Drones over Kansas City: one hub flying, one waiting, and two states' rules
A plain-language guide for residents of both Kansas Cities and the 17 towns around them. Amazon's MK30 drones have flown from Riverview Avenue since February 9, 2026. A second hub on East 149th Street is approved and waiting. The FAA owns the flight. Two cities, two counties and two legislatures own the rest.
The short version
Kansas City is the one metro on the FAA's public list where Amazon's drone operating areas are drawn in two states. The MK30, 78 pounds and up to 83.2 at takeoff, has flown from the MKC6 warehouse at 6925 Riverview Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas since February 9, 2026, dropping packages under 5 pounds from about 13 feet to homes within 7.5 miles. A second hub at 4001 East 149th Street in south Kansas City, Missouri holds the same FAA approval, signed May 1, 2026, 81 days after the first delivery, and has no launch date. Each hub may fly 1,000 times a day.
No city council vote is in the record DroneXL read. Each city granted a planning permit in spring 2025. This guide is for both Kansas Cities and the 17 neighbors the FAA names under the circles.
Every block is marked Every US town or Kansas City.
If you remember three things
The Kansas hub is flying; the Missouri hub is approved. Same FAA decision, same 1,000-a-day cap. The south Kansas City site has no launch date on the record.
Neither city can touch the flight. Each city owns the permit for the pad, the conditions on it, consent at the doorstep, and nuisance law.
Two states, two sets of rules. Missouri's 1939 drop law and stadium rule, Kansas's 2016 stalking-act clause. Neither state has taken drone rules away from cities.
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 Kansas City entry under Wing on the FAA's drone environmental review index as of October 11, 2026, and no Kansas filing at all. Wing named St. Louis on its Walmart list in January 2026; it has not named Kansas City.
- 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 since Feb. 9Flies the MK30 from the MKC6 warehouse at 6925 Riverview Ave, Kansas City, KS. The FAA's May 1, 2026 decision also covers the SMO1 site at 4001 E 149th St, Kansas City, MO, which has not launched. Each hub: up to 1,000 flights a day, 6 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., 7.5 miles.
- 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 Kansas City entry on the FAA's review index as of October 11, 2026. Zipline's Pea Ridge, Arkansas area reaches into southwest Missouri, far from Kansas City; it flies for Walmart in Texas and Arkansas and for Cleveland Clinic in 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
How a drone would actually reach your street
There is no question of where the bases go. One is already flying: a fenced pad beside Amazon's MKC6 fulfillment center on Riverview Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas, south of I-70 near the Turner Diagonal, on land the FAA's file says is zoned MP-1 Planned Light Industrial. The other is waiting at the SMO1 same-day delivery warehouse on East 149th Street at Botts Road in far south Kansas City, Missouri, near the former Richards-Gebaur airfield, zoned M1-5 light industrial. Every address within 7.5 miles of either pad can order; the FAA puts each circle at 174 square miles. The drone crosses whatever lies between the pad and the customer at roughly 180 to 377 feet, and no address inside a circle can refuse the overflight. Amazon told Axios in March 2026 that MKC6 is "the first of many" local launch sites; it has 12 facilities in the metro, and since July 28, 2026 any further hub is checked against the FAA's national document with no comment period.
The map is centered on Kansas City, MO City Hall, 414 East 12th Street, and the dashed ring is 7.5 miles from there, which is only a scale: Amazon's two real circles are drawn from the hubs, one 8 miles west on Riverview Avenue and one 17 miles south on East 149th Street. The hub markers are the positions recorded in the DroneXL tracker from the FAA's file. Town markers are city centers with straight-line distance to the nearer hub; the FAA names all 19 municipalities as inside an operating area, so a town whose center sits outside 7.5 miles still has streets inside. The FAA's own maps of both areas are in its final assessment, linked under Sources.
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.
CityKansas City, MO and Kansas City, KS
- 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
StateMissouri
- Whether cities may regulate drones at all: neither Missouri nor Kansas has passed a law taking that power from cities, and neither has written one spelling it out. DroneXL found no preemption statute in either state's drone provisions or in its own state table as of October 11, 2026; the federal line (flight is the FAA's, the ground is the city's) is what applies on both sides of State Line Road
- Dropping objects: Missouri's RSMo 305.080, on the books since 1939, makes it a misdemeanor to drop any object but water or loose sand ballast over a thickly inhabited area. DroneXL found no equivalent in Kansas's aeronautics chapter, K.S.A. chapter 3, as of October 11, 2026. Neither state has said in writing how the Missouri clause meets an FAA-authorized package drop
- Privacy: Kansas's Protection from Stalking Act, K.S.A. 60-31a02, amended in 2016, counts a course of conduct by an unmanned aerial system over a dwelling as harassment. Missouri's drone statutes cover stadiums, critical infrastructure and mental health hospitals (RSMo 577.800 and 632.575), not homes; general trespass and nuisance law apply in both states
- Missouri's stadium and infrastructure rule, RSMo 577.800, rewritten effective June 12, 2026, exempts a commercial operator the FAA has authorized to fly in that airspace. The legislature wrote the exemption in; it could write conditions in the same way
- Could write: hub siting, resident notification before a launch, data retention, who pays when a package lands in a pool. Neither legislature has
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
Neither Kansas City has a drone or delivery ordinance. What exists is a paper trail in two city halls and one FAA file: two planning permits in spring 2025, Amazon's public promises, a Shawnee staff briefing, a 30-day comment window that closed after the first flight, and a signed federal decision. Newest last. DroneXL searched both cities' sites and local coverage for a drone ordinance as of October 11, 2026 and found none.
Kansas City, Missouri grants the permit for the 149th Street siteCD-SUP-2025-00010 · April 16 and 23, 2025
Amazon asked the city for a special use permit to run a drone delivery center inside its existing warehouse at 4001 East 149th Street, a 220,000-square-foot same-day building in the I-49 Industrial Center. The City Plan Commission heard case CD-SUP-2025-00010 on April 16, 2025 and recommended approval; the Board of Zoning Adjustment approved it April 23, with conditions tied to compliance with federal drone rules, according to the Kansas City Star's report. Staff wrote that the project was "a new type of operation for an existing use" and expected little effect on noise, lighting or traffic. Engineering drawings showed four takeoff and landing pads. The planning process was the only local decision, and it was a land-use one. The dates and the Board of Zoning Adjustment action come from the Kansas City Star, as reported by DroneXL, and from UMKC's This Week at City Hall listing; DroneXL could not open the city's own case file at clerk.kcmo.gov.
Kansas City, Kansas follows three weeks laterUnified Government City Planning Commission · May 12, 2025
The Unified Government's City Planning Commission took up Amazon's plan for a launch pad at the MKC6 fulfillment center at 6925 Riverview Avenue, south of I-70 and the Turner Diagonal, at its second-Monday meeting on May 12, 2025 and approved it, KCTV5 reported, with no public opposition and one commissioner asking, "Can we be first?" Amazon's submission described an 83-pound drone flying 55 to 60 mph at 200 to 400 feet, a 7.5-mile radius, a 12-foot drop, and a noise figure of 68.4 decibels at the loudest point from an Arizona study. It asked the FAA for up to 250 flights a day. This account rests on KCTV5 and the Community Voice; DroneXL could not read the Unified Government's agenda portal, and neither report says whether the Board of Commissioners took a further vote.
Amazon's public promisesAugust 13, 2025 · Burke Technical Education Center, KCK
Amazon put the MK30 on display at 6565 State Avenue and told KSHB it would launch from both sites before the 2025 holidays with 12 drones at each, more than 30 jobs at each, packages under 5 pounds dropped from 10 to 12 feet, and a $4.99 fee or free on orders over $50. Chris Preston, Prime Air's director of commercial operations, called it "a big deal." The holiday launch did not happen; the Kansas site flew in February and the Missouri site has not.
Shawnee hears about it from its own staffShawnee City Council · November 10, 2025
The clearest record of how a neighboring town learns the news is in Shawnee, Kansas, where Deputy City Manager Colin Duffy told the council that drones from both hubs would cover about two-thirds of the city, about 21 deliveries an hour split between KCK and northeast Johnson County, sunrise to sunset, in light rain and medium wind. The city's fire and police emergency managers had spent two months with Amazon. There was no vote; the session was informational. "Even if it's light rain or medium winds, you might still expect to see these," Duffy said. The council's reaction, from Councilmember Kurt Knappen: "It's amazing where we're headed with technology."
The FAA's draft review and the only comment windowJanuary 26 to February 24, 2026
The FAA posted Amazon's draft environmental assessment for both hubs on its website on January 26, 2026 and took comments for 30 days. The study area covered Johnson, Wyandotte and Leavenworth counties in Kansas and Jackson, Platte and Cass counties in Missouri. The FAA's final document says comments were received and are in its Appendix F; it does not give a count in the pages DroneXL could read. This was the only public step in the federal process, and the first flight came before it closed.
First deliveries, during the comment windowFebruary 9, 2026
Amazon began deliveries from the Riverview Avenue hub on Monday, February 9, 2026, 15 days before the FAA's comment window closed and 81 days before its decision was signed: packages up to 5 pounds, within 7.5 miles, daylight hours, $4.99 for Prime members and $9.99 for others, in 60 minutes or less. Amazon told KCTV5 the service would not be fully operational until spring. Captain Kevin Fithian of the KCK police real-time crime center said Amazon was sharing live drone positions so its aircraft and the police drones could stay apart: "Their drones have to get out of our drones way." The launch came five days after an MK30 struck an apartment building in Richardson, Texas.
The FAA's signed decisionFONSI/ROD · May 1, 2026
The FAA's decision, signed May 1, 2026 by the manager of its AFS-750 office, allows up to 1,000 flights a day from each hub, seven days a week, 6 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., with up to 100 of those in the 6 to 7 a.m. and 10 to 10:30 p.m. periods; en route at about 180 to 377 feet; a 7.5-mile range and a 174-square-mile area per hub; a 78-pound aircraft with an 83.2-pound maximum takeoff weight that drops the package from about 13 feet. Its noise finding: DNL 65 dB out to about 150 feet from each pad, DNL 50 dB out to about 1,050 feet, en route noise up to DNL 46.0 dB anywhere in a circle, and no residential property line above DNL 48.1 dB. It names 19 municipalities and 285 potential Section 4(f) parks and historic properties inside the two areas. The 60-day window to challenge it in a federal appeals court closed June 30, 2026, under 49 U.S.C. 46110.
Read the full text: FAA Final Environmental Assessment and FONSI/ROD, Amazon Prime Air, Kansas City, MO and Kansas City, KS (PDF).
What's still open for the city
Disclosure, at both pads
Each city can require any operator flying delivery drones from a site inside it to put its hours, altitude band, aircraft count, daily flights, a local complaint contact and an incident plan on the record, and to notify the city in writing within 24 hours of any aircraft coming down. Northglenn, Colorado's ordinance is the model, and it is a land-use condition, not a flight rule. The Missouri pad is the easier case: it has not launched, and its special use permit already carries conditions. Northglenn staff memo (PDF)
The Missouri site, before the first flight
Kansas City, Missouri approved CD-SUP-2025-00010 with conditions the Kansas City Star described as tied to federal compliance; DroneXL could not open the case file, so whether anything about notice, a complaint line or reporting is in it is unknown. The pad is not flying. The council can ask staff what the conditions say, whether a launch requires any further sign-off, and whether a disclosure condition can be added before the first flight rather than after. Ask to see the case file. DroneXL on the April 2025 permits
Seventeen towns with no pad and no vote
The FAA's file names Overland Park, Leawood, Shawnee, Lenexa, Mission, Merriam, Roeland Park, Westwood, Lake Quivira, Bonner Springs, Edwardsville, Parkville, Riverside, Grandview, Belton, Raymore and Lee's Summit as inside an operating area. None hosts a hub, so none holds a permit. What they hold is a joint ask: one shared complaint record, one request to both Kansas Cities for a disclosure condition, and one letter to each legislature. Shawnee's staff have already spent months with Amazon; that work can be shared. Johnson County Post on the Shawnee briefing
Gone
The comment window closed February 24, 2026, two weeks after the first flight, and the court window closed June 30. The 1,000-a-day cap, the hours and the altitude band are settled unless Amazon asks to change them or the FAA reopens the file. Any new hub in the metro goes through the FAA's national document with no comment period at all. FAA decision, May 1, 2026 (PDF)
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 and noise inquiries at faa.gov/noise/inquiries. Neither changes a decision; both create a record. Residents of the 17 other towns: your own council and your own state districts differ from the ones above; the ask is the same.
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. Kansas City is the first survey where some respondents are already under the drones and others are waiting for a second hub; the town question keeps the two apart. Modeled on the independent Westborough, MA survey that reached 853 responses and three state legislators in six weeks.
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.
Kansas City
Every US town
Kansas City flew first and filed later, and the only local votes were on a parking lot
I have watched this play out in Richardson, Papillion, Westborough and North Myrtle Beach, and Kansas City adds a wrinkle the others did not have: a state line through the middle of the service area. The first flight from Riverview Avenue came 15 days before the FAA's own comment window closed and 81 days before the decision was signed, and that is now the pattern, not the exception. Both cities did what cities do, which is check a warehouse pad against a zoning map, and both said yes in the spring of 2025, a year before anyone at the FAA signed anything. Nobody did anything wrong. The process was built so that the only local step was a land-use permit.
My read of the file: the number that matters is not the DNL 48.1 at a property line, it is 1,000 a day from each pad on paper, 2,000 for the metro, with a 78-pound aircraft that has no parachute crossing Shawnee, Grandview and Overland Park at 180 to 377 feet. Amazon asked Kansas City, Kansas for 250 flights a day in 2025 and the FAA gave it four times that. The 68.4 decibels Amazon quoted the KCK planning commission came from an Arizona study of a different neighborhood. Kansas City has no public complaint count, no incident on the DroneXL tracker, and no disclosure condition that anyone has put on the record at either pad. That is not a clean record. It is an empty one, eight months in.
None of this is an argument against drone delivery. A prescription across the Turner Diagonal in 30 minutes earns its noise. A phone charger over a cul-de-sac in Grandview, a thousand times a day on paper, has to earn it from the people under it, and Zipline's P2, lighter, tethered, with a parachute, shows the same job can be done with less over the roof. What is left is small and real, and the Missouri pad is the place to do it: a disclosure condition before 149th Street flies, a complaint line that answers on both sides of the line, and a letter to Jefferson City and Topeka asking for the rules neither has written. The Kansas hub flew before the paperwork. The Missouri one does not have to.
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 (Kansas City, MO), 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: Kansas City 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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