Amazon wants to launch MK30 delivery drones from the parking lot of its warehouse at 64 Otis Street in Westborough, Massachusetts, to homes within 7.5 miles (12 kilometers), an area of about 174 square miles (451 square kilometers), and it hopes to be flying by the end of the year. The circle takes in Westborough, Shrewsbury, Grafton, most of Southborough and parts of Marlborough and Worcester. Amazon presented the plan to the Westborough Select Board on August 18, opened a Planning Board hearing on September 15 that has been continued to October 6, and is holding a public meet-and-greet at the DoubleTree by Hilton on Computer Drive this Wednesday, September 23, from 5 to 7 p.m.
The towns under the flight paths did not all hear about it from Amazon. Shrewsbury’s town manager told his Select Board on August 12 that the town had been alerted by regional law enforcement. Southborough, which sits almost entirely inside the service area on Amazon’s own map, had not been contacted by the company as of September 16, according to the town’s Select Board chair and administrator.
It is the first Prime Air hub DroneXL has seen proposed in Massachusetts, and the second New England hub to surface in a week, after Connecticut opened a 15-day comment window on Amazon’s North Haven site. Massachusetts is one of the 17 states whose attorneys general told the FAA in January that its national environmental review of drone delivery was a paper exercise. The FAA signed it anyway on July 28, and there is no FAA document of any kind posted for Westborough.
Amazon Wants a 6,800-Square-Foot Drone Pad on a Westborough Parking Lot
Amazon is asking Westborough for a fenced 6,800-square-foot (632-square-meter) launch-and-landing area on the east side of the parking lot at its SMA1 same-day facility, taking out about 27 parking spaces. Jonathan Greeley, Amazon’s head of economic development for New England, made the pitch on August 18.
The pad holds landing circles, with battery vaults and flight monitors beside them. Tareq Wafaie, who leads Amazon’s drone program in the region, described the aircraft the company flies everywhere: a six-rotor MK30 about 5 feet (1.5 meters) across, autonomous and electric, cruising at 60 to 75 mph (97 to 121 km/h) with up to 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms) in a shoebox-sized package, which Amazon says covers about 60% of what its fulfillment centers stock. Customers opt in, pay an extra fee for the one-hour service, and mark a landing spot on their property that Amazon describes as a cylinder 18 feet (5.5 meters) wide and 100 feet (30 meters) tall. The drone scans the spot for anyone or anything in the way, then releases the package from about 13 feet (4 meters). Amazon’s national page puts the fee at nothing for Prime members on orders of $50 or more, $2.99 below that, and $4.99 for everyone else.
On noise, Amazon told Westborough the drone peaks below its own trucks and sits around a delivery van; the Community Advocate reported the pitch as no louder than a toothbrush at arm’s length. Amazon’s own FAA filing for Baton Rouge records the MK30 at 90.5 to 91.8 decibels SEL at takeoff and landing, measured 20 feet from the aircraft, with the delivery hover at 92.1, for an aircraft a Baton Rouge resident said passes about 20 times an hour.
The application sits on the Planning Board’s September 15 agenda as a site-plan review, number 26-02275, filed by engineering firm Kimley-Horn, not as a special permit: the building commissioner and town counsel treat the pad as accessory to the warehouse rather than an airport under the zoning bylaw, a reading a Select Board member questioned on August 18, according to Citizen Portal’s summary of the meeting recording. Residents at the September 15 hearing asked whether the flights were worth the risk and how loud a steady stream of them would be, CBS Boston reported. The same Citizen Portal summary has Amazon and town staff telling the board that an FAA environmental review and a landing-area approval from MassDOT’s Aeronautics Division are also required before any flight, with the FAA filing to follow the local review.
Shrewsbury Learned About the Flights From Police, Not Amazon
Shrewsbury Town Manager Kevin Mizikar briefed his Select Board on August 12 and said the town heard about the plan from regional law enforcement, My Southborough reported. The drones reach almost all of Shrewsbury, he told the board: “We can’t control flight altitude or delivery corridors.”
Select Board member Gregg Richards put it in plainer terms, telling the Community Advocate there will be unlucky residents with a flight path over their house that the town cannot stop, and that it stinks. Mizikar’s answer was the ground: the town keeps authority over the land end of the operation, and it could bar drones from taking off on municipal property. Board member Anand Sharma said the town needs a bylaw; Vice Chair Carlos Garcia wanted a proposal drafted before the flights arrive, not after.
What a flight path over the house looks like is on the record in Richardson, Texas, where a hub sits less than a mile from homes: one resident’s tracker logged 52 Amazon drones over her yard in a single day, the New York Times reported on Monday, and the city concluded in April that it has no legal handle on the flights. Amazon’s Westborough presentation showed a service-area map, not the routes its drones would fly.
Southborough had less than that. Beth Melo, who publishes My Southborough, spotted the town inside Amazon’s service map on the August 18 meeting video and checked with the Select Board chair and town administrator on September 16. Neither the board nor Southborough police had heard from Amazon. Melo notified them herself. Wafaie had told Westborough the map included communities Amazon was still talking to, or would be, and that stakeholder outreach was the main message.
Amazon’s statement to CBS Boston, from spokesperson Jack Stelzner, said the company is working with local officials and “exploring opportunities to expand” in the Westborough area and elsewhere. Amazon’s August 19 expansion announcement, which named Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland, Atlanta and Boise as the next launches on the way to nearly 500 cities and towns by year-end, did not mention Massachusetts.
Massachusetts Adds a State Landing-Area Permit the FAA Route Does Not
Massachusetts bars anyone from establishing a restricted landing area without a certificate of approval from MassDOT’s Aeronautics Division, under 702 CMR 5.01 and Chapter 90, Section 39B of the General Laws. The division inspects the site first, and the applicant must notify the local police and fire departments in writing.
The regulation exempts private landing areas, but only for non-commercial use, which a Prime Air pad is not. That is a layer most Amazon hubs never see. The Texas, Florida, Kansas City and Detroit hubs each got an FAA environmental assessment with a 30-day comment period and a local site-plan vote, and nothing from the state. Since July 28 the FAA can also skip the site assessment and check a new hub against its national finding inside the agency, the path DroneXL described when Washington cleared the runway for 500 cities. Tracy, California got a launch date and no document; Portland got a city permit and no document. The FAA’s drone environmental review page, last updated September 11, listed no Massachusetts document when DroneXL checked it on September 21.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office signed the January 23 letter from 17 attorneys general asking the FAA for a full environmental impact statement instead of the national assessment. The 60-day window to challenge the July 28 finding in court runs out September 26, three days after Amazon’s Westborough forum.
The towns also have more ground to stand on than Shrewsbury’s briefing suggested. The one federal ruling DroneXL’s 35-state review of drop laws found on point came out of this state: in Singer v. City of Newton, a federal judge in Boston struck four provisions of Newton’s drone ordinance in 2017 but rejected the argument that federal law leaves no room for any local rule. In 2018 the state’s Supreme Judicial Court held in Roma III v. Rockport that the aeronautics code does not wipe out local zoning over a private landing area. Newton is about 20 miles (32 kilometers) east of the Otis Street lot.
DroneXL’s Take
Amazon had this backwards, and Southborough is the proof. The service map went up on August 18 with a town on it whose officials say Amazon had not contacted them, and a local blogger did the outreach the company called its main message. Shrewsbury’s manager found out from the police.
That is not community engagement, it is a land-use application with a 174-square-mile shadow, and the towns in the shadow got the news secondhand. The pro-drone position here is the one I hold on every hub: a 30-minute Motrin run without a van on Route 9 is the industry this site exists to cover, and the hubs Amazon already runs deliver it daily. On the pad itself Amazon holds the stronger hand, because it owns the lot and the FAA’s own page says hub siting is the operator’s call within local zoning.
What Massachusetts has that Texas did not is a state aeronautics permit with written notice to the fire and police chiefs, an attorney general on the record, and a court decision from 20 miles away that says local rules survive. My read is that none of that stops a single flight. It does decide whether anyone outside Westborough gets asked before the first one leaves Otis Street. Anyone who wants to take the July 28 finding to court has five days left, and Massachusetts is the state with the case law to test it. Wednesday at the DoubleTree is where the towns find out whether Amazon has a plan for Southborough or a map with Southborough on it.
Sources: Community Advocate (Westborough), Community Advocate (Shrewsbury), My Southborough, CBS Boston, Citizen Portal, 702 CMR 5.00, FAA NEPA and Drones, Comments of 17 Attorneys General, January 23, 2026, Amazon.
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
