The Pathology Institute rising at 6624 Fly Road already has FAA clearance for a 50 mile drone corridor to Utica. On July 9, the landing zone itself went back to the Planning Board.
The medical drones serving Central New York are getting a bigger front porch in East Syracuse. On July 9, the DeWitt Planning Board took up amended site plans for the Upstate Pathology Institute, the 108,928 square foot laboratory rising at 6624 Fly Road, and the headline change is a larger landing pad for the delivery fleet that Upstate University Hospital CEO Dr. Robert Corona expects to shuttle lab specimens across the region when the building opens in spring 2027.
This story came from public records we pulled ourselves
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The application, filed as PB-869-26, is short on drama and heavy on detail. Per the board’s published agenda, the amendment covers “Increasing drone pad size, modifying stormwater and landscaping, and adding walkway access to emergency exits.” It modifies the project’s original approval, PB-667-23, granted when the site plan first cleared the board in 2023. The parcel, tax map number 029.-02-27.3, sits in DeWitt’s Hi Tech zoning district, and the Onondaga County Planning Board classified the change as exempt from county review. The item reached the July 9 meeting on the board’s final track, the last stop before an amended plan takes effect.
What the new drawings show
The 400 page agenda packet published for the meeting includes construction drawings revised as recently as June 23, 2026, issued as Bulletin 15 by lead architect SLAM of Glastonbury, Connecticut. The drone facility is not an afterthought bolted to a parking lot. The floor plans show a dedicated wing at ground level with a drone control center, a drone work room, courier offices, a courier vestibule, and a room labeled simply “drone pad,” room number 102.13.
Outside, the plans detail a fenced drone yard with dimension strings running 113 feet 4 inches along its long edge and 46 feet 6 inches across, enclosed by a 6 foot fence with gates, gravel and concrete surfaces, and electrical pedestals with plugging boxes for charging equipment. Exterior lighting and security cameras mount to the corner posts of the fence. The drone center’s exterior elevation shows a 12 foot garage door. On the roof, the drawings call for an INVOLI air traffic sensor mounted to a pole on the roof screen, with a Tempest weather sensor below it, the hardware that lets a drone operation watch the sky around it in real time.
The engineering is just as specific. A photometric plan puts five 61 watt LED flood lights at 4000K on the pad, plus three building mounted wall packs, producing an average of 3.5 footcandles on the landing area with a maximum of 16.4. Every fixture runs on photocell sensors, and the flood lights must be shielded and aimed so they do not project light onto neighboring property, onto a roadway, or straight up into the flight path.
The stormwater package, prepared for the site under state permit GP-0-25-001, maps the drone landing pad into drainage area DR-12, a 2.434 acre zone that sheet drains to a bioretention area at the site’s edge. The full proposed drainage design covers 14.074 acres, limits earth disturbance to 11.5 acres, and buries a detention system of 686 MC-3500 chambers under the site. The engineers’ bottom line: no increase in peak flow leaving the property, even with the bigger pad.
The building behind the pad
The drone yard serves a project that is one of the largest health care construction jobs in the eastern suburbs. Upstate Medical University broke ground on the Pathology Institute on July 7, 2025, on a site next to Upstate Bone and Joint, home of Upstate Orthopedics. The three story building will consolidate a pathology operation that today runs across 55,000 square feet on five separate floors in three different buildings on Upstate’s downtown Syracuse campus. That scattered operation processed more than 3.2 million specimens in fiscal year 2024.
“There’s about 20 different labs involved in a pathology department, and when the labs are together, it allows tighter collaboration, it allows operations to be more efficient,” Corona told WSYR-TV at the groundbreaking. He also framed consolidation as a safety measure: “You’re not going to lose specimens, you’re not going to damage specimens, and it’s also nice to have technicians, PhDs, residents collaborating because multiple minds make for a better diagnosis.”
WRVO reported that Corona expects the single site to cut test result wait times, with all the lab’s components no longer spread around Upstate’s various facilities. Upstate Medical University President Dr. Mantosh Dewan said at the groundbreaking that the building “will transform the practice of pathology and help us meet the increasing demand for our services with greater efficiency and set a standard for laboratory science.”
The building is privately developed. Upstate Pathology Lab Ownership, LLC, led by Dr. A. John Merola and John Murphy, owns the project and counts North Medical Center in Liverpool and Northeast Medical Center in Fayetteville among its holdings. LeChase Construction Services is construction manager, with SLAM as lead architect assisted by Dwyer Architectural of Syracuse, ME Engineering of Rochester, and Colliers. Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon, State Assemblymembers Chris Ryan and Pamela Hunter, and U.S. Rep. John Mannion attended the July 2025 groundbreaking.
No patients will ever check in at 6624 Fly Road. Specimens arrive by courier van and by drone, get analyzed on site, and results go straight back to doctors. Upstate says more than half of the lab’s services already go to clients outside Onondaga County, which is why the location matters: the site sits near the interchange of the Thruway and the future Route 81, a logistics position for a lab that lives on turnaround time.
Why the pad is the story
A bigger landing zone only matters because Upstate has spent three years building one of the most advanced hospital drone programs in the country, and East Syracuse is where it is all supposed to converge.
The program, called Air Upstate, started hauling medications in 2023 between the Upstate Outpatient Pharmacy at 5000 West Seneca Turnpike and Upstate Community Hospital across the street, more than 900 deliveries in that first stretch. In November 2023, Upstate opened a home delivery pilot, making prescriptions available by drone to roughly 150 households within a quarter mile of the pharmacy using Flytrex aircraft. The flights are operated with Causey Aviation Unmanned, a Liberty, North Carolina firm founded in 2018 that CNY Central reported was just the fifth operator in the United States to hold an FAA Part 135 certificate for this kind of health care delivery.
“There’s specialty bags that we have and what we’ll do is we’ll put the specimens in there, if required we have an ice pack. We put them in these bags and place into the drone,” Steve Roberts, Upstate’s director of IMT Autonomous Machines, told WSYR-TV. “It’s supported by the FAA. So everything we do is approved in coordination with the FAA.”
The regulatory milestones came fast. On May 22, 2024, Air Upstate flew its first beyond visual line of sight flight, an 18.6 mile round trip from Griffiss International Airport in Rome to the state Homeland Security Training Center in Oriskany that took 18 minutes and 20 seconds, using an Eiger drone built by RigiTech. In May 2025, the FAA granted Upstate a waiver permitting flights beyond visual line of sight, over people, and over moving vehicles.
Then came the big one. In February 2026, the FAA granted Upstate an expanded Certificate of Waiver covering a corridor that connects the Community Campus, the downtown campus, the Pathology Institute, and the Upstate Cancer Center in Verona, reaching all the way to Utica, a span of roughly 50 miles from downtown Syracuse. The waiver, announced April 2 and valid through June 2029, also authorizes night flights. Upstate says the pharmacy operation alone has logged more than 7,200 drone deliveries since 2023, and drones already carry lab specimens between the Upstate Transplant Center and the pathology lab at the Upstate Cancer Center downtown, fast enough that results can come back while the patient is still in the room.
“This is a major achievement for our team and for the future of medical drone operations,” Corona said in the April announcement. “Approvals of this scale are very uncommon, and the FAA granting the full scope of what we requested positions Upstate in a unique and privileged position to continue advancing innovative solutions that improve patient care.”
Mark Zeman, Upstate’s chief information officer, put the East Syracuse building at the center of that map: “By connecting multiple campuses and clinical sites, we can explore new ways to move critical medical items quickly and safely across our system.” Upstate has said outright that the waiver is key to supporting specimen transport between its locations and the Pathology Institute, and that the building includes a drone bay for recharging and maintaining the fleet.
What it means for East Syracuse
The jobs math is concrete. The institute will house 178 of the pathology department’s current 228 employees, while 50 stay downtown to run hospital based lab work. Upstate projects 25 new hires in the building’s first year, then 10 more in each of the following two years, 45 new positions in all, bringing the Fly Road workforce to 223 by year three. The space the department vacates downtown gets repurposed for pharmacy, cancer treatment, interventional radiology, a STAT lab, and surgical programs.
For the neighborhood, the practical meaning is a steady, low altitude stream of small aircraft coming and going from a fenced yard off Fly Road, watched by an air traffic sensor on the roof and run from a control room inside the building. The board packet’s fine grain treatment of lighting, fencing, cameras, and stormwater is the town’s mechanism for making sure a first of its kind facility behaves like any other neighbor.
The drone pad shared the July 9 agenda with more familiar East Syracuse fare: a relocated monument sign for the Taco Bell at 5840 Bridge Street, a facade and drive thru upgrade at the Burger King at 6300 Thompson Road, and a 68 acre subdivision on East Seneca Turnpike. The board, chaired by Nathan Brown with vice chair Douglas Arena, meets at DeWitt Town Hall, itself addressed at 5400 Butternut Drive, East Syracuse. Final minutes and resolutions from the July 9 session had not been posted to the town’s public portal as of July 16; CNY Signal will report the recorded outcome when the town publishes it.
The sequence from here is fixed on the calendar. The FAA corridor clearance runs through June 2029. The building it feeds is scheduled to open in spring 2027, and by that opening day, the enlarged pad reviewed on July 9 is where Central New York’s lab results will start touching down.
Sources & Verification
Town of DeWitt Planning Board meeting agenda, July 9, 2026, project PB-869-26 (Amended Upstate Pathology Lab, 6624 Fly Rd), published via the town’s CivicClerk portal, dewittny.portal.civicclerk.com. Town of DeWitt Planning Board agenda packet, July 9, 2026, 400 pages, including SLAM construction drawings (Bulletin 15, June 23, 2026), photometric plan, and Stormwater Management Report for the site. Upstate Medical University news release, “Upstate receives FAA approval for expanded drone operations across Central New York,” April 2, 2026, upstate.edu. Upstate Medical University news release, “Upstate breaks ground on new state-of-the-art Upstate Pathology Institute,” July 7, 2025, upstate.edu. WSYR-TV/LocalSYR, “Upstate Pathology Institute ground-breaking,” Ashley Cafaro, July 7, 2025, localsyr.com. WRVO Public Media, “Upstate to build new pathology lab,” Ellen Abbott, July 8, 2025, wrvo.org. Upstate Medical University news release, “Upstate’s Air Upstate drone team conducts its first beyond visual line of sight flight,” June 26, 2024, upstate.edu. Upstate Medical University news release, “Upstate Outpatient Pharmacy takes health care to the sky with home drone delivery service,” November 14, 2023, upstate.edu. CNY Central, “Upstate Medical University demonstrates pilot project that uses drones to deliver meds,” May 15, 2023, cnycentral.com.
Reporter: Mike Rivera. Edited by: the CNY Signal news team. Published: 2026-07-16.
