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As the other poster noted, these are the first outright purchases of planes, vs previous planes were leased from aircraft leasing companies. My understanding is that when you lease, the leasing company handles all the maintenance and crewing and you only specify the routings. Obviously when you buy planes, you're responsible for everything yourself. You can however contract out maintenance and crewing to other contractors.

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Generally there's "wet" leases (aircraft + at least one crewmember) and "dry" leases (just the aircraft). There are also different certification requirements between the two lease types. [1]

I believe as of late Amazon has been dry leasing aircraft and contracting with Air Transport International, Atlas, Sun Country, and others for crew and potentially maintenance as well.

[1] https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2020/march/pilo...

That's not how this sort of leasing generally works, it's more of a financial transaction, like financing a car.

Airlines are more likely to buy packages of service from manufacturers (especially engines) and big service providers if they don't have enough scale or experience to do their own maintenance, regardless of how it was paid for.

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