Drones over Tracy: what Amazon said, what the record shows, what you can do
A plain-language guide for residents before the City of Tracy's October 22 town hall with Amazon Prime Air. Amazon said drones would fly within a month of August 29. They have not. The sky belongs to the FAA. The doorstep is yours.
The short version
Tracy, 93,000 people in San Joaquin County, is the only California city Amazon has confirmed for Prime Air drone delivery. Amazon told the Los Angeles Times in late August that MK30 drones would fly from its East Grant Line Road warehouse within a month. As of October 11 none has, Amazon has given no date, and the FAA has published no document for the site.
The city has scheduled a town hall with Prime Air for October 22, the first public forum on a program that, under the FAA's July 28 national finding, may never get a comment period. This guide is for Tracy, for Banta, Mountain House and the River Islands side of Lathrop under the same circle, and for any town waiting on Amazon.
Every block is marked Every US town or Tracy.
If you remember three things
Amazon named Tracy. Amazon's own website hasn't. The launch date came from a newspaper interview; the company's newsroom and locations pages listed no California site as of September 27, and its expansion page still does not as of October 11.
The city can't touch the flight. It can decide what a launch pad is under its zoning code, and write ground rules on consent, hours and complaints.
Your consent is required before a drone delivers to your yard. It is not required for one to fly over.
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 Tracy or San Joaquin County site in Wing's announced rollouts and no California filing on the FAA's public environmental index as of Oct 11, 2026. Its nearest announced region is the Bay Area, with no city named.
- 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
Announced, not flyingAmazon told the Los Angeles Times on Aug 29, 2026 that MK30 deliveries from its East Grant Line Road warehouse would start within a month, then gave The Stockton Record no date on Sept 24. No FAA environmental document for Tracy on the agency's index and no California entry on Amazon's own expansion page as of Oct 11, 2026. The city hosts a town hall with Prime Air on Oct 22. Amazon's only earlier California site, Lockeford, closed in April 2024.
- 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 namedHeadquartered in South San Francisco, about 55 miles west; no California site or announcement on DroneXL's tracker as of Oct 11, 2026. 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
Tracy is the opposite of Belvedere: here the base is in town. Amazon has a warehouse on East Grant Line Road with its own parking lot and loading yards, and that is where the MK30s would take off, land and be loaded. Tracy Press reported the aircraft would cruise at about 400 feet and release the package from about 15 feet above the drop point; Amazon's Erik Robertson told the Los Angeles Times 250 to 400 feet. Every Tracy address is inside the 7.5-mile circle, so the question for a Tracy resident is not whether a drone could reach your street but how often one would cross it on the way to someone else's.
The ring is drawn around the center of Tracy; Amazon's warehouse at 1500 E. Grant Line Road is 1.6 miles north-east of it, so the real circle sits slightly that way. The Amazon and Lockeford points are the positions in DroneXL's tracker records, approximate. Town points are well-known town-center coordinates labeled with straight-line distance from Tracy's center. Inside Amazon's 7.5-mile circle: all of Tracy, Banta, the River Islands side of Lathrop, and the eastern edge of Mountain House. Lathrop's center, Manteca, Stockton and Livermore are outside it. Amazon has not published a Tracy map or ZIP code list.
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.
CityTracy
- 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
StateCalifornia
- Whether cities may regulate drones at all: California has no statute taking that power away. Los Angeles wrote its own drone rules in 2015 and Belvedere voted on delivery ground rules in September 2026; Florida's legislature did the opposite and stripped its cities of the power
- Privacy: Civil Code 1708.8 makes entering "the airspace above the land of another person" to capture an image an invasion of privacy, and the constructive version applies "regardless of whether there is a physical trespass"
- Aircraft: Public Utilities Code 21407 bars operating an aircraft "in a careless or reckless manner" that endangers life or property. There is no state rule on releasing a package from an aircraft; the federal hazard standard is the only one
- Could write: hub siting standards, resident notification, data retention, who pays for damage. None of that is on the books
- Has done: Attorney General Rob Bonta joined 14 other states on September 28, 2026 in asking a federal appeals court to set aside the FAA's national finding, and his release names Tracy. No bill on delivery hubs had been reported as of October 11, 2026
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
There is no Tracy drone ordinance and no public permit for the East Grant Line Road pad. What exists is one FAA document for a site that closed, one national finding, a set of Amazon statements to newspapers, a state lawsuit, and a town hall. Newest last.
Lockeford: the one California filingFAA Final EA and FONSI/ROD · November 10, 2022
Amazon's first US delivery site was a purpose-built pad at 12405 East Brandt Road in Lockeford, 35 miles up the road in the same county. The FAA wrote a full environmental assessment and posted it. It allowed "a maximum of approximately 200 delivery flights per operating day," daylight only and never after 10 p.m., with the MK27-2 flying 160 to 180 feet above ground en route and dropping the package from about 13 feet. The FAA's noise analysis put CNEL 65 dB within about 100 feet of the pad and CNEL 45 dB out to about 1,150 feet. Amazon closed the site in April 2024 without saying why. The 2022 document is still the only California entry on the FAA's drone environmental index.
The FAA's national findingJuly 28, 2026
The FAA signed one programmatic environmental assessment for drone package delivery across the country and a finding to go with it. A hub at the 1,150-deliveries-a-day threshold must sit at least 600 feet from noise-sensitive land use; hubs are barred from designated critical habitat and must keep 1,000 feet from bald eagle nests and half a mile from historic properties whose setting matters. A site that fits is checked inside the agency: no draft, no comment period, no local hearing. Fifteen states, California among them, asked the Second Circuit on September 28 to set it aside. No stay was requested, so approvals continue.
Amazon's 500-city announcementAugust 19, 2026
Amazon's newsroom said Prime Air plans to reach "nearly 500 cities and towns" by the end of 2026, listed eleven live sites in ten metros and five metros coming next (Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland, Atlanta, Boise), and set the prices every site gets: free for Prime members on orders of $50 or more, $2.99 below that, $4.99 for everyone else. California appears nowhere on the page, and as of October 11 it still does not.
The interview and the car showAugust 29, 2026
Erik Robertson, Prime Air's regional operations manager for the West, told the Los Angeles Times that Tracy would start within a month, with MK30s flying 250 to 400 feet, up to 7.5 miles from the building, with up to 5 pounds aboard. "Every flight that we take starts with safety," he said. The same Saturday morning Amazon put an MK30 on display at a downtown Tracy car show. Amazon told ABC10 it was working with the City of Tracy, the FAA and the EPA, including on wildlife; ABC10 asked the city for comment and had no reply by publication. Amazon has not published the drone site's street address. Tracy Press and ABC10 place it on Grant Line Road, and ABC10 has reported Amazon's SCK6 fulfillment center, a five-story robotic sorting building, at 1500 E. Grant Line Road; whether the pad is on that lot or an adjacent Amazon parcel is not on the record DroneXL read.
The details Amazon gave the local pressTracy Press, Stocktonia, ABC10 · September 2026
The MK30 would cruise at about 400 feet and release the box from roughly 15 feet above the drop point, Tracy Press reported. Amazon said the cameras are for navigation and obstacle detection, that the drones do not track individuals, and that no person watches a live feed. Robertson told ABC10 the sound is "very much similar" to a delivery truck and told Stocktonia, "We've been working on this for 13 years." The measured figures in Amazon's FAA filings elsewhere include 92.1 dBA SEL at 25 feet during the delivery hover (Baton Rouge) and about 74 decibels for an overflight at 50 feet (Texas). Tracy has no filing of its own, and under the national finding Amazon owes none.
The Stockton Record asks for a dateSeptember 24, 2026
Asked when flights would begin, Amazon's statement to the Record restated the prices and the 5-pound, 7.5-mile terms, added a 70% year-over-year rise in items delivered in under a day, and said, "We're genuinely excited to bring Prime Air back to California." It gave no date and no timeline. The same day Amazon launched Cleveland, a metro that had been on its August 19 list, with 21 drones.
California sues the FAA, and names TracySeptember 28, 2026 · New York et al. v. FAA, Second Circuit
Attorney General Rob Bonta joined New York and 13 other states in a petition to set aside the national finding, which he said "falls far short of properly analyzing the environmental impacts." His release says Amazon flew in Lockeford in 2022 and "now seeks to expand those operations to additional cities like Tracy, California." A petition for review is a notice, not an argument; the briefs come after the FAA files the record. If the court vacates the finding, new sites go back to per-site reviews with a comment period. Nothing in the filing stops Tracy in the meantime.
What the city's own record showsCity Council agendas and the airport page · as of October 11, 2026
The City Council's September 15 and October 6 agendas carry no item on Amazon, drones or a launch pad. The Planning Commission packets posted on the city site run through June 10, 2026 and have none either; agendas since May 14 sit in a PrimeGov portal DroneXL could not open, so whether a permit or site-plan item for 1500 E. Grant Line Road exists there is unchecked. The one thing the council did touch is warehouses: on September 15 it held a public hearing to introduce Article 35.5, Warehouses, into the zoning code (Chapter 10.08), with the Cordes Ranch, Industrial Areas, Northeast Industrial and Tracy Hills specific plans amended to match. The city's airport page states that, for aircraft, "Tracy does not have any noise restrictions, curfews or ordinances in place" and that the FAA has exclusive authority over the airspace.
The town hallOctober 22, 2026 · 4 to 7 p.m. · Tracy Community Center, 950 East Street
The City of Tracy is hosting a Tracy Community Town Hall: Amazon Drone Delivery, where residents can ask questions of Prime Air representatives and give feedback. The city's own listing calls it "Amazon's proposed Prime Air drone delivery program," which is the city's word, not Amazon's. The listing names no city official, no Amazon speaker, and no way to submit questions in advance. The council's next regular meetings are October 20 and November 3, 7 p.m., 333 Civic Center Plaza.
Read the full text: City of Tracy: Tracy Community Town Hall, Amazon Drone Delivery, October 22.
What's still open for the city
The town hall: get it in writing
A booth answers a fixed list and packs up. Ask the city to post Amazon's answers after October 22: hours, number of aircraft, flights a day, which streets get overflown and how often, sound at 50, 100 and 250 feet, what the cameras keep, who pays for damage, who gets the call when one comes down. Northglenn, Colorado requires an applicant to disclose exactly that before approval; nothing stops Tracy asking for the same voluntarily. Northglenn staff memo (PDF)
The pad is a land-use question
A fenced launch area on a warehouse lot is a use of land, and Tracy is writing warehouse rules right now: Article 35.5 was introduced September 15. Ask the council, in writing, whether a drone launch and landing area is a change of use under Chapter 10.08, whether Amazon has applied for anything at 1500 E. Grant Line Road, and whether Article 35.5 reaches an existing building. Amazon told a Massachusetts audience that about 80% of its hubs were approved administratively; the counter at 333 Civic Center Plaza is where Tracy finds out which kind it is. Council agendas and minutes
Consent, hours and a complaint line, as general rules
Tracy has no rule on delivery to private property, no delivery hours and no named complaint department. Belvedere's draft Chapter 8.34 is the model written to survive a lawsuit: resident consent before a drop, hours copied from the general noise ordinance so they bind the truck too, no landing in public areas, and a complaint route in the code. Tracy's airport page says the city has no aircraft noise restrictions or curfews, so delivery hours would have to be written for every delivery vehicle at once, truck and drone alike. What Belvedere wrote
Sacramento is already in court
California's attorney general is suing over the finding any Tracy approval would rest on, and named Tracy in his release. What the state has not done is write a law: there is no California statute on hub siting, resident notification, data retention or liability for a package that lands in a pool. Assemblymember Rhodesia Ransom and Senator Jerry McNerney both represent Tracy, and the lawsuit gives them a reason to ask. The 15-state lawsuit
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. The city's airport office, (209) 831-6215, takes aircraft noise complaints and says it will not release the names of people who file them.
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.
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.
Tracy
Every US town
Lockeford got a filing. Tracy gets a booth
I have covered both of Amazon's California sites, and the difference between them is the whole story. Lockeford in 2022 got a federal document anyone could read: 200 flights a day, daylight only, 160 feet up, a noise contour drawn on a map. It closed in 16 months and Amazon never said why. Tracy in 2026 gets a drone on a plaza on a Saturday morning, a price list, a month that came and went, and a town hall the city organized itself. Same county, same company, and the paperwork went backwards.
My read is that the slip is not sinister. Amazon says sites through whoever is holding a microphone and lets its website decide which promises count, and Tracy's 'within a month' was a conversation, not a commitment. What I do think matters is that nothing public shows what the FAA has approved for Tracy, or whether it has approved anything, and the council has not said it knows more. The town hall is the one chance to turn Amazon's reassurances into answers on paper, and the council has a land-use question of its own to ask: whether a launch pad on a warehouse lot is a change of use under the warehouse rules it is writing this fall.
None of this is an argument against drone delivery. Zipline's P2 lowers an 8-pound box on a tether under a parachute-equipped aircraft, and that is the standard I measure everyone against; the MK30 is 83 pounds with no parachute and drops from 13 feet, and I would not want it over my roof a thousand times a day without a document saying what that costs the people underneath. Tracy should ask for the filing. Lockeford had one.
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 (Tracy, CA), 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: Tracy 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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