What is flying today?
Prime Air flies out of Amazon warehouses in 10 cities across seven states — Phoenix, Tampa, Kansas City, Omaha, Baton Rouge, Detroit, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and Waco — and each of those sites serves an area of about 175 square miles (450 square kilometres), with parcels arriving in half an hour to an hour. That is the rung the ladder starts on: sites that exist, a stated coverage area and a stated delivery time.[1]
On August 19 Amazon named five new metropolitan areas — Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, Syracuse and Boise — and said the service should reach nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026, a sixfold expansion. The two figures do not share a denominator. The 10 counts the places Amazon flies out of; the 500 counts the places it flies over, and a single site with a 175-square-mile (450-square-kilometre) footprint can cover many municipalities at once. The announcement says nothing about how many new sites stand behind the larger number.[1]
Nobody counts the same thing
Walmart, flying with Wing and Zipline, has passed 1 million drone deliveries from 66 stores in four states and is aiming at more than 270 stores by 2027. Zipline reports more than 2.7 million deliveries worldwide and has signed a partnership with Uber that targets 1 million deliveries a day by the end of 2029. DoorDash holds an FAA Part 135 certificate from July and an aircraft still on the drawing board. Amazon counts settlements, Walmart counts stores and deliveries, Zipline counts deliveries, DoorDash counts a certificate; the four cannot be laid on one scale.[1]
The unit Amazon chose grows faster than its fleet, because a Prime Air site added to a metropolitan area sweeps in every suburb inside its radius. That mechanism is what makes a sixfold jump within one year look reachable while the warehouse count stays quiet. Amazon may well plan far more sites than the 10 it flies from today and have simply left them out of the announcement; silence about a site count leaves that reading open.[1]
What the aircraft can actually carry
The MK30, designed in-house, handles nearly all items of 5 pounds (2.3 kg) or less that fit inside a large shoebox, and strong wind, heavy rain, snow or extreme cold keeps it on the ground. Coverage measured in settlements says nothing about how much of a household's order that envelope can carry, or how many days a year the weather lets it fly.[1]
Yesterday this column counted, in Pennsylvania's own figures, how many announced data centre projects had cleared a first-phase permit; there the distance between announced and delivered capacity was at least measured in one unit. Here that distance has moved inside the unit. The test is dated and cheap: if Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, Syracuse and Boise show up as operating Prime Air sites by 31 December 2026, the promise will have turned into launched sites; if the year closes with a settlement count and no site list, the 500 remains a coverage claim.[1], [2]