Drones over Hazel Park: the hub is here, who decides, and what you can still do
A plain-language guide for residents of Hazel Park and the suburbs under the same circle. Amazon's drones already fly from inside the city limits. The FAA's environmental decision for the site came May 1, 2026, months after the first flights. Michigan law bars the city from writing a drone ordinance. Here is what is left.
The short version
Hazel Park, 14,983 people on 2.8 square miles, is one of the few American cities with an Amazon drone hub in town. The drones fly from 1400 E. Ten Mile Road, shown at the community center on November 20, 2025. The FAA signed its decision on May 1, 2026, clearing up to 1,000 flights a day from that lot, 6 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. No one in Hazel Park wrote to the FAA. By August the city had fewer than a dozen formal complaints.
Michigan law bars the city from any ordinance on drone operation. What remains is the ground: the site, the drop, the complaint record, and Lansing. It is also for Ferndale, Madison Heights, Royal Oak, Warren and Oak Park, under the same 7.5-mile circle.
Every block is marked Every US town or Hazel Park.
If you remember three things
The drones are already flying. From 1400 E. Ten Mile Road since late 2025. The FAA's environmental decision for the site came May 1, 2026, after flights had begun; what Amazon flew under before that is in its operating authorization, which is not public.
Hazel Park cannot write a drone ordinance. Michigan law, MCL 259.305, bars it unless a state statute expressly allows it, and none does for delivery. Zoning of the site and the state's own drop rule are what is left.
Your consent is required before a drone delivers to your home. It is not required for one to fly over. Amazon says each pass is audible for about 30 seconds.
Four questions, four parts
The tabs across the top are this guide's chapters. Each card below is one of them, labeled the same way. Start with the question that is yours.
Where DroneXL stands
DroneXL is not against drone delivery. Blood and organs between hospitals, a defibrillator to a heart attack before the ambulance, medication to someone who can't get out, tools and supplies to search-and-rescue teams in terrain a truck can't reach: those flights earn their noise, and some of them already fly. Everyday packages to homes may earn it too.
What we are for is doing it the right way: the least disruptive, safest, most accountable version, with the people living under the flight paths part of the conversation before the first flight rather than after. The country is in the middle of working out what that looks like. This guide, and the survey at the end of it, exist so that this town's answer is on the record.
Three things to hold onto
The sky is federal
Since 1958 the FAA has had sole authority over the navigable airspace. A city cannot ban overflight, set an altitude, or write a drone curfew. A federal judge struck down a city that tried in 2017.
The ground is local
Where a drone lands, where a package is dropped, whether a facility can be built, and under what conditions: that is zoning and land use, and it is the city's.
The window is before the first flight
Since July 28, 2026 the FAA approves most new hubs with no public comment period. A town that writes its rules early has leverage. A town that waits finds out from a press release.
Who delivers by drone in the United States
Three companies are rolling out home delivery at scale and saying so: Amazon, Wing and Zipline. Others, among them Flytrex, Manna and Wingcopter, fly trials and small services in the US without announced rollout plans; this guide adds them the day that changes.
Four words you'll see
- Nest
- Wing's name for its base: a fenced patch of a store's parking lot where its drones take off, land, recharge, and are loaded with the order by store staff. Nothing is launched from your street.
- Hub
- The same thing for Amazon, in the parking lot of one of its own warehouses. Zipline calls its version a dock.
- Service area
- The circle around a nest or hub that the drones can reach: about 6 miles for Wing, 7.5 for Amazon. Every home inside it can order. The base sits in one town; the circle usually covers several.
- Overflight
- A drone passing above your property on its way to someone else's. The FAA controls it; no town or homeowner can refuse it.
Wing (Alphabet)
Not namedNo Michigan filing under Wing on the FAA's public environmental list as of October 11, 2026, and Detroit is not among the metros Wing has announced, per the DroneXL tracker on the same date.
- Aircraft
- Hummingbird, 14 lb (a 24 lb version in part of the fleet)
- Flies from
- A nest (its takeoff, landing and loading base) in a retailer's parking lot, usually a Walmart
- Reach
- About 6 miles from the nest
- Delivery
- Hovers at about 23 ft, lowers the package on a tether. Never lands at your house
- Hours (FAA)
- 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.
- Volume
- Up to 400 flights a day per nest
Amazon Prime Air
Operating in Hazel ParkFlies from 1400 E. Ten Mile Road and from Pontiac. The FAA's May 1, 2026 decision also covers a Wixom site and 20110 Woodward Ave in Detroit, two miles from Hazel Park City Hall, neither flying yet.
- Aircraft
- MK30, 83 lb at takeoff, no parachute
- Flies from
- Amazon's own warehouses
- Reach
- 7.5 miles from the hub
- Delivery
- Drops the package from about 13 ft
- Hours (FAA)
- 6 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.
- Volume
- Up to 1,000 flights a day per hub
Zipline
Not namedNo Michigan filing under Zipline on the FAA's public list as of October 11, 2026. Its nearest service is the Cleveland Clinic prescription run in Beachwood, Ohio.
- Aircraft
- P2 Zip, 55 lb, carries a parachute
- Delivery
- Hovers at about 300 ft; a tethered "droid" lowers the package
- Reach
- About 10 miles
blueflite / Jack Demmer Ford
Parts trial, WayneA state-funded auto parts run between Ford dealership sites in Wayne, about 20 miles southwest of Hazel Park, flown by a Michigan-built cargo drone with a parachute. Dealer to dealer, not to homes. First flight August 25, 2026.
Read moreHow a drone would actually reach your street
There is no guessing where the base is. Amazon's delivery station at 1400 E. Ten Mile Road, at Dequindre, is zoned Industrial, sits about 1,500 ft east of the nearest homes by the FAA's measure, and is less than a mile from City Hall. The FAA document says the drones cruise between about 180 and 377 ft, drop the package from about 13 ft, and route around highways, parks and schools. The pad was built before the federal review: the FAA's own text says "Earlier construction was not part of the Proposed Action reviewed by the FAA." The second thing to watch is two miles south on Woodward Avenue in Detroit, where a fourth hub is approved on paper and would put most of Hazel Park under two circles.
Distances are straight-line from Hazel Park City Hall, 111 E. Nine Mile Road (approximate center). The four hub positions and addresses come from the FAA's May 1, 2026 Detroit decision as logged on the DroneXL tracker; neighboring towns are plotted at their approximate centers. The ring is the MK30's 7.5-mile range from the Ten Mile Road hub, which covers every address in Hazel Park, Ferndale, Madison Heights, Pleasant Ridge, Royal Oak and Oak Park and much of Warren. The Detroit site on Woodward, if it opens, would overlap almost all of it; the FAA's own figure for noise where two areas overlap is DNL 48.9 dB. Pontiac and Wixom do not reach Hazel Park.
How approval works now
The part most towns get wrong. Since July 28, 2026 there is usually no public comment step at all.
The operator picks a site and files with that town, if the work triggers a permit
Often it doesn't. Amazon told a Massachusetts audience that about 80% of its hubs were approved administratively, with no hearing. Northglenn, CO heard from Walmart, and Tacoma, WA received a Walmart building permit application, weeks before Wing announced either metro.
The FAA checks the site against one national environmental document
Signed July 28, 2026. A hub under 1,150 deliveries a day, at least 600 ft from homes at full volume, aircraft under 110 lb, flights under 400 ft: cleared internally. No draft, no comment period, no local hearing. Before July, each metro got its own review with about 30 days for public letters.
The company issues a press release
By then the decisions are made. Papillion, Nebraska found out when a reporter counted about 50 Amazon drone movements in an hour over a suburb whose council had never voted on any of it.
The only early warning is your own planning counter
A permit application at city hall, or a planning commission agenda item, is the first and often the last public signal. Fifteen states have sued the FAA over the national finding; the window for anyone else to challenge it closed September 26, 2026.
Full detail: How drone delivery approval works on the DroneXL tracker.
Who owns what
FederalThe FAA
- All airspace, flight paths, altitude
- Which companies may fly, and where
- Aircraft design, parachutes, in-flight noise
- Daily flight caps and hours in the air
- Whether any environmental review happens
Authority since 1958; restated by the FAA in 2018 and 2023. For a licensed air carrier, a second law also bars states from regulating its routes and services.
CityHazel Park
- Zoning: is a hub a permitted use, and where
- Site plan, building permit, conditional use permit and its conditions
- Ground hours, lighting, screening, traffic, noise at the property line
- Consent for delivery onto private property
- General nuisance, trespass, litter and privacy law, as long as it doesn't single out drones
StateMichigan
- Whether cities may regulate drones at all: Michigan says no. MCL 259.305(1) bars any political subdivision from an ordinance regulating the ownership or operation of unmanned aircraft unless a statute expressly allows it; the Court of Appeals enforced it against Ottawa County in November 2022
- Privacy and harassment: MCL 259.322 makes it an offense to fly a drone to harass someone or to capture images that invade a reasonable expectation of privacy
- The drop: MCL 750.44 makes it a misdemeanor to drop any object from an aircraft that may endanger life or injure property, and Aeronautics Commission rule R 259.308 says, on its face, that no object may be dropped from an aircraft in flight without written permission of the political subdivision; the rule sits in the commission's airport field rules, and whether it reaches a delivery drone has not been tested. Whether Hazel Park was asked is an open public-records question
- Could write: hub siting, resident notification, a complaint standard, who pays for damage. The 15-bill SHIELD package did none of that; the House passed two procurement bills on May 12, 2026 and the other 13 stalled
- Has done: is one of 15 states that, with Harris County, Texas, petitioned the Second Circuit on September 28, 2026 to throw out the FAA's national drone delivery clearance
What a city can and cannot do
The test case is Singer v. City of Newton (2017): a federal judge struck Newton's altitude limit, overflight ban and local registration, and left land use alone.
Overflight is airspace. Richardson, Texas dropped a rezoning threat on legal advice and now points residents to their senators. Source
Altitude, overflight and local registration are the rules the court in Newton struck down.
Aircraft design and in-flight noise are FAA rules. Worth asking the operator about; not something a council can order.
Land use is the city's. Most towns have not yet written a drone facility into their zoning code at all.
A rule about what happens on the ground. Every operator already requires the customer to opt in.
The same rule the delivery truck lives under. A general rule applied to drones survives; a drone-only rule invites the challenge.
Northglenn, CO's draft ordinance (first reading Oct. 12, final vote set for Oct. 26) would require any applicant to disclose hours, altitude, noise, aircraft count and flight frequency, plus an incident plan with 24-hour written notice after any crash. Source
Castle Rock and Parker, CO froze hub applications in July 2026. Legal, but it only moves the pad one town over. Source
The record so far, document by document
Hazel Park has no drone ordinance, and under MCL 259.305 cannot adopt one. What exists instead is a paper trail: a council trip, a community event, a federal review nobody in town wrote to, and the complaint counts that came after. Newest last.
Three council members visit Amazon's Arizona hubSeptember 2025
Councilmember Luke Londo went with Alissa Sullivan and Andrea Washington to Amazon's drone facility near Phoenix. Londo told C&G Newspapers he had been "inherently skeptical and leaning 'no'" and came back more positive. No council vote on the Hazel Park operation appears in C&G's November 14 and December 8, 2025 stories or the Detroit News's August 3, 2026 story, and the city's council page, checked October 11, 2026, lists no drone item. The city's approved minutes are posted on an outside file host DroneXL could not open, so whether any council or planning action on the drone pad exists is unconfirmed against the city's own record.
Pontiac starts flyingNovember 1 to 2, 2025
Amazon announced over the first weekend of November that drone delivery was live from its Pontiac site at 1200 Featherstone Road, its first in Michigan. Council President Mike McGuinness had said in July: "This is the future of where delivery is heading."
The Hazel Park unveilingNovember 20, 2025
Amazon showed a static MK30 at the Hazel Park Community Center, 620 W. Woodward Heights Blvd., and said a fleet of 12 would fly from 1400 E. Ten Mile Road to addresses within 7.5 miles before the end of the year. Mayor Mike Webb, to C&G: "Hopefully it's for the better, but time will tell." The facility employs about 700; Amazon put the drone jobs at 30.
Neighboring cities post noticesDecember 2, 2025 onward
Berkley told residents on December 2 that the service was available within 7.5 miles of the Hazel Park center and pointed to an Amazon webinar on December 6. Pleasant Ridge (June 8, 2026) and Ferndale (July 14, 2026) later posted that they cannot ban flights, set no-fly zones or regulate aircraft noise, and gave two addresses: [email protected] and hotline.faa.gov.
The FAA comment windowJanuary 19 to February 17, 2026
The FAA published a draft environmental assessment for four Detroit-area sites and took comments for 30 days. Six submissions came in: AUVSI, the Commercial Drone Alliance and the Small UAV Coalition in support; Birmingham's planning director on cumulative overflights and high-frequency sound; Warren's police commissioner and fire chief asking about airspace priority for their own drones; and one Bloomfield Township doctor asking for a buffer over Wood Lake. The FAA's reply to Birmingham: "The FAA does not select the locations for commercial drone operators." To Warren: the NEPA process does not address airspace access. Nothing came from Hazel Park, Ferndale, Madison Heights, Royal Oak or Oak Park.
The federal decisionMay 1, 2026
Derek Hufty, manager of the FAA's General Aviation and Commercial Operations Branch, signed the FONSI/ROD for SMI1 Hazel Park, DET3 Pontiac, STW1 Wixom and DET6 Detroit. Each site: up to 1,000 delivery flights an operating day, about 365,000 a year, between 6 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. The MK30 weighs approximately 78 lb (83.2 lb at maximum takeoff), carries up to 5 lb, cruises at 180 to 377 ft, and drops from about 13 ft. Noise: DNL 65 dB out to about 150 ft from the hub, DNL 50 dB out to about 1,050 ft, en route up to DNL 46 dB anywhere in the area. The EA puts a single overflight at 50 ft at about 71.2 decibels; the FAA's reply to the Bloomfield Township commenter says 74.2. Its own comparison is a leaf blower at 73 to 77. The Hazel Park site is zoned Industrial, with the nearest neighborhood about 1,500 ft west.
The complaint countsJuly 23 and August 3, 2026
Axios Detroit reported about five documented complaints in Ferndale, where the city was "actively exploring" options with its lawyers. The Detroit News reported Hazel Park had fewer than a dozen formal complaints; City Manager Edward Klobucher: "It's probably not going away." Amazon said fewer than 1% of its customer inquiries this year concerned noise, that its Pontiac fleet of 14 averages more than 100 deliveries a day, and that it has had no crashes or incidents in Michigan.
Michigan sues the FAASeptember 28, 2026
Attorney General Dana Nessel is listed as counsel for the People of the State of Michigan on a 15-state petition in the Second Circuit against the FAA's July 28 national environmental clearance, the document the FAA now uses in place of the per-metro review Detroit got. The petition targets that national finding, not the May 1 Detroit decision.
Read the full text: FAA Final Environmental Assessment and FONSI/ROD, Amazon Prime Air, Detroit, Michigan, signed May 1, 2026 (PDF).
What's still open for the city
The drop
Michigan's Aeronautics Commission rule R 259.308 says no object may be dropped from an aircraft in flight without written permission of the political subdivision having jurisdiction. It sits among the commission's airport field rules, and no court has said whether it reaches a delivery drone; its text names no airport. Amazon drops every package from about 13 ft. Whether it asked Hazel Park, and what the city answered, is a records request away, and the council can put its position on paper either way. The state drop laws, state by state
The second hub
20110 Woodward Avenue in Detroit is approved and not flying. Hazel Park gets no vote in Detroit, but it can ask Amazon, before that site opens, for the facts Northglenn, Colorado now requires of any applicant: hours, altitude, aircraft count, flights per day over each street, and an incident plan with written notice after any crash. Northglenn staff memo (PDF)
The site
The pad at Ten Mile Road went in before the FAA review and is on land zoned Industrial. That lever is mostly spent. What is not: any expansion, new structure or change of use at 1400 E. Ten Mile is a site-plan matter at City Hall, and the state's preemption law covers drone operation, not the zoning of a warehouse lot. FAA Detroit decision (PDF)
Lansing
Because MCL 259.305 takes the pen from cities, every rule a resident might want on siting, notification, complaints or liability has to be written in Lansing. The SHIELD package spent 15 bills on no-drone zones and procurement and none on delivery. The state's own attorney general is already in court against the FAA over this program. What SHIELD did and did not do
Before the vote
A checklist. Ticks are saved on this device only.
Once drones are flying
Don't consent, if you don't want deliveries
Every operator requires the customer to opt in. It is a personal choice, not a shield: Amazon told a Westborough, Massachusetts ballroom in September 2026 there is no opting out of overflight. Read more
Keep a log, then complain with dates and times
Date, time, altitude, duration, direction. What living under it sounds like: a Richardson, Texas resident counted 52 Amazon drones over her yard in a day, and the FAA's own Baton Rouge filing puts an Amazon delivery hover at 92 decibels measured 25 feet from the aircraft. After Richardson residents complained, Amazon raised its outbound altitude to 225 ft and moved routes over commercial land. Amazon left College Station after two years of noise complaints. Read more
Ask the operator the 15 questions
Weight, parachute, what happens after a collision, sound at 50/100/250 ft, how often one street is overflown, what the cameras record, who pays for damage, who gets the call when one comes down. Zipline answered in part; Amazon and Wing have not. Read more
Report what comes down
The Drone Delivery Tracker logs every hub, market and incident on the public record. Several rows exist because a resident sent photos. Read more
Who to contact
Federal: the FAA takes drone questions at 844-359-6982, safety reports at hotline.faa.gov and noise inquiries at faa.gov/noise/inquiries. An FAA regional office told a Ferndale resident in writing that privacy, trespass and nuisance questions fall under state or local jurisdiction. None of these changes a decision; all of them create a record.
Have your say
Two minutes, anonymous. No name, no email, no address. Results are public, update live, and are feedback from people who chose to answer, not a scientific poll. Modeled on the independent Westborough, MA survey that reached 853 responses and three state legislators in six weeks, without the name and street it asked for. In Hazel Park the drones are already flying, so this is the count after the first flight, not before it.
Read the documents yourself
Every claim in this guide traces to one of these. If a document says something different from this page, the document is right and we want to know: send a correction.
Hazel Park
Every US town
The pad came first, the review came second, and the city never had a vote
Hazel Park is the clearest case I have covered of the order of operations Amazon prefers. The pad was built, three council members went to Arizona to look at the finished product, the drone was unveiled at the community center, and five months later the FAA signed a document noting that the earlier construction was not part of what it reviewed. The comment window drew six letters, and the city under the hub sent none of them. I do not blame Hazel Park for that. The notice went out in the third week of January, on an FAA web page nobody reads, for an operation that was already flying.
The Michigan twist is one drone pilots cheered for in 2022 and residents are discovering now: the state law that stopped Ottawa County from banning drones in its parks is the same law that stops Hazel Park from writing a word about them. Belvedere's consent rule, Northglenn's disclosure form, Castle Rock's moratorium: none of it is available here. My read is that this leaves one local lever that nobody has pulled, the Aeronautics Commission's rule that an object dropped from an aircraft in flight needs the written permission of the political subdivision. Amazon drops every package. I think the council should ask, in public, whether anyone asked it, and answer in public either way. The other lever is Lansing, where the attorney general is already suing the FAA over this program and the legislature spent 15 bills on no-drone zones without one line about delivery.
None of this is an argument against the service. A prescription to a Ferndale senior without a car in 30 minutes is a flight worth the 30 seconds of noise. A thousand battery runs a day until 10:30 p.m. over Royal Oak has to earn it, and the people under it get a say. The aircraft doing the work is an approximately 78-pound machine with no parachute, dropping from 13 feet; Zipline's P2 carries a parachute and lowers the package on a tether, and that remains my reference for doing this right. Fewer than a dozen formal complaints in a city of 15,000 by August is a real number, and so far it cuts Amazon's way. So does this one: the FAA cleared 1,000 flights a day from Ten Mile Road, and Amazon's Pontiac fleet averages about 100. The distance between those two numbers is the whole question for Hazel Park.
Spotted a mistake? Here is how to get it fixed
Every fact in this guide is meant to be checkable against a document listed above. If something is wrong, out of date, or missing (a meeting moved, a permit decided, a number that does not match the filing), tell DroneXL and it gets corrected, with the change logged below.
- Use the correction form at the bottom of this page (jump to it). Pick "Correction," name the guide (Hazel Park, MI), quote the sentence, and say what it should say. A link to the document that shows the correct fact gets it fixed fastest. The form can be sent anonymously.
- Or email [email protected] with "Correction: Hazel Park guide" in the subject line.
- What happens next. The claim is checked against the primary document. A confirmed error is corrected on the page and noted in the "Updates" log below with the date; a material error also gets a correction note on the DroneXL corrections page. Readers who report an error are not named unless they ask to be.
City officials, operators and residents are all welcome to use this. Disagreement with DroneXL's take is not a correction, but it is welcome in the comments.
Updates to this guide
Spotted an error, or something that changed? Every fact on this page is meant to be checkable against the documents in the Sources tab. Corrections and updates: how to report an error or the correction form below (anonymous if you want), or email [email protected]. Fixes are logged in the Sources tab with the date.
This is reporting, not legal advice. DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Editorial standards · Corrections policy
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