Amazon says drones will reach nearly 500 US towns this year — that is a sixfold jump in place names, not in launch sites

On 19 August 2026 Amazon said Prime Air would serve "nearly 500 cities and towns" in the United States by the end of the year. Today the service flies from 11 locations in 10 metro areas across seven states — Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska and Texas. New sites were named in the Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland, Syracuse and Boise metro areas. The two numbers are not measured in the same unit. A Prime Air site works a radius of about 7.5 miles, which is roughly 175 square miles of ground, and an American metropolitan area of that size routinely contains dozens of separately incorporated cities, towns and villages. Adding a handful of sites therefore adds hundreds of place names. "We've already delivered hundreds of thousands of packages to customers by drone this year," said David Carbon, vice president of Prime Air — a figure that, spread over a year and 11 sites, describes a working service rather than a mass one. The aircraft doing the flying is the MK30, in customer service since November 2024. It lifts off on six motors, transitions to wing-borne cruise at up to 73 mph, flies up to 400 feet above ground and returns to base within a 7.5-mile radius. Its maximum take-off weight is 83.2 lb, of which the customer's parcel may be no more than 5 lb — a ceiling Amazon says still covers about 60% of what its customers buy most often. The constraint that decides whether the target is met is not the drone. Prime Air holds an FAA Part 135 air-carrier certificate and flies beyond visual line of sight, but each new site needs its own regulatory clearance and environmental review before a single package leaves the ground. Amazon has published a target measured in towns; what is worth watching between now and December is the number measured in sites.