An independent survey of residents around Amazon’s proposed Prime Air drone hub in Westborough, Massachusetts, had 853 responses at 8:30 a.m. on Monday, September 28, and 92% of them oppose the operation. The count is live and keeps moving. Another 3% would support it only with added restrictions, 3% support it outright, and 93% say they are unlikely to use drone delivery if it reaches their address. The survey is not a scientific poll, and its organizers say so on the page.
By Sunday night residents were circulating a phone script aimed at three state legislators, Governor Maura Healey, both U.S. senators and Representative Jim McGovern. Hours earlier, a second resident had posted that he rebuilt the survey site’s document library into a reference shelf of FAA environmental reviews, NTSB crash reports and Massachusetts landing-area law.
Amazon told a packed hotel ballroom in Westborough on September 23 that it hopes to start flying from its Otis Street parking lot possibly by the end of October. By its own account that night, it had none of the three approvals that would let it.
The Survey Counts 853 Responses and Calls Itself Unscientific
The Westborough Area Drone Delivery Survey at dronefeedback.com is run by a Westborough resident, with no tie to Amazon or the town. It asks for a name, email, street name and town, no house number, and accepts one response per email address. At 8:30 a.m. on September 28 it counted 853 accepted responses: 477 from Westborough, 86 from Grafton, 82 from Northborough, 74 from Hopkinton and 32 from Marlborough. The site publishes opposition as one figure across all towns, not town by town.
The site’s methodology note says residency is self-reported and the results are feedback from people who chose to answer, not a sample of the population. Amazon can say the same thing, and it would be right. The count does show speed. Amazon presented the plan to the Select Board on August 18. Six weeks later, 477 people in a town of 21,567 have put their name and street on the form, and across all towns 92% of those who did marked oppose.
Alessio Burgio, who maintains the site’s Documents & Sources section, posted in a Westborough Facebook group on Sunday afternoon that he had reorganized it into sections for local and state review, FAA documents, environmental and wildlife material, noise, documented safety incidents and other Prime Air communities, and asked residents to send him anything he had missed. The library links the NTSB reports on the MK30, from the two Pendleton test collisions in 2024 to the two drones that hit a crane in Tolleson, Arizona, on October 1, 2025, along with the FAA’s College Station and Texas environmental assessments and the Connecticut permit notice for North Haven’s 1,000-flights-a-day envelope.
Residents Have a Phone Script for Moore, Kane and Donaghue
Stephanie Lawrence Stuchlik posted the script on Facebook on Sunday night, asking residents to call or email their representatives Monday morning and to use the same wording so the offices know the callers are organized. The script registers “strong opposition” to commercial drone delivery in Westborough and surrounding areas, cites noise, safety, privacy, the environment and property values across the 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) delivery zone, and asks officials to prohibit the service, slow the approvals, and back noise limits, altitude restrictions, no-fly zones near homes and privacy rules. It lists State Senator Michael O. Moore, State Representatives Hannah Kane and Kate Donaghue, Governor Healey, U.S. Representative Jim McGovern and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, with office numbers for each.
The post puts the survey at “93% of area respondents” with more than 800 responses. The site’s own figure for opposition is 92%; 93% is the share who say they are unlikely to use the service.
The three state legislators have already been in the room, in a sense. The survey site says that in correspondence shared with the project, Moore, Kane and Donaghue said they had met with Amazon, discussed constituent concerns and the limits of state authority with MassDOT, and raised the issue with other state and federal officials. That matches what Amazon’s Tareq Wafaie told the September 23 forum: a virtual briefing for town managers and state legislators, with no public meeting before each town’s board.
The script points callers to Mass Blue Skies, a grassroots group that formed around the proposal and counts 15 cities and towns inside Amazon’s radius, from all of Westborough, Shrewsbury, Grafton and Northborough to slivers of Hudson, Berlin, Ashland and West Boylston. Its position page says most members are Amazon customers who want to keep the vans and skip the drones. Residents who want to tell Amazon directly can use the phone number and chat route in DroneXL’s guide to what residents can do.
Amazon’s October Target Still Rests on Three Missing Approvals
Westborough’s Planning Board continued its September 15 hearing on site-plan application 26-02275 to October 6, MassLive reported, and that vote covers only the fenced launch pad and trailers on the parking lot. The October 6 agenda the town posted on September 11 does not list the item yet, and Boston.com gave the date as October 7. MassDOT’s Aeronautics Division has not issued the landing-area approval Massachusetts requires for a commercial pad, and Amazon was still waiting on it with no timeline as of September 24, Boston.com reported. The FAA’s drone environmental review page listed no Massachusetts document when DroneXL checked it on September 28, five days after a member of Amazon’s airspace team told the forum the FAA was reviewing Westborough now. An empty page is not proof of no review: since July 28 the FAA can clear a new hub against its national environmental assessment without posting a site document.
The survey site keeps its own status board, and it is mostly blank. Operating hours, a flight-density map, emergency-response coordination, a Westborough-specific FAA determination and any wildlife review are each marked “not publicly identified,” which the site defines as no Westborough document found, not proof that none exists. The one number on the board is Amazon’s: up to 1,000 deliveries a day, the eventual goal Amazon gave the Planning Board on September 15, with existing sites averaging 500 to 600, per Boston.com.
Wafaie also told that room that about 80% of the communities where Amazon has proposed a hub approved it administratively, with no public hearing. Westborough is the other 20%. Southborough learned it was on Amazon’s map from a blogger and Shrewsbury from the police. By then a resident in Richardson, Texas, had already counted 52 drones over her yard in a day.
DroneXL’s Take
The 92% does not surprise me. Five days ago I watched a ballroom full of Amazon customers in Westborough raise their hands against Amazon’s drones. A self-selected survey measures who cares enough to answer. In a service area whose anchor town has 21,567 people, 853 answers is a lot of people who care. The number Amazon should worry about is 93%: the share who say they would not use the service even if it came. A hub that 93% of the people who answered say they won’t order from is a hub that flies over them for someone else’s benefit.
The document library is the sharper weapon. Amazon’s pitch in every town rests on the FAA having done the homework, and Westborough residents are now reading the homework: the NTSB reports, the Texas assessment, the College Station eagle buffer, the Connecticut permit that spells out 1,000 flights a day in writing. Amazon has given no written answer to the eight safety questions DroneXL sent on September 4. Leaving a Planning Board that holds NTSB report numbers unanswered on October 6 is a harder trick.
My read is that the end-of-October date is already gone. There was no MassDOT approval as of last week’s reporting, there is no FAA document and no site-plan vote, and the state legislators the residents are calling this morning have already been asking MassDOT where the state’s authority ends, according to the survey site. Amazon can still get its pad. It will not get it quietly.
Sources: Westborough Area Drone Delivery Survey, MassLive, Documents & Sources, Mass Blue Skies, Boston.com, Town of Westborough Planning Board agendas, FAA environmental review page, Facebook posts by Stephanie Lawrence Stuchlik and Alessio Burgio.
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
