Amazon’s Prime Air drone delivery service will soon expand to its largest market yet.
First reported by Crain’s Chicago Business, the logistics titan is planning to serve customers out of two fulfillment centers in the south Chicago suburbs of Markham and Matteson. Each site will have 12 to 20 drones. The company hopes to launch near the Windy City by late spring or early summer.
Per Crain’s, residents of nearby Tinley Park, Midlothian, Homewood, Flossmoor, Dolton, Blue Island, Chicago Heights, and Country Club Hills will also fall within the drones’ 7.5-mile service radius.
Prime Air’s flagship MK30 weighs 83 pounds and can carry items weighing up to 5 pounds, which Amazon said covers 3 in 5 of the approximately 25 million items stored in the Markham and Matteson facilities. Josh Brundage, Prime Air’s senior manager of commercial operations, said these robot-enabled facilities are the largest type of building Amazon uses. The drones operate out of dedicated Prime Air Drone Delivery Centers (PADCCs) that are located on the property.
“In most cases, we take over an area of their parking lot,” Brundage told FLYING. “We fence it in, we put up all our infrastructure that we need to operate, and then we’re usually within a couple hundred yards of the building.”
Locals who select the drone delivery option are sent an aerial satellite image of their residence, allowing them to pick from predetermined delivery locations such as their driveway or backyard. Brundage said the company creates “basically a world map” whenever it launches in a new market, using sourced and publicly available data.
“Then we go ahead and select optimum delivery points that we think would be the safest, most convenient, most likely to succeed,” Brundage said.
The drones cruise at about 73 mph and 200 to 300 feet agl. Six vertical propellers provide lift, with staggered tandem wings supporting cruise flight. They can fly in light precipitation and winds faster than 20 mph.
“Our drones are not your off-the-shelf, hobbyist-type drone,” Brundage said. “They’re the size of a good dining room table, so they’re very robust. And we are a Part 135, FAA-certified carrier, so our drones are essentially held to the same rigor as a commercially certified aircraft.”
Onboard perception systems help the drone navigate obstacles in the air and verify that the delivery area is clear. Parcels are stored in a shoebox-sized fuselage and dropped to the ground from about 13 feet up.
Chicago-area deliveries would be restricted mainly to daytime hours, beginning 30 minutes before sunrise and ceasing 30 minutes after sunset. In other markets, Amazon Prime members pay $4.99 per delivery, and nonmembers pay $9.99, with some locations offering free shipping for large orders. Brundage said the company will announce pricing for the Chicago area when the service launches.
Brundage said deliveries in Chicago will be completed in under two hours, but the company will steadily lower that figure. In other markets, it offers drone delivery in one hour or less.
Amazon expects the expansion will add about 100 jobs at the two fulfillment centers without eating into their existing workforce of about 6,000.
The planned Chicago-area service is part of an ongoing expansion for Prime Air, which last week debuted in parts of Kansas City, Kansas. It is also active in San Antonio and Waco, Texas, as well as the suburbs of Detroit, Dallas-Fort Worth, Tampa, Florida, and Tolleson, Arizona, in the Phoenix West Valley area.
Mixed Feelings
Per Crain’s, Amazon on Wednesday hosted a virtual community meeting to inform local residents about the upcoming service. An in-person meeting is planned for March 2 at the Tinley Park Convention Center. Brundage described it as a “welcome to the neighborhood” meeting, where members of the public will be able to see the MK30 on a static display and pose questions to Prime Air subject matter experts.
Derrick Champion, the city administrator for Markham, told Crain’s that he and residents he has spoken to are excited about the service, with little concern about the impact to their daily lives.
“The feedback from the communities that we are in has been overwhelmingly positive,” Brundage said. “I think there’s definitely a ‘cool’ factor when we first show up in town.”
Other residents, speaking to CBS News Chicago, expressed concern. One called the drones “problematic,” and another worried they would disrupt “a lot of the peace that we enjoy here.”
Citing the deputy city manager of Shawnee, Kansas, the Johnson County Post in November reported Prime Air drones have logged about 4,000 flight hours or 16,000 flights. With the service still in its early days, Amazon is working out a few kinks.
Earlier this month, for example, an MK30 collided with an apartment building in Richardson, Texas, where Prime Air launched less than two months prior. Video taken by a local resident appears to show pieces of debris tumbling to the ground, where they begin to smoke.
That incident came a few months after another Texas incident in Waco, when a Prime Air drone clipped an internet cable. Amazon said the drone initiated what it calls a safe contingent landing (SCL), switching to vertical flight mode and scanning for a clear landing area after one of its propellers was damaged by the cable. An SCL—initiated when the aircraft encounters unexpected weather conditions, obstacles, air traffic, or system failures—was also used in October during a delivery in Goodyear, Arizona.
“If we can’t do this safely, we’re not going to do it,” Brundage said. “When there are events, we have very well documented procedures to ensure that all those parties are safe and accounted for, that the drone is then taken care of and handled correctly.”
Since they began flying in Arizona in late 2024, another MK30 made what Amazon described as a “precautionary controlled landing.” In July, one drone’s propellers blew a package several feet into a customer’s pool in Avoldale.
Perhaps the most notable incident took place in October, when two MK30s crashed into the same crane boom just minutes apart. The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) has cited the event as evidence that drone detect and avoid (DAA) systems are not mature enough for expanded use under the FAA’s proposed Part 108 rule.
“Amazon’s operations are still in an early commercial phase, where incident rates are expected to be higher,” David Ison, an aviation planner for the Washington State Department of Transportation, wrote on LinkedIn this week.
Ison—who oversees emerging aviation technologies and airport land use in the state—calculated, based on publicly reported incidents, that Prime Air drones have an incident rate of one per 1,140 flight hours. That analysis assumes they have logged 8,000 flight hours, double what was reported in November.
“I believe delivery drones have enormous potential,” Ison wrote. “But I also believe in being honest about the data—and right now, the data should give us pause.”
Still, Brundage said that whenever incidents have occurred, Prime Air has been “very quickly able to identify what the concern was and then remedy it.”
In 2025, for example, the company voluntarily paused operations just a few months after launching in Arizona, after discovering that specks of dust interfered with the MK30’s altitude sensors. Brundage said the hiatus “allowed us to focus on some things and come back with a much better product as a result.”
“We’re able to react incredibly nimbly when we do recognize a problem, whether it’s the result of an event or whether it’s something we just recognize internally,” he said. “From my boss’ boss down to the frontline person in the PADCC working with packages and batteries, any one of us is immediately able to pull a cord to stop and address what’s going on.”
