Indonesia’s J&T Express is looking to add more capacity to ship packages throughout Indonesia with the launch of its first cargo aircraft.

Celebrating its 6th year this year, the delivery service company officially launched its first cargo aircraft at Budiarto Airport in Tangerang on the island of Java.

The aircraft, a B737-300 registered PK-YSH, will be J&T’s first owned aircraft. According to Planespotters, the plane has an average life of 25.4 years and was recently reconfigured as a preighter. It will be operated by previous owner Trigana Air Services and can load up to 15 tonnes each way, with at least two flights per day.

With the new preighter, J&T Express is looking to increase the efficiency of package delivery, especially outside Java, with hopes to enhance service-level agreements with its customers.

Also read: e-commerce logistics startup SiCepat raises US$170m

“Seeing the current pandemic situation, flight schedule instability is still occurring, many flight schedules have been canceled or delayed due to a lack of passengers and other factors which have resulted in obstructed air shipments and delayed delivery of SLAs,” said Robin Lo, CEO of J&T Express Indonesia.

“After previously maximizing the distribution of land routes for shipments on the island of Java, today J&T Express launched an air freighter to increase the efficiency of air shipping along with the increasing number of packages, especially in areas outside Java,” he added.

The company will operate the preighter on the Jakarta-Medan and Jakarta-Batam-Tanjun Pinang routes, which are seeing the highest delivery traffic for cities outside Java.

“With this air freighter, J&T Express hopes to also accommodate customer needs for shipping larger and heavier packages where these two things were previously unacceptable due to limitations in access to the delivery of special air routes for the two routes,” the company noted, adding that it can also flexibly adjust flight hours as needed.