Zipline is asking the Federal Aviation Administration to approve one of the biggest drone-delivery footprints ever attempted in the United States: 220,000 daily P2 flights across five Texas metros, spread over 17,584 square miles of airspace, operating 24 hours a day with no seasonal shutdowns. The scope is spelled out in a draft environmental assessment released by the FAA on Zipline's behalf in mid-September, first reported by DroneXL.
The Texas Blueprint
The draft EA covers Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Amarillo and El Paso. Houston and San Antonio would each get 65 Chargers, 1,300 Dropboxes and 65,000 deliveries a day. Austin, Amarillo and El Paso would each get 30 Chargers, 600 Dropboxes and 30,000 daily deliveries. Houston is already flying commercial routes as of April, and Austin was announced in June; the other three metros are staged for later launches once approvals land.
To put the ask in perspective, Zipline's global network currently ships around 8 to 9 million total deliveries. The Texas footprint alone would eclipse that as a running rate within months if fully utilised, and it comes on top of the operator's earlier Uber Eats deal for 1 million daily flights in Dallas–Fort Worth by 2029.
An Unusually Honest Wildlife Section
The environmental filing is notable for admitting where the data is thin. It concedes that "without baseline data, an effective predictive model for drone and bird interactions is not possible," and cites only two recorded bird-drone contacts in American history. The FAA's Derek Hufty is the responsible official, and public comments are due by 11 October.
Why 220,000 A Day Matters
The Texas ask sets a bar for Part 108, the FAA's still-unfinalised rule for beyond-visual-line-of-sight drone delivery. Zipline is chasing a $20 billion valuation on a $1 billion new round largely on the promise that Part 108 will unlock this kind of density, and every state that clears an EA at scale forces the FAA to keep moving. Rivals Amazon Prime Air and Alphabet's Wing have yet to file anything at this cadence, and Zipline is still the only major operator that has answered DroneXL's safety questions on the record.
Reporting based on coverage from DroneXL and the FAA's Zipline Texas draft environmental assessment.