Drones over Houston: three delivery fleets, one sky, and what you can still do
Houston is one of two US metros, with Dallas-Fort Worth, where all three home-delivery drone companies fly at once. The FAA has signed the papers for far more than is in the air today. The city has no zoning, the counties have none, and Harris County has gone to court. Here is what that leaves you.
The short version
Greater Houston is one of two US metros, with Dallas-Fort Worth, where all three home-delivery drone companies are in the air. Wing has flown Walmart orders from five Supercenters since January 15. Zipline opened Cypress on April 29. Amazon flies its 83-pound MK30 from a warehouse on Harlem Road in Fort Bend County and holds FAA sign-off for five more hubs, each cleared for up to 1,000 flights a day.
No council vote on any of it appears in the record DroneXL found. Houston has no zoning, Texas counties cannot zone, and a 2017 state law bars cities from regulating drone operation at all. The one local government that acted is Harris County, which joined 15 states in suing the FAA on September 28. This guide is for Houston and for Cypress, Katy, Richmond and Pasadena, under the same aircraft.
Every block is marked Every US town or Houston.
If you remember three things
Three fleets, one sky. The FAA has cleared up to 75 Wing nests, six Amazon hubs and is weighing 65 Zipline bases for this metro. Nobody has added them up over your street.
Houston has no zoning, and the county has none either. The permit hearing other towns get never happens here. The suburbs with zoning, Missouri City, Katy and Kemah among them, still have it.
Your consent is required before a drone delivers to your home. It is not required for one to fly over, and in Texas no city can change that.
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)
Operating, for WalmartFlying since January 15, 2026 from five Walmart Supercenters: 14215 FM 2100 in Crosby, 255 FM 518 in Kemah, 15955 FM 529 in northwest Houston, and 1313 and 6060 N. Fry Road in Katy. The FAA's August 13, 2026 decision allows up to 75 nests across Harris, Fort Bend, Montgomery, Galveston, Brazoria, Chambers, Liberty, Waller, Grimes and San Jacinto counties, 400 deliveries a day each, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Wing's January store list is the last one it has published for Houston.
- 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 from Richmond; five more hubs clearedFlies from the HOU6 warehouse at 10507 Harlem Road, a Richmond address in unincorporated Fort Bend County; Amazon listed Richmond as live on August 19, 2026, two days after an MK30 released a box into a customer's pool there. The FAA's February 5, 2026 decision also covers SAH1 on FM 1960, HOU2 on Ella Boulevard, STX5 on Campbell Road, STX4 in Pasadena and a site in Missouri City, each up to 1,000 flights a day, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. None of those five is on Amazon's operating list as of October 11, 2026 (checked: Amazon's August 19 location list and the FAA decision).
- 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
Operating from CypressOpened April 29, 2026 in Cypress with an early-access program for the first 5,000 residents; Walmart and Chipotle are among the merchants. The FAA published a draft on September 11 that would allow 65 Zipline bases and 65,000 deliveries a day across 9,932 square miles of the metro, 24 hours a day; comments close October 11. Memorial Hermann has signed on for prescription deliveries, pending approvals.
- Aircraft
- P2 Zip, 55 lb, carries a parachute
- Delivery
- Hovers at about 300 ft; a tethered "droid" lowers the package
- Reach
- About 10 miles
How a drone would actually reach your street
In most towns the question is whether a drone company will build inside the town. In Houston it already has, several times over, and the better question is which circle you live in. Wing flies about 6 miles from a Walmart lot; the five it uses today sit in Crosby, Kemah, Katy and northwest Houston. Amazon flies 7.5 miles from its Richmond warehouse and has FAA clearance for five more, one of them 1,000 feet from the Houston National Cemetery on Ella Boulevard. Zipline flies about 10 miles from its Cypress base and has asked the FAA for up to 65 across the metro. Put an address into each company's map and you will know whether the drone over your street is going to a neighbor, or could be coming to you.
Distances are straight-line from Houston City Hall, and the three rings are drawn there only for scale: the real circles sit around each hub, nest and base. Amazon hub coordinates and the Zipline point are from the DroneXL tracker's site and incident records, which follow the FAA's Texas decision and the September 4 Highway 6 landing; the pool delivery is from the tracker's incident record. Wing's five Walmart addresses are from Wing's January 15, 2026 announcement, plotted at the approximate center of each town because Wing's FAA document names no store. The FM 529 Supercenter (77095) is inside Houston's city limits, about 20 miles northwest of City Hall, and is not plotted separately.
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.
CityHouston (and its suburbs)
- 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
StateTexas
- Whether cities may regulate drones at all: Texas said no in 2017. Government Code 423.009(b) bars a city or county from adopting or enforcing any rule on the operation of an unmanned aircraft; 423.009(d) makes such a rule void. The exceptions are special events, the government's own drones, and the area around its own facilities after a public hearing. Zoning and ground use stay with the city, where a city has them.
- Houston has no zoning, in the city's own words, and Texas counties may not adopt zoning outside narrow exceptions. Amazon's operating hub and its FM 1960 site are both in unincorporated county land. The permit hearing that gave Richardson a 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. condition on its Amazon hub has no equivalent for those sites.
- Privacy: Government Code 423.003 makes it a Class C misdemeanor to use a drone to capture an image of a person or private property with intent to conduct surveillance; 423.006 lets an owner or tenant sue for a $5,000 civil penalty per episode, $10,000 if the image is distributed, plus attorney's fees.
- A dropped package: Transportation Code chapter 24, the state's aircraft operation chapter, has no provision on releasing objects from an aircraft. The nearest section, 24.021, covers taking off and landing on a public road.
- Could write: hub siting setbacks from homes, notice to residents before a hub opens, a complaint line that answers, a cap on how many operators' routes may stack over one neighborhood, who pays when a package lands in a pool. Bill prefiling for the 2027 session opens November 9, 2026. A DroneXL web search of 89th-session bills touching Chapter 423, run October 11, 2026, found nothing passed on delivery hubs; a Texas Legislature Online bill search was not run.
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
No Houston ordinance, no council vote on the record, no county hearing. Every decision that put drones over Greater Houston was made by the FAA or by the companies. Here is the paper trail, oldest first, with what each document allows.
Amazon's Texas draft goes out for comment, with six Houston-area addresses in itFAA draft EA · Aug. 15 to Oct. 1, 2025
The FAA published Amazon's draft for 22 Texas hubs and took public comment from August 15 to October 1, 2025, after extending the first 30-day window. The Houston-area sites were named with street addresses: 1202 E. FM 1960 Road in unincorporated Harris County, 10550 Ella Boulevard, 5215 Campbell Road, 10611 Red Bluff Road in Pasadena, Beltway 8 at Highway 90 in Missouri City, and 10507 Harlem Road in Richmond. This was the one comment period Houston residents got on Amazon.
Amazon files for the Richmond hub with the stateTDLR project HOU6 Tenant Improvements · Aug. 29, 2025
Amazon's filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation describes an 1,800-square-foot office, drone storage and launch pads at the HOU6 warehouse, estimated at $2.25 million. The site is unincorporated Fort Bend County with a Richmond mailing address, so no city council had a permit to vote on.
Wing tests, then launches, from five Walmart lotsFAA Wing Houston EA · tests from Oct. 31, 2025; launch Jan. 15, 2026
Wing's FAA document describes test operations at a limited number of nests for no more than six months beginning October 31, 2025. On January 15, 2026, Wing and Walmart announced service from five Supercenters: Crosby, Kemah, FM 529 in northwest Houston, and two in Katy. The FAA's environmental document for Houston had not yet been published; the draft went out for comment three and a half months later, on May 4. What Wing flew under in the meantime is in its operating authorization, which is not public.
The FAA signs Amazon's Texas decisionFONSI/ROD · Feb. 5, 2026
Signed by Joseph Hemler of the FAA's Flight Standards Service. Each of the 22 hubs may run up to 1,000 delivery flights per operating day, seven days a week, between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m., en route at about 180 to 377 feet and never above 400. The MK30 weighs about 78 pounds, 83.2 at maximum takeoff, and releases a package of up to 5 pounds from about 13 feet. The document puts the 65-decibel day-night contour about 100 feet from each hub and the 50-decibel contour about 600 feet out. On HOU2 it records that the Texas Historical Commission, because the site is about 1,000 feet east of the Houston National Cemetery, "recommends avoiding drone overflights in this area."
Zipline opens Cypress with no Houston document on the FAA's listZipline announcement · Apr. 29, 2026
Zipline opened an early-access program for the first 5,000 eligible Houstonians in Cypress on April 29, 2026, with plans to add neighborhoods in the following weeks and then scale across the metro. Zipline holds a Part 135 air carrier certificate; the FAA's public project list showed no Houston-specific Zipline review until the Texas draft appeared on September 11, four and a half months after the first flight.
Wing's draft goes out for comment. Nobody writes in.FAA Wing Houston draft EA · May 4 to June 3, 2026
The FAA took comment on Wing's plan for up to 75 nests across ten counties from May 4 to June 3, 2026. Its final document records that it "did not receive any comments." A second window for the Texas General Land Office's coastal review ran June 19 to July 19; no comments were received there either.
The FAA signs Wing's Houston decisionFONSI/ROD · Aug. 13, 2026
Signed by Derek Hufty of the FAA's Flight Standards Service and dated August 13, 2026 on the FAA's index. Up to 75 nests, up to 24 aircraft each, 400 deliveries per nest per operating day, flights from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. with in-nest hover checks from 6 a.m., aircraft at 150 to 300 feet en route. The Hummingbird weighs under 15 pounds with a 2.7-pound payload; the larger version under 25 pounds with 5. The decision puts the 65-decibel day-night contour within 35 feet of a nest perimeter and 60 within 65 feet, and names no store, city or county for any nest.
Amazon starts flying from Richmond, and a box lands in a poolAmazon location list · Aug. 17 to 19, 2026
On August 17 an MK30 released a customer's order into her swimming pool in Richmond, the second Prime Air pool delivery DroneXL has recorded, after Avondale, Arizona in August 2025; Amazon called it "extremely rare." On August 19 Amazon published its list of operating sites with Richmond, Texas as the Houston metro's one entry, alongside its plan for nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026.
A Zip comes down on Highway 6Zipline statement to KPRC 2 · Sept. 4, 2026
A Zipline Platform 2 aircraft on its way to a pickup deployed its parachute after what Zipline called a midflight issue and landed in the southbound lanes of Highway 6 near Timber Creek Place Lane in Cypress. No injuries, no damage, and law enforcement told KPRC it received no calls. The cause has not been published.
The FAA publishes Zipline's Texas draft: 65 bases, 65,000 a day, 24 hoursFAA draft EA · published Sept. 11, 2026; comments to Oct. 11
The draft would amend Zipline's operating areas to cover Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Amarillo and El Paso. For Houston: 9,932 square miles, up to 65 Chargers, 1,300 Dropbox kiosks and 65,000 deliveries a day, every day, 24 hours, with about 95 percent of flights between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. The aircraft weighs about 63 pounds with its 8-pound payload and cruises at about 330 feet. Comments go to [email protected] with "Zipline Texas Draft EA" in the subject line.
Harris County goes to courtPetition for review, 2d Cir. · Sept. 28, 2026
Harris County, with County Attorney Abbie Kamin listed as counsel, joined New York, California, Illinois and twelve other states in a petition asking the Second Circuit to set aside the FAA's July 28, 2026 national environmental finding for drone package delivery. Harris County is the only local government on the petition. It is a notice, not a brief; the arguments come once the court sets a schedule. No stay was requested, so approvals that rely on the national finding continue.
Read the full text: FAA Finding of No Significant Impact and Record of Decision, Amazon Prime Air in Texas, Feb. 5, 2026 (PDF).
What's still open for the city
The comment window
Zipline's Texas draft is the one open process in this metro, and it closes October 11. The draft analyzes Zipline's noise alone; my reading of the FAA's July 28 national document is that overlapping routes from several operators are the gap it leaves to later review. Over the Cypress area, Wing's FM 529 nest and Zipline's base already overlap, and Amazon's cleared sites on Campbell Road and FM 1960 would add a third fleet beside them. A comment that asks the FAA to count Wing and Amazon in the same sky gets a written answer in the final document. FAA drone environmental review page
The suburbs that have zoning
Houston cannot do what Richardson did, because Houston has no zoning and the county has none. Missouri City, Katy and Kemah do. The Amazon site in Missouri City is FAA-cleared and not flying; whatever site plan or permit the city holds is where a council attaches hours, a named local contact, a public flight count and 24-hour written notice after a crash. Pasadena's Red Bluff Road site is also cleared and not flying; whether that city holds a permit with conditions depends on its own development code. Richardson wrote 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. into its zoning case. The Richardson guide
Harris County's case
The county is a petitioner in the Second Circuit. What it asks the court for, and whether it files its own brief, is a Commissioners Court decision residents can ask about at a meeting. A vacatur would send the FAA back to one review per metro, which is the process that produced zero comments for Wing here; a brief that asks for cumulative noise analysis would at least put the gap this guide keeps finding in front of the court. The petition (PDF)
Austin
Section 423.009 is the Legislature's to amend, and prefiling for the 2027 session opens November 9, 2026. Siting setbacks, resident notice, a complaint standard and a limit on stacked routes are state questions in Texas. The four members whose districts hold the operating hubs are listed under contacts; the metro's delegation runs to dozens more. Texas Government Code 423.009
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
Greater Houston spans dozens of House and Senate districts; the four state members above are the ones whose districts hold the operating hubs, matched by address through the Census Bureau's geocoder. Not sure which is yours: the Texas Legislature's Who Represents Me lookup at wrm.capitol.texas.gov takes an address. Federal: the FAA takes drone questions at 844-359-6982 and noise inquiries at faa.gov/noise/inquiries. Neither changes a decision; both 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. The FAA got zero comments on Wing's Houston plan; this count is the one that will exist. 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.
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.
Houston
Every US town
Houston is the test nobody designed
Every other town in this series has one operator and one argument. Houston has three operators, no zoning, and a comment record that reads zero. Wing's 75-nest plan sat on the FAA's site for 30 days in May and not one person in a metro of seven million wrote in. I do not read that as consent. I read it as a process nobody told them about, in a city whose council had no permit to hold a hearing on, in a state whose Legislature took the subject away from cities in 2017. The result is the case I think the FAA's national document handles worst: several companies' routes stacked over the same streets. Over northwest Harris County, where Wing's FM 529 nest and Zipline's Cypress base already overlap and Amazon holds clearance for two more hubs, that is not a scenario. It is the plan on paper.
The two incidents three weeks apart in the same metro are the whole industry in miniature. On August 17 an 83-pound Amazon aircraft opened its hatch over a Richmond backyard and let a box fall 13 feet into a pool, by design. On September 4 a 63-pound Zipline aircraft had something go wrong at altitude, put out a parachute, and came down slowly enough that the driver behind it took a photo through her windshield. Neither is good. One is a design choice that works until the day it doesn't, and the other is a failure that was caught by the layer built to catch it. My read: if Houston is going to live under delivery drones at this scale, the Zipline version, with the aircraft at 300 feet, a tethered droid on the last stretch and a canopy for the bad day, is the one to insist on, and Memorial Hermann's prescription runs are the flights that earn the noise first.
What Houston can still do is narrower than Belvedere or Richardson, and it should spend it well. The comment to the FAA closes October 11; a paragraph asking the agency to count all three fleets in the same sky is worth more than a hundred posts in a neighborhood group. The suburbs with zoning hold the only permits in the metro, and the Amazon site in Missouri City is not flying yet. And Harris County is in federal court, the only local government on that petition. Whether it argues for the thing Houston actually lacks, a cumulative count of what flies over one street, is a decision its residents can ask for by name at a Commissioners Court meeting. The sky is federal. The question of how crowded it gets is still open, for about a day.
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 (Houston, TX), 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: Houston 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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