Amazon told hundreds of people packed into a Westborough, Massachusetts, hotel on Wednesday night, September 23, that it still plans to launch Prime Air drone deliveries from its Otis Street warehouse, and not one resident who took the microphone spoke in favor. The crowd filled the DoubleTree ballroom and an overflow room, and Amazon started ahead of the advertised 6 p.m. time because the room was already full.
I was in that room with a recorder. Right before Tareq Wafaie, who handles Amazon’s Prime Air projects in the Northeast for its economic development team, began his presentation, someone at the back shouted “Welcome to New England, Amazon.” Late in the evening a resident asked everyone who shops on Amazon to raise a hand, and nearly the whole room did. The next question was who thought drone delivery was a bad idea. More hands went up.
Wafaie told the room he had heard its opposition and would take it back to the company. He also said Amazon’s plan is to launch from Westborough, possibly by the end of October.
Westborough’s Only Local Vote Covers Amazon’s Launch Pad, Not the Flights
Westborough’s Planning Board, which resumes its site-plan review on October 6, can rule only on the pads and trailers Amazon wants in its Otis Street parking lot. The FAA controls the airspace, Wafaie said, and Amazon’s Part 135 certificate already covers the MK30 nationwide, though each new site still needs FAA sign-off.
Opting in to drone delivery decides only whether a drone delivers to your yard. When a resident asked how to keep the drones from crossing her property after she declined the service, Wafaie said: “There is no opting out of drones flying over your property.” Amazon will not publish its routes either. Rich, from Amazon’s airspace team, said the software builds each path around no-fly zones and flies as directly as it can from the pad to the customer.
The 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) radius covers about 175 square miles, Wafaie said, and parts of 13 cities and towns, Spectrum News reported. Wafaie said Amazon held a virtual briefing last week for town managers and state legislators from the area, but a public meeting before each town board is not part of its plan. That settles the question DroneXL raised before the forum, after Southborough found itself on Amazon’s service map through a local blogger rather than the company. Carlos Garcia of the Shrewsbury Select Board, who spoke last, called that answer “not satisfactory to me.”
The federal side is not finished. Wafaie first told a Northborough resident the FAA’s environmental assessment was done. Rich then said Amazon files a separate environmental review for every new site, and the FAA is reviewing Westborough’s now. Massachusetts also requires a MassDOT Aeronautics inspection and registration of the landing area. Wafaie said Amazon has none of those approvals yet and hopes to have all of them by year-end. Asked about wildlife, he said Amazon ran no peer-reviewed study of its own and relies on the FAA’s review. A horse-farm owner who boards 12 horses asked what happens when a drone spooks them; Wafaie said Amazon has had no complaints of spooked animals.
Wafaie added that about 80% of the communities where Amazon has proposed a hub approved it administratively, with no public hearing. One resident cited two Denver-area towns that had paused drone hubs this summer. Castle Rock and Parker both adopted emergency moratoriums on July 21: six months on commercial drone-delivery hubs in Castle Rock, nine months on drone dispatch facilities in Parker. A town cannot touch the sky, but it can pause the pad.
Amazon Left the Door Open to 5 a.m. Flights and 1,000 Trips a Day
Amazon’s FAA approval lets the MK30 fly during civil twilight, from shortly before sunrise to shortly after sunset, and allows up to 1,000 flights a day from each site. In Westborough, Wafaie said, Amazon will start with about six drones and several hundred daily deliveries, with one to three airborne.
A resident had the numbers ready: sunrise on June 10 was 5:09 a.m. Asked whether drones could be flying that early, Wafaie said that if customers order at that hour and the drone is cleared to fly, it is a possibility. Later he floated working with Westborough on operating hours, without committing to anything. Amazon’s Richardson, Texas, hub flies from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., according to the New York Times account DroneXL covered this week.
Wafaie called the 1,000-flight ceiling aspirational for a single Westborough pad with six drones, and said more drones would likely mean another site-plan approval. He would not forecast anything beyond that. One man called the refusal disingenuous; Wafaie asked him to stay civil. Scale was the worry residents kept coming back to. A Hopkinton resident asked the room whether it wanted blue sky or “a highway of drones.” Mark, who lives on Fisher Street near the warehouse, made it personal: “I did not buy a house near an airport in a city.”
Noise drew the most technical pushback. Wafaie said the drone never exceeds 65 to 68 decibels during the 25 to 30 seconds it spends at a customer’s home, citing what he called an independent noise study. A resident who said he works with sound measurement cited what he said was Amazon’s published peak of 81 to 84 dBA at 20 feet (6 meters) and noted that many local towns bar lawn mowing before 7 a.m. Amazon’s FAA filing for Baton Rouge puts the MK30’s delivery hover at 92.1 decibels SEL, a metric that adds up a whole event’s sound energy and runs higher than a peak reading.
Amazon’s Answers on Drone Cameras Changed Over One Evening
The MK30’s cameras record for the whole flight. Rich said the footage is written over on the next flight unless an incident triggers a safety investigation, in which case it goes to a secure vault. Earlier, Wafaie had told a Westborough resident the cameras were not recording in flight.
Rich also gave the coverage: 350 degrees around the aircraft and 17 degrees vertically in forward flight, enough to see ahead and below. Police asking for footage two weeks after a routine flight would find nothing, he said: “that data doesn’t exist anymore.”
Asked why anyone should trust that the drones don’t surveil, Wafaie said spying would go against everything Amazon does, and the room laughed. A Hopkinton resident answered with the record: in 2023 Amazon paid more than $30 million to settle FTC charges that it kept children’s Alexa recordings after parents asked for deletion and let Ring employees view customer videos. The same mismatch showed up in Richardson, where the city’s FAQ says the drones don’t record video and Amazon’s own operations page says people near a delivery point may be recorded, the Times reported.
Amazon Explained the Tolleson Crane Crash and Skipped Richardson
Asked about the two MK30s that hit a crane in Tolleson, Arizona, on October 1, 2025, Wafaie said the crane should have been permitted with the FAA and was not. The drone was built to scan forward for aircraft and missed that crane type, he said. It detects them now.
That was my question. I also asked what caused an MK30 to strike an apartment building in Richardson in February 2026, and whether the drone carries a parachute. It does not. The MK30 weighs about 83 pounds (38 kilograms) at takeoff and cruises at 60 to 74 mph (97 to 119 km/h), and Wafaie said six propellers and a safe contingent landing are what the FAA cleared. He did not address Richardson, as the Worcester Telegram & Gazette also noted. He did bring up Richardson more than an hour later, as a city with organized opposition where Amazon now makes tens of thousands of deliveries. Amazon left all eight of the safety questions DroneXL sent on September 4 unanswered. At the meeting, Wafaie answered one of them in passing: Amazon checks each customer’s chosen drop spot against aerial LiDAR data, and in some cases sends someone to drive by before the first delivery.
Wafaie told the room several times that Amazon has delivered hundreds of thousands of packages this year without incident, while conceding, in answer to my question, that a couple of flights had not gone perfectly. DroneXL’s own 2026 file includes the Richardson strike and an MK30 that crashed into a garden in Darlington, England, on July 29, a crash the UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch is investigating. On September 11 another MK30 made a precautionary landing beside a Baton Rouge boulevard, upright and with no visible damage.
When an MK30 does fail, it chooses where to come down. Wafaie said the aircraft finds the nearest open area that isn’t a road or a building, and Amazon keeps no map of predetermined landing sites. Bob, a Westborough resident who said he spent more than 10 years on Air Force drone programs and helped develop the first FAA-approved detect-and-avoid system, asked to see one; there isn’t one. A youth sports volunteer asked Amazon to route around schools, playgrounds and ball fields. Wafaie said that would take out most of every delivery area. The Part 107-certified monitors in the trailer on the pad cannot steer a drone either. They can recall it or order a contingent landing, and Wafaie said they can put every drone down if Westborough police ask.
DroneXL’s Take
I’m pro drone delivery when the cargo justifies the flight: an organ for transplant, medication for residents of a remote island, a defibrillator racing to someone in cardiac arrest. Urgency and value earn the right to fly over people’s homes. Toothpaste doesn’t. When a resident asked what problem Amazon was solving, Wafaie’s own example was diapers for a mother home with a sick child, and a same-day van already covers that.
If a company is going to fly consumer goods over backyards anyway, it has to do it right, and Zipline shows what right looks like. Its P2 weighs 55 pounds empty and 63 with a full 8-pound load, stays about 300 feet up and lowers the package on a tether, so the aircraft stays well above the people on the ground. It carries two parachutes, one on the aircraft and one on the delivery pod. The MK30 weighs about 20 pounds more than a fully loaded P2 to carry a 5-pound package, descends to 13 feet over a customer’s yard, and has no parachute. It is too big and too heavy for what it carries.
My read is that this gap is what the Westborough room was reacting to, and it puts the missions I care about at risk. A town has one move left against a company holding the FAA certificate, and Castle Rock and Parker already made it. A moratorium on delivery hubs grounds a medical drone as surely as a toothpaste run. Watch October 6: if the Planning Board approves the pad on the same answers this room rejected, Shrewsbury’s board, which has already talked about a bylaw, has every reason to write one, and Amazon will have taught another town to say no to all of us.
Sources: Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Spectrum News 1, DroneXL recording of the September 23 meeting, Federal Trade Commission, Citizen Portal (Castle Rock), Citizen Portal (Parker).
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
