Amazon wants to fly delivery drones out of North Portland. A pre-application conference request filed with the city’s permitting department shows the company proposing a Prime Air Drone Delivery Center at its sub-same-day fulfillment center at 1001 N. Schmeer Road, with service planned for early 2027. This is Portland, Oregon, not Maine: the address is the former Portland Meadows racetrack beside Interstate 5, in the Delta Park industrial strip a few minutes north of downtown.
It would be the first Prime Air hub serving customers in Oregon, or anywhere in the Pacific Northwest. Amazon has flown in the state for years, at the Pendleton UAS Range in Eastern Oregon, where its test program has an FAA environmental assessment of its own. Portland appears in none of Amazon’s published expansion plans, and, as of the Drone Delivery Tracker’s September 16 sweep, in none of the 40 Amazon delivery hubs DroneXL has pulled from FAA filings. A city permit surfaced it, the same way a Tacoma Walmart permit surfaced Wing’s first Washington hub four days ago.
Oregon’s attorney general is one of 17 who told the FAA in January that its national drone delivery review was “a paper exercise.” The FAA signed it anyway in July. If the FAA decides the Portland site fits inside that national review, no Portland-specific federal environmental document and no federal comment period follows. Portland’s own land-use process is separate, and it is the only public step the city controls.
Amazon’s Portland Request Covers a Building, Not the Flights
A pre-application conference is a meeting with city planners that Portland requires before certain land-use applications. It approves nothing. Amazon’s request describes a Prime Air Drone Delivery Center added to the existing warehouse at 1001 N. Schmeer Road, with drone delivery from the site planned for early 2027…