DroneXL today launched the Drone Delivery Tracker, a public record of every drone delivery company flying over American homes under an FAA authorization: Amazon Prime Air, Wing and Zipline to start, 40 Amazon hubs with street addresses, 368 Wing nests, five Zipline authorizations, eight incidents, and the questions each company has and has not answered.
The page is built from the FAA’s own environmental filings, the operators’ statements and DroneXL’s reporting. Every row links to its source. It updates the day a story publishes and gets a full sweep every Monday.
This morning all three companies received the same fifteen questions, on the same terms, due Monday, September 15. Wing and Zipline each got fifteen more specific to their aircraft. Amazon also still owes answers to the eight it received on September 3 and let lapse on September 5. Every operator’s page now reads “Pending” until they reply.
The tracker lists every hub, market and incident on the record
The Drone Delivery Tracker covers Amazon Prime Air, Wing and Zipline. It maps 40 Amazon hubs from FAA decisions, Wing’s five authorized metros and 368 nests, and Zipline’s five FAA actions from North Carolina to Seattle, plus eight incidents: six Amazon incidents and two Zipline parachute landings in Texas.
Amazon’s page is the most detailed because Amazon’s filings are. The FAA decisions for Texas, Florida, Detroit, Kansas City and Tolleson name each hub by street address, so the tracker maps all 40 with a 7.5-mile operating circle around each, the radius Amazon’s own filings define. Chicago, Baton Rouge and Omaha sit in FAA review. Atlanta, Cleveland, Syracuse and Boise are announced with no filing found. That is the geography behind Amazon’s promise of nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026: the 500 is not a list Amazon published, it is every municipality inside those circles.
Wing and Zipline pins are metro-level, because their filings authorize a nest count inside a metro rather than addresses. Wing’s DFW, Central Florida, Houston, Atlanta and Charlotte authorizations add up to 368 nests at up to 400 flights a day each. Zipline is authorized for up to 75 sites in Dallas-Fort Worth and has a 75-site Seattle proposal in review.
The incident table is the part I expect towns to read first. Amazon’s six entries run from the two Pendleton crashes in December 2024 through the Tolleson crane strikes, the Waco cable, the Richardson apartment building and the package released into a Richmond swimming pool. Zipline’s two are the parachute landings in Greenville on July 26 and on Highway 6 in Cypress on September 4. Wing has no US incident in DroneXL’s record. That is the absence of a record, not a safety statistic, and the page says so; a sweep of FAA and NTSB files is under way.
The aircraft page puts weight, payload and noise side by side
A separate aircraft comparison page compares the four delivery aircraft on the same rows: takeoff weight, payload, how the package reaches the ground, hover height over the home, recovery system, redundancy and measured noise. Every figure comes from an FAA filing. Where a filing is silent, the table says so.
The numbers that matter most are the simplest. Amazon’s MK30 is an 83.2-pound aircraft carrying five pounds, or 15.6 pounds of drone per pound of cargo, with no parachute, dropping the package from about 13 feet. Zipline’s P2 is 63 pounds carrying eight, hovers at about 330 feet while a tethered droid sets the package down, and carries a parachute that has now deployed twice. Wing’s 7000W-B is 14 pounds carrying about 2.5, lowering the package on a tether from 23 feet; its 8000-A is 24.3 pounds carrying up to 6.6.
Noise is where the record is thinnest. Amazon’s numbers are public because the FAA’s consultant put microphones under the MK30 in Pendleton: 63.7 dBA SEL for a cruise pass at 200 feet, about 82 dBA at 20 feet in hover. Wing’s and Zipline’s figures sit in appendices of their DFW and Florida filings and have not yet been extracted into the tracker. That is the first item on next Monday’s update, and it is also question nine on every operator’s list.
Amazon has answered none of its questions and now has fifteen more
Amazon received eight MK30 questions on September 3, due September 5. Its communications team replied twice about email delivery and never about the aircraft. Today Amazon received the fifteen questions every operator gets; Wing and Zipline received those plus fifteen specific to their aircraft. All are due September 15.
The eight questions I sent from the Commercial UAV Expo floor were not exotic. Why does the MK30 weigh 78 pounds empty when Zipline carries more with 55? Does it have a parachute, and if not, why not? What does it do after it hits a crane, a cable or a building, all of which it has done? None got an answer. Amazon’s tracker page shows all eight marked “No answer” and will keep showing that until Amazon changes it.
The fifteen generic questions are the ones a town council should be asking before the first flight: weight and payload, recovery system, collision behavior, single points of failure, delivery method, drop-zone checks, incident record, who gets the call when an aircraft comes down, sound level, pitch, overflight frequency, cameras and data, liability, weather limits, and whether the operator will send an engineer rather than a spokesperson to a public meeting. They are published on the tracker as a handout, operator-neutral, for any town to use.
Wing’s specific set asks, among other things, how many of the 368 nests sit within 120 feet of a home, school or church, the setback the FAA allows. Zipline’s asks what caused the two parachute deployments and whether they share a failure mode. Nobody has replied yet, which is expected on the first morning; all three pages carry a “Pending” marker and the date the questions went out. Every answer publishes in full on the operator’s page the day it arrives. So does every silence.
Readers can search their town, send tips and follow the weekly sweep
The tracker has a town search covering every Amazon hub city, the FAA jurisdiction lists for Kansas City and Chicago, and every Wing and Zipline market in DroneXL’s record. A corrections and tips form, with an anonymous option, reaches the editor directly. Tips are leads until confirmed.
The town search will grow. Amazon’s other 35 hubs each come with an FAA list of the municipalities inside their operating area, and extracting those lists is the job that turns the search into a yes-or-no answer for roughly 500 towns. Amazon hub coordinates are placed from the street addresses in the FAA decisions and are approximate pending geocoding, which the page says next to the map.
Operators are added when they meet one of two tests: an FAA authorization for package delivery in the United States on the agency’s public list, or confirmed US commercial delivery flights documented by DroneXL or a public record. Announced but unfiled operators wait. Every operator that qualifies gets the same template and the same fifteen questions on the same deadline.
DroneXL’s Take
I built this because the FAA approves the airspace and the certificate, the operator announces the metro, and the town finds out when one comes down on a residential street. There is no public place where a resident of Matteson, Illinois or Pea Ridge, Arkansas can see who is authorized to fly over their street, what the aircraft weighs and whether it has a parachute. The filings exist. They are 300-page PDFs on an FAA index page. Nobody reads them, so nobody asks.
The operators will say, fairly, that the record is good. Zipline’s fleet has flown more than 140 million autonomous miles without a serious injury, and both Texas parachute landings ended with an intact aircraft and nobody hurt. Wing has no US incident I can find. Even Amazon’s six entries include no injury. I accept all of that, and the tracker prints it. A record that includes the operator’s strongest facts is the only kind a town will trust.
But a good record is not the same as a public one, and the difference is what Amazon’s silence exposes. Eight plain engineering questions, five days, two replies about email formatting. A company that plans to fly an 83-pound aircraft over 500 towns and cannot say in writing why it left out a parachute has not earned the benefit of the doubt, whatever the incident count says. I don’t think Amazon’s engineers lack the answers. My read is that the communications team has decided the answers are worse than the silence, and the tracker is built to make silence expensive: a dated, permanent “No answer” on the page every reporter and council staffer will find first.
September 15 is the date to watch. If Wing and Zipline answer, and I expect both will answer at least the generic set, the page will show for the first time how the three aircraft compare on the questions that matter to the people under them, in the operators’ own words. If Amazon lets a second deadline pass, that is a story on its own, and it will run.
The tracker is a standing product, not a story. Next Monday’s sweep adds Wing’s and Zipline’s noise figures, the first batch of FAA jurisdiction lists for the Texas hubs, and whatever the three companies have said by then. If you live under one of these routes, the tips form is the fastest way to reach me.
Sources: FAA Public Involvement and Environmental Review for Drone Operations, Amazon Prime Air FAA FONSI/RODs (Texas, Florida, Detroit, Kansas City, Arizona), Wing Aviation FAA FONSI/RODs (Dallas-Fort Worth, Central Florida, Houston, Atlanta), Zipline FAA FONSI/RODs (Dallas-Fort Worth, Pea Ridge, Salt Lake City, Kannapolis), FAA Part 135 National Draft Programmatic Environmental Assessment (December 2025).
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
