On September 8, 2026, the drone-industry outlet DroneXL launched a public Drone Delivery Tracker built to answer a question the companies themselves have not: where, exactly, do Amazon Prime Air, Wing and Zipline actually fly delivery drones in the United States today?

The tracker's method is deliberately unglamorous. Rather than repeating company press releases about city counts and expansion targets, DroneXL built its map from the Federal Aviation Administration's own environmental paperwork — the Findings of No Significant Impact and Records of Decision that the FAA must sign off on under the National Environmental Policy Act before a drone-delivery hub can legally operate. That paper trail, hosted on the FAA's NEPA and drone operations page, includes decisions such as the Detroit hub and the Kansas City hub. Because each hub requires its own site-specific federal clearance, the record of signed decisions functions as a hard, verifiable ledger of where operations are actually authorized — as opposed to where a company says it plans to be.

Cross-referencing those records, the tracker plots 40 Amazon Prime Air hubs across the country, each shown with a 7.5-mile operating radius. It maps 368 Wing delivery nests concentrated in five authorized metro areas: Dallas-Fort Worth, Central Florida, Houston, Atlanta and Charlotte. And it locates four of Zipline's FAA-authorized sites — Dallas-Fort Worth, Pea Ridge, Salt Lake City and Kannapolis — with a fifth, a 75-site Seattle proposal, still pending FAA review rather than authorized.

Alongside the footprint data, the tracker logs eight documented incidents involving the three operators. Six are attributed to Amazon: crashes at its Pendleton, Oregon test site, crane strikes at the Tolleson, Arizona hub, a cable strike in Waco, Texas, an incident involving a building in Richardson, Texas, and an incident involving a residential pool in Richmond, Texas. The remaining two are Zipline parachute deployments, both in Texas — a reference to the safety mechanism built into Zipline's aircraft, which is designed to bring the drone down under canopy if something goes wrong in flight.

The Hardware Behind the Numbers

The tracker also catalogs the aircraft doing the flying, which helps explain why the three operators' footprints look so different. Amazon's MK30 weighs 83.2 pounds and carries payloads up to 5 pounds. Zipline's P2 is lighter at 63 pounds but carries more, up to 8 pounds, and is the aircraft fitted with the parachute system referenced in the two logged Texas incidents. Wing's 7000W-B is the smallest of the three at 14 pounds, carrying roughly 2.5 pounds per delivery — a profile that lines up with Wing's much larger nest count spread across a tighter set of metro areas, favoring a dense network of small, frequent hops over Amazon's fewer, larger hubs.

Q&A: Why Build This Now?

Why does the gap between claimed and verified footprint matter right now?
Because Amazon has said it plans to expand its delivery-drone reach sixfold this year, reaching nearly 500 US cities and towns by the end of 2026, according to trade coverage of the company's own targets. That is a dramatic claim, and as reporting on the expansion has noted, every one of those sites still requires its own individual FAA clearance — the same hub-by-hub Records of Decision process the tracker is built around. A count of cities named in a press release is not the same thing as a count of sites that have cleared federal environmental review.

Did DroneXL just publish the map and move on?
No. According to DroneXL's own account of the launch, the outlet sent Amazon a set of questions about its real operating footprint on September 8, the same day the tracker went live, with a response due September 15. As of publication, Amazon has not answered.

Is this the first time someone has tried to independently verify drone-delivery claims?
The tracker is notable less for the individual data points — FAA decisions are public records — than for aggregating them into one continuously checkable map, and for pairing that footprint data with an incident log rather than treating safety record and operating scale as separate questions.

Why It Matters

Drone delivery has spent years being covered largely on the terms its operators set: press releases announcing new markets, executives citing city counts, expansion roadmaps measured in multiples. The FAA's Records of Decision process exists specifically because environmental review has to happen before a hub can fly, which makes it one of the few checkpoints in this industry that is not self-reported. A tracker built on that record — rather than on marketing copy — gives regulators, competitors, local officials and the public a way to check operator claims against a federal paper trail instead of taking a sixfold-expansion figure at face value.

The incident log matters for the same reason. Six Amazon incidents and two Zipline parachute deployments are not, on their own, a verdict on either company's safety record — deployments are literally what the parachute system is designed to do when it works. But folding incident history into the same public tool that tracks operating footprint means the safety conversation and the scale conversation can no longer be had separately. As Amazon pursues an expansion that, by its own account, will roughly sextuple its reach this year, a public, FAA-sourced check on where it is actually authorized to fly — and what has already gone wrong where it already flies — is a meaningfully different kind of scrutiny than has existed for this industry before. Amazon's silence in the face of direct questions about that footprint, with a self-imposed deadline of September 15 now on the record, will itself become part of the story the tracker is built to tell.

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