Amazon wants to launch MK30 delivery drones from the parking lot of its warehouse at 64 Otis Street in Westborough, Massachusetts, to homes within 7.5 miles (12 kilometers), an area of about 174 square miles (451 square kilometers), and it hopes to be flying by the end of the year. The circle takes in Westborough, Shrewsbury, Grafton, most of Southborough and parts of Marlborough and Worcester. Amazon presented the plan to the Westborough Select Board on August 18, opened a Planning Board hearing on September 15 that has been continued to October 6, and is holding a public meet-and-greet at the DoubleTree by Hilton on Computer Drive this Wednesday, September 23, from 5 to 7 p.m.
The towns under the flight paths did not all hear about it from Amazon. Shrewsbury’s town manager told his Select Board on August 12 that the town had been alerted by regional law enforcement. Southborough, which sits almost entirely inside the service area on Amazon’s own map, had not been contacted by the company as of September 16, according to the town’s Select Board chair and administrator.
It is the first Prime Air hub DroneXL has seen proposed in Massachusetts, and the second New England hub to surface in a week, after Connecticut opened a 15-day comment window on Amazon’s North Haven site. Massachusetts is one of the 17 states whose attorneys general told the FAA in January that its national environmental review of drone delivery was a paper exercise. The FAA signed it anyway on July 28, and there is no FAA document of any kind posted for Westborough…