Amazon Prime Air Picks Baton Rouge For Summer MK30 Drone Delivery Launch

Amazon will launch Prime Air drone delivery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana this summer, putting between 12 and 20 MK30 drones into operation from a new facility near the company’s Cortana fulfillment warehouse. The service will deliver packages weighing up to five pounds (2.3 kg) to customers within a 7.5-mile (12.1 km) radius, with Prime members paying $4.99 per delivery and non-Prime customers paying $9.99.

Jeff Cleland, Amazon’s principal of Prime Air drone delivery, announced the plan during a press event on April 22, 2026, alongside J. Ofori Agboka, Amazon’s vice president of people experience and technology (PXT) for global operations and an LSU alumnus. The Baton Rouge service joins a U.S. drone delivery network already operating in Texas, Michigan, Arizona, Florida, and Kansas.

That expansion continues even after a 15-month stretch in which the MK30 has crashed into a construction crane in Arizona, an internet cable in Texas, and an apartment building wall in Richardson, Texas, plus two ground crashes during testing at Amazon’s facility in Pendleton, Oregon. I covered the aircraft up close at XPONENTIAL Europe in Düsseldorf this spring, and the gap between its physical size and its 5-pound payload remains the design choice that defines the program’s risk profile.

How the Baton Rouge service will work

Customers inside the 7.5-mile delivery zone will see drone delivery as a checkout option in the Amazon app when ordering eligible items. The fleet of 12 to 20 drones will fly from a new facility built adjacent to Amazon’s existing Cortana fulfillment center. The MK30 cruises at altitudes above 200 feet (61 m) at speeds over 70 mph (113 km/h), and the company says it can operate in light rain. Cleland told reporters the service can handle roughly 60,000 products from Amazon’s catalog.

The MK30 is an 83-pound hexacopter with a fixed-wing element, descending to about 12 feet (3.7 m) above the delivery point to release packages. Customers select up to three drop zones on their property at checkout. Amazon advises keeping people, pets, and tall objects at least 10 feet from the delivery zone.

Andrew Fitzgerald, senior vice president of strategy and research at the Greater Baton Rouge Economic Partnership, framed the launch as a traffic mitigation story.

“If this lets you get a good you need without having to leave your house and run an errand, and if it possibly keeps cars and trucks off the road, that’s a huge plus for the region,” Fitzgerald said.

Cleland leaned on a family use case.

“I have three young kids, and if one of my kids is sick, I don’t want to have to put all three of them in the car and drive somewhere to get children’s Motrin or something like that. But if you can get this delivered to the house in under two hours, it really then becomes, like, a necessity for a family,” he said.

Where Baton Rouge fits in Prime Air’s expansion map

Amazon confirmed to WAFB that Prime Air now operates out of eight facilities delivering to seven communities: San Antonio, Waco, Dallas, Phoenix, Detroit, Tampa, and Kansas City, Kansas. Detroit accounts for two of those facilities, in Pontiac and Hazel Park. Baton Rouge will be the program’s first Gulf Coast metro outside Florida.

This is the cadence Amazon has settled into since recovering from the January 2025 grounding. Pontiac in November 2025. Waco two days later. Hazel Park later the same month. Richardson, Texas in December 2025. Kansas City in February 2026. The Chicago south suburbs are ramping for late spring or early summer, and Amazon has confirmed it is also exploring metro Atlanta, where Walmart’s drone partner Wing already operates from at least six area cities.

The MK30’s safety record still hangs over every new launch

Two MK30 drones crashed at Amazon’s Oregon testing facility in December 2024 after faulty LiDAR sensors mistook rain for the ground, cutting motor power mid-flight. Amazon paused all U.S. operations in January 2025. The FAA approved software fixes in March 2025 and Amazon resumed flights.

In October 2025, two MK30 drones struck the same construction crane in Tolleson, Arizona within minutes of each other, prompting FAA and NTSB investigations. In November 2025, an MK30 severed an internet cable during ascent in Waco, Texas, just 13 days after Amazon launched service there. In February 2026, an MK30 collided with the side of an apartment building on Routh Creek Parkway in Richardson, Texas. A resident filmed the wreckage. “The propellers on the thing were still moving, and you could smell it was starting to burn,” the bystander told local outlets. Richardson firefighters responded and confirmed no fire broke out.

That incident happened five days before Amazon launched Kansas City. As of February 2026, Prime Air had logged roughly 16,000 deliveries across all U.S. operations. Amazon’s stated target is 500 million annual drone deliveries by 2030. The gap between those numbers explains the pace of new market launches. So does the unit economics: internal projections we analyzed in December 2024 showed delivery costs around $63 per package against customer pricing of $4.99 to $9.99. That math only closes at scale.

DroneXL’s Take

I have covered Amazon’s Prime Air program since the MK27 days. Standing next to an MK30 at XPONENTIAL Europe in Düsseldorf, and again in Detroit, this spring, the size of this aircraft is striking. I am 6 feet 4 inches tall and the MK30 reaches my shoulder height. The aircraft is well-engineered. It is also 83 pounds of machinery for a 5-pound payload, which is a design choice Wing and Zipline did not make.

Baton Rouge is interesting for two reasons. Cleland called the city an “innovative town” that “wants like new things, cool things,” which is the same community framing Amazon used in Pontiac and Hazel Park. The playbook is consistent across launches: pre-launch community events at fulfillment-center facilities, paired with careful language about working with local officials. That approach is a direct response to College Station, where noise complaints forced Amazon to retreat. It produces quieter rollouts.

The second reason is weather. Tampa already gives Amazon a hot, humid Gulf Coast environment, but Louisiana summers add the kind of heavy afternoon convective storms that can build with little warning. That pattern tests the MK30’s light-rain certification in ways that Tolleson dust and Pontiac snow have not. Amazon’s own materials state the aircraft cannot operate below 14°F (-10°C), but the upper-bound thermal envelope has gotten less attention.

What I am watching for in Baton Rouge: whether the first incident, if there is one, happens over Amazon property or in a residential area. Every MK30 incident outside the Oregon testing facility has happened over operational airspace, including a public parking lot in Tolleson, a public street in Waco, and an apartment building wall in Richardson. The FAA’s pending Part 108 BVLOS rulemaking, which would broaden commercial BVLOS operations nationwide, will be shaped by exactly the kind of operating data Amazon is generating right now. The pace at which Amazon is generating that data is not slowing down. The question Cleland did not address in Baton Rouge, and was not asked, is what happens to the program if a Part 108 rulemaking imposes mandatory incident-reporting requirements that capture every close call, rather than only the crashes that end up on local TV.

Sources: WAFB, WBRZ, The Advocate.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.