The FAA published a draft environmental assessment on Friday that would let Zipline run up to 220,000 drone deliveries a day across five Texas metropolitan areas: Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Amarillo and El Paso. Public comments close on October 11.
The document sets a ceiling of 660,000 individual flight legs a day over 17,584 square miles (45,542 square kilometers), 24 hours a day, seven days a week, holidays included. The Dallas-Fort Worth authorization the agency signed last December allowed 75 sites at 400 deliveries a day each, or 30,000 in total. This filing is more than seven times that, in one document.
Three of the five metros have never appeared in a Zipline launch announcement DroneXL has covered. San Antonio, Amarillo and El Paso show up here for the first time, in a federal table, with numbers attached.
The Draft Covers Five Metros And 220,000 Deliveries A Day
Zipline is asking the FAA to amend its Part 135 operations specifications to cover the five metro areas. The ceiling across all of them is 220 Chargers, 4,400 Dropbox pickup kiosks and 220,000 deliveries a day, every day of the year, with no seasonal limit and no holiday pause…