Fifteen US states and Harris County, Texas, have asked a federal appeals court to throw out the Federal Aviation Administration's environmental review of commercial drone deliveries, escalating a regulatory fight that could slow the rollout of hub-based operations by Amazon's Prime Air and other operators.

The coalition filed its petition on September 28, 2026, in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The states argue the FAA failed to adequately examine the effects of expanding drone delivery operations before signing a finding of "no significant impact" on July 28, 2026.

That finding covers a programmatic assessment of delivery hubs that companies could establish at existing businesses, including parking lots and rooftops. The FAA says it intends to use the assessment when evaluating individual operators' applications, while reserving the right to require additional environmental analysis for particular projects or operations. The locations of future hubs and service areas will only become known as companies apply for approvals — a sequencing structure the states contend prevents meaningful scrutiny of where flights will actually occur.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the assessment lacked meaningful information about the places where those operations would take place and did not sufficiently address potential safety risks and other environmental impacts.

The petitioners are New York, California, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin. Harris County — home to Houston and more than 4.7 million residents — is also a petitioner, though the state of Texas itself is not part of the challenge.

The legal filing lands as friction between drone operators and residents intensifies in at least one active service area. In Richardson, Texas, a Dallas suburb, homeowners say Amazon Prime Air flights have made normal outdoor life impossible.

"It's constant — it's like a beehive up there right over our house," resident Scott Bratcher told NBC's TODAY show.

Stephanie Puri told The New York Times she counted 52 drone passes over her home in a single day and could hear the aircraft indoors even with the television on. Homeowner Nikki Anderson said the repeated flights had driven her family inside to escape the noise.

Amazon disputes the characterization. The company told the outlets that fewer than 1% of Prime Air inquiries this year concerned noise, and described the sound as brief and comparable to a low window fan or a passing car.

The gap between those positions defines the commercial and regulatory stakes. For operators, the FAA's finding of no significant impact is the procedural foundation for scaling delivery networks without site-by-site environmental review for each hub — the difference between rapid expansion at existing businesses and a slower, costlier approval process for every parking lot and rooftop location. A court ruling vacating the finding would likely force the agency to restart its analysis with far more granular data on flight paths, frequencies, noise footprints and populated areas, delaying authorization timelines for operators that have built business cases around dense urban and suburban coverage.

For states and municipalities, the case tests whether programmatic reviews that defer location-specific analysis until operators apply satisfy federal environmental obligations — or whether that structure leaves communities such as Richardson without any effective review point before flights begin over their homes.

The FAA's own framing leaves room for case-by-case scrutiny. The agency acknowledges that additional environmental analysis may still be required for particular projects or operations, and hub locations remain unknown until applications arrive. The states' argument, in essence, is that this arrangement makes the current finding too thin to serve as the baseline for approvals covering thousands of potential launch points.

The Second Circuit has not indicated a timeline for considering the petition. A decision against the FAA would reset the environmental groundwork for US commercial drone deliveries, while an affirmance would leave the programmatic review intact and operators free to proceed through the application process as hubs are proposed.