players in the in the market. They’re all looking for extra lift. One of the things that the company has routinely done in its history is fly charter flights. We’ve done almost none of that over the last eighteen months because we put all of our aircraft into scheduled networks for either ourselves or the scheduled integrator worlds, and so we look forward to being able to get back into charter work. CF: Throughout the pandemic Amerijet has ACMI-leased capacity, including two A321-200P2Fs from Titan. What does that program look like moving forward? TS : One of them returned to Titan in October, and the other one will run into the second quarter of 2022. We’re discussing whether to hang on to it or not. We love the airplane, it's a really good cargo airplane. They also like working having the airplane in our fleet, so it works well for both parties and if we can do it, we’ll keep it longer term. It’s just a matter of what the mix is and how big the demand is on the 757 fleet. CF : Could you see A321-200Fs entering Amerijet’s own fleet? TS : I think we’re a little bit away from that. It’s still a little bit more expensive on a on a cost-per-unit basis than some of the older aircraft out there. We do like the Airbus airplanes, but we think it’s still a little on the pricey side. I think that’ll come down over the next four or five years and I do think it’s natural to believe that plane is going to be a big player in the ACMI and CMI world going forward. I don’t think we’re quite there yet though. CF : Based on current forecasts, how do you expect your fleet to grow? TS : This time next year, we’ll be at twenty-seven airplanes. If we keep the A321 and a couple of the other ones in here, we’re easily at thirty, with the majority of them being Amerijet aircraft. We think forty to fifty is probably about right for us. As we scale up our systems are scalable to fifty to seventy-five airplanes. At the end of the day, we don’t create demand by adding airplanes; the demand is there and the airplanes go and fill the gap. So we’ll continue to work it that way. This story originally appeared in the December 2021 issue of Cargo Facts.

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