Two Amazon delivery drones crash into crane in commercial area of Tolleson, AZ

https://www.abc15.com/news/region-west-valley/tolleson/two-amazon-delivery-drones-crash-into-crane-in-commercial-area-of-tolleson

by bookofjoe • 10 months ago

254 259 10 months ago

abc15.com

https://www.theverge.com/news/790636/amazon-prime-mk30-drone...

neom4• 10 months ago

Little after 10am, pure speculation but wonder if the angle of the sun overwhelmed the dynamic range of the image sensor over a particularly inopportune area of the frame. Guessing no LiDAR on drones like this.

oofbey7• 10 months ago

Fine speculation. But they should be smart enough not to fly into their own blind spots e.g. the sun. They would tack back and forth I bet. They have a lot of tricks like this.

I bet it has to be a confluence of factors. I hope Amazon reports openly what went wrong. FAA should demand it. Will be a very interesting report if we ever get to read it.

testplzignore• 10 months ago

They should learn to shield their sensors with their hand and squint. Humans perfected this millions of years ago :)

JCM96• 10 months ago

Given the severity of this it’s likely the NTSB will get involved, and Amazon’s ability to operate would likely be suspended pending a review of their operation.

jampa• 10 months ago

I wonder if they do a routine map of the delivery area (with a Lidar plane) so they have a high-resolution scan of the city for better pathing. But they didn't expect something like a crane that could be assembled so high and fast to be in the way.

ooterness• 10 months ago

Who could have predicted that drones flying outside during the day might have to deal with direct sunlight?

LeifCarrotson• 10 months ago

No one could have known. And in Phoenix, no less, where it's famously overcast most of the time? Next you're going to tell me that a component overheated or clocked down for thermal throttling - preposterous, Phoenix is great for passive cooling! /s

Zigurd2• 10 months ago

Based on the descriptions I've read so far, it sounds like the drones didn't give enough space around the crane boom, which it seems like they avoided. That's not to make an excuse. But it's a different defect than failing to detect the crane boom.

neom4• 10 months ago

My theory could in theory hold if a specular highlight off the boom arm created some type of confusion I suppose, however, I posted it as just thinking aloud, I don't have much faith in my own theory at large.

(my degree is in digital imaging technology so, fun thinking problems for me :)

ajcp3• 10 months ago

I'm currently in Phoenix and it's a little after 10am and the sun is almost directly overhead at this time of day. Would they need sensors pointing directly overhead in-flight?

neom4• 10 months ago

If that's the case my little theory makes no sense. Thanks!

bri3d3• 10 months ago

mmWave is the usual solution for this; I know that Amazon were at least testing using mmWave but I'm not sure if it made it to their production drones.

oofbey7• 10 months ago

Would that act like radar in mmWave? Send out pulses and see where they come back and time difference to estimate range?

ge962• 10 months ago

The crash site is intriguing, want to see what tech they're using

prein• 10 months ago

I didn't even know they were using delivery drones yet. Why did they both crash, were they working in tandem carrying one payload or something?

deadbabe• 10 months ago

Been using them for years, I got a package by drone the other day.

Insanity• 10 months ago

Yeah but it’s in a pretty limited zone IIRC. Just some states and areas have it, and it’s definitely not yet a common practice.

catlifeonmars• 10 months ago

I was thinking maybe they used the same route planning system, so their routes were identical.

dylan6045• 10 months ago

If an amazon delivery drone uses the same route as a truck, what's the point of the drone? As a crow flies would be the point to be as direct as possible.

Edit: Nevermind. I'm not awake yet. this logic does not compute. please ignore

ceejayoz• 10 months ago

I'd laugh pretty hard if the second one was an automatic redelivery attempt.

"Something went wrong with the drone. Send another!"

dylan6045• 10 months ago

The local Walmart nearest me has also started using drone delivery using Zipline drones. It's not a store I frequent, but recently drove past and the landing/launching site has a very unique look to it. At first thought, I thought it was a small carnival type of set up, but realized the rides looked really weird. There's large towers that remind me of the sculptures in Singapore near the ship on stilts building. I just perused Zipline's website hoping to find some imagery, but the site is clearly focused on promotional aspects with happy people receiving packages. zzzzzz.

https://www.zipline.com/

olex2• 10 months ago

Zipline drones fly quite high, and instead of descending and landing to deliver their payload, they hover at altitude and lower a "delivery pod" down on a wire. The pod also has maneuvering capabilities, but all of its thrusters are fully enclosed, and it's designed to not cause any damage even it if collides with something during descent or ascent. Overall, a very clever design that should be safer, create no noise on ground level, and be able to deliver into much smaller and more confined landing zones.

nuggetzs• 10 months ago

Oh man that Amazon paycheck gonna be huge.

zenmac• 10 months ago

Well thanks to tort reform likely not:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(film)

tamimio3• 10 months ago

There were plenty of proposals back in 2021 about having highways in the sky for drone delivery operations, at least in Canada, so such incidents are avoided, as relying on technology alone isn't enough and the risk plans are only to mitigate rather than eliminate the risks.

That being said, drone delivery will not really become a thing unless the endurance issue is resolved, like a new breakthrough battery technology that gives you at least 4 hours flight time (hybrid drones are noisy), as for any drone to have a proper impact, it should have three items checked: endurance, payload, and range. The last two are pretty much resolved by having modular payloads and flying over the internet, the first one is still pending.

ge962• 10 months ago

I thought this is a thing for autonomous vehicles carrying people at least I remembering seeing something with Honda

tamimio3• 10 months ago

It is for both, manned and unmanned, providing also a map of the network coverage in these “highways” and other active drones as well. I remember seeing a proof of concept platform that provided such functionality in Singapore, I am not sure if it became a reality later though.

SketchySeaBeast• 10 months ago

Why is 4 hours a limit?

tamimio3• 10 months ago

It's not a limit, just from my personal exposure in the overall drone delivery, 3-4hrs would provide enough time with margin for any safe delivery, beyond that is definitely better but probably is too hard to achieve. Keep in mind the actual flight time will be less than that, accounting for payload weight and environment like wind and temperature. In cold weather like Canada, the batteries will consume some of their energy to heat themselves before taking off.

jon-wood• 10 months ago

I'm not sure they need endurance, if they're cheap enough companies can just buy a fleet n times larger than the number they need in the air at any given moment and have the others charging at base. Or more likely buy some extra batteries and have someone employed to swap them out when they're getting low.

oofbey7• 10 months ago

Why do you think there is any problem with battery endurance? I’m quite sure Amazon has run the numbers on battery life for individual flights and for the lifetime of battery packs many many times. It’s just economics. And has basically nothing to do with safety. Unless a battery fails suddenly and spectacularly, which is rare and probably isn’t what caused it to crash into a crane.

pixel_popping• 10 months ago

Alternative working link: https://www.theverge.com/news/790636/amazon-prime-mk30-drone...

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dang• 10 months ago

Thanks, I've added that link to the toptext.

mothballed2• 10 months ago

"Crane" is a highly optimistic word for what looks like a telescoping boom lift.

Edit: per below was actually a crane

mikeyouse• 10 months ago

Nah - at 0:35 into the video on the news page, you can see the crane they actually crashed into. There are boom lifts around, but they hit a proper crane. Pulled this link from the video but no clue how direct linking works with some of these weird sites;

https://cf.cdn.uplynk.com/ause1/slices/14f/5c3d34b8b29a45469...

mothballed2• 10 months ago

Thanks! I took a quick look at the image in the article, and wrongly assumed they pictured the thing that it hit.

stronglikedan• 10 months ago

It's a local news station who's targeting the lowest common denominator, so it's an acceptable usage in this case.

EDIT: NM, it was a crane after all.

jfengel• 10 months ago

Today I learned:

Boom lifts, available in various models such as mini scissor lifts for sale, spider lifts, and tracked scissor lifts, offer excellent mobility, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness for many tasks. Cranes, on the other hand, are essential for heavy lifting and large-scale projects.

I also learned that "spider lifts" look like something a bad guy drives in a sci-fi movie.

mrguyorama3• 10 months ago

Boom and bucket lifts all conveniently say "Do not use as a crane"

It's so convenient to ignore too!

bilekas• 10 months ago

From their brief on the drones themselves: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-drone...

Our approval includes the ability to fly Beyond Visual Line of Sight, using our sophisticated on-board detect and avoid system. This is an historic, first-of-its-kind approval for a new drone system and a new operating location following a rigorous FAA evaluation of the safety of our systems and processes.

It's true the FAA would have had to have signed off on these so that will be interesting.

trollbridge3• 10 months ago

The NTSB should be investigating, then.

fakedang2• 10 months ago

Maybe the FAA let Amazon self-approve them. Business as usual.

mattas• 10 months ago

Interesting to me that _two_ managed to hit a boom lift.

antonvs• 10 months ago

Begun, the drone wars have

jollyllama3• 10 months ago

Terrifying. Imagine being a roofer or other worker when a delivery drone knocks your ass off the n-th floor surface that you're working on. It wouldn't take much to get somebody killed in such a precarious situation.

potato3732842• 10 months ago

Any modern roofer or other worker that could fall far is wearing a safety harness (with some exceptions for flat roofs that have railing set up).

jollyllama3• 10 months ago

laughs in independent subcontractor

infecto• 10 months ago

I am going to wager that 90% of resi roofers are not using harnesses unless the pitch of the roof is extreme. It’s all about the couch cushion.

SAI_Peregrinus• 10 months ago

I've never seen residential house roofers wearing a safety harness, even on 2-story jobs. There's generally nowhere to clip the harness to on such buildings, so it wouldn't help anyway.

trollbridge3• 10 months ago

You don’t wear a harness when framing and roofing 1 and 2 storey buildings. What would you even attach yourself to?

“I will not be hit by an 80 pound flying missile” is a reasonable expectation for construction workers

Polizeiposaune• 10 months ago

Years ago I heard a comment from someone in the trades that (in his opinion) harnesses are a net negative on typical single-family-houses - the presence of the rigging (particularly when there are multiple workers on the roof) creates trip hazards that make falls and injuries more likely.

Whether or not it's true, if significant numbers of crews believe this they won't be wearing harnesses on low roofs.

Timshel• 10 months ago

And the not much here is an 80 pounds drone (Mk30).

jollyllama3• 10 months ago

Thank you, I stand corrected!

imglorp• 10 months ago

Impact aside, really, any contact to a soft meat bag by an 80lb machine surrounded by whirling propellers at high rpm will result in an unpleasant outcome.

nkrisc• 10 months ago

An 80lb mass moving at any appreciable speed hitting you is going to suck regardless of what it is.

At a leisurely 3 mi/h, wolfram alpha gives this amusing comparison: about 0.36 times the momentum of an American football player moving at a speed of 1 m/s.

ajmurmann3• 10 months ago

With the information we have about the actual incident, it seems you'd only be at risk of that happening if you were as thin as a cable.

alfalfasprout• 10 months ago

If it runs into the cable and tumbles down on you, it's a very real risk.

14• 10 months ago

Literally everything around us has the same dangers. Like getting into a car and doing 70mph in the opposite direction of some stranger doing the same speed possibly drunk or high. This tech will be completely standard and everywhere eventually and no one will pay attention to it. Benefits will outweigh any risks and just like cars people won’t be going around fearing them.

bravetraveler2• 10 months ago

Shotguns are now standard issue, Foreman finally gets to work

acka2• 10 months ago

Exemplary of the new norm of engineering practice in the US: "if all you have is a shotgun, everything looks like a target." In this context, casualties at ground level be damned.

JCM96• 10 months ago

Flying in uncontrolled airspace in VMC is a “see and avoid” environment, meaning this looks like a pretty bad screw up by Amazon.

The fact that two different drones crashed into the same object raises even more serious questions on the quality of Amazon’s tech and their ability to safely monitor it.

arbll• 10 months ago

well at least it's consistent

qafy• 10 months ago

this is actually hilarious because now they can't call it a fluke or an act of god

fusslo• 10 months ago

second time was because dev rejected bug report without QA replicating it

djtriptych5• 10 months ago

Two drones doesn't really mean anything if they were following a similar flight plan to make a delivery at the same location right?

BobaFloutist2• 10 months ago

It means it wasn't a fluke or a bug specific to one drone, but something wrong in the overall software approach.

JCM96• 10 months ago

It means Amazon’s approach to its “see and avoid” responsibility is fundamentally flawed in some way vs this being a one-off fluke with a broken sensor or other anomaly.

Atheros4• 10 months ago

If a drone crashes, obviously no other drones should fly there until a human determines what went wrong and presses the 'resume' button. The fact that that system did not exist is a systemic problem.

krferriter• 10 months ago

At the same time? If there's a crash there should be an automatic system which geofences off that area making it impossible for other drones to go near there, while the situation is assessed.

nomel2• 10 months ago

see and avoid

Wires are somewhere between hard and not possible to see, visually. The "fix" for this might be "that kinda looks like it might be construction over there, go around".

nakedrobot22• 10 months ago

Even very small and cheap lidar can see cables just fine.

I work with 3d scanning lidar every day and I know this as a fact.

They have no excuse there.

OJFord2• 10 months ago

It's unclear if anyone was injured during the incident.

'It's unclear if' is a phrase that paints a brilliant picture of an organ's journalistic standing.

It means there's no information either way, what follows is pure speculation, probably false, but the author can put whatever idea they want in our heads, since they've prefaced that it 'may or may not be the case'.

It's unclear if the drones had malicious intent. It's unclear if the author was sober while writing and free of criminal record.

sejje• 10 months ago

I think they're just trying to get ahead of the question everyone wants answered, and they're saying they don't know yet.

slashdave3• 10 months ago

How about "there are no reports of injuries"?

energy123• 10 months ago

Virtually all journalism is this bad though.

sigmoid102• 10 months ago

It's unclear if this commenter has read more than just the headlines. Maybe they try to argue for the sake of controversy and outrage culture. Maybe they just don't have a brain.

But seriously, the article text doesn't follow up with any speculation and highlights it is a developing story. According to the latest news on TV, someone actually was insured and is now at the hospital. The details are still unclear however. This is very based reporting for the world we currently live in and I would like to see more news stations follow this style instead of jumping to conclusions.

OJFord2• 10 months ago

The sentence I quoted is not in the headline.

browningstreet• 10 months ago

Per the video report, someone went to the hospital with difficulties breathing from fumes.

anigbrowl3• 10 months ago

Oh come on. This is just a stub article, saying two drones had crashed and police are investigating. It's clearly going to be a story of strong local and general interest, and they have limited information and a couple of photographs so the story is only a few sentences long for now.

Ranting about deeper meaning of the words in such a minimal bulletin is nonsensical.

amelius3• 10 months ago

By the way, I see very little discussion on the drones used in the UA-RU war, which should be quite interesting from a hacker's perspective. Technology is going very fast there.

Seriously, why is this downvoted?

Etheryte2• 10 months ago

Probably because this thread is only remotely related to that? There's been countless discussions on the topic, doesn't mean every thread has to be about that.

amelius3• 10 months ago

I mean on Hacker News in general.

slashdave3• 10 months ago

Amazon engineer this morning to colleague: "Hey! Maybe we should include some cranes in our training data."

blaufuchs• 10 months ago

As someone who has worked in AV perception this is unfortunately way too accurate lol, so much training set whack-a-mole

andrewl-hn2• 10 months ago

Like, they may have trained on power lines, catenaries above rail tracks, network cables, etc. but all of them are horizontal. And the software couldn't recognize vertical cables or cables at an angle.

barryrandall• 10 months ago

I'm not looking forward to _that_ CAPTCHA.

johntb86• 10 months ago

https://www.theverge.com/news/790636/amazon-prime-mk30-drone... gives more information, including that

* No one was injured directly, but someone was treated for smoke inhalation

* The drones "were flying back to back"

* They hit the cable of a crane (including a link to a video showing the crane). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_ZpY6qHcTk

cherioo• 10 months ago

The video also includes a video clip of package delivery, where drone would drop package to the ground, which worked. But then propeller blew the package right into the bush was lmao.

perihelions2• 10 months ago

Timestamp for the ADHD's,

https://youtu.be/E_ZpY6qHcTk?t=134

toast0• 10 months ago

Drop and tumble helps reduce impact energy, might manage to keep the goods intact.

mrguyorama3• 10 months ago

someone was treated for smoke inhalation

I'm mildly amused by this. It's an open air environment, did someone go stand over one of the crashed drones as it burst into flames and just, breathed deep? Glad they got treatment, plastic smoke is gross.

Also wow, the drones are massive, and apparently flying so low they will hit cranes putting things on single story buildings? That's so stupid.

Dear tech world: Please do not fly 80 pound projectiles just a few feet above my head at speed. Jeeze.

Zigurd2• 10 months ago

Gad. Zoox. I hope it's not the same team doing both.

wavemode• 10 months ago

Sir, a second drone has hit the crane on 96th Avenue.

hermannj314• 10 months ago

Household ownership of cars hit 50% by 1930 but there was no federal seatbelt mandate unitl 1968 or regulation of intoxicated driving until the 1980s.

Don't hold your breath waiting on the US government to give a shit about death and destruction of its people. Let the industry discover the tech and capitalist forces dictate safety, around 2060 we can start having serious conversations about drone safety.

To any of the aspiring Ralph Nader's of the drone industry out there, thank you for your service in advance.

oofbey7• 10 months ago

The facts don’t line up with your concerns. Amazon announced prime air in what 2013 IIRC. Now 12 years later they have FAA approval for a small number of test flights. Exactly so they can slowly discover problems like this and fix them. Every safety critical system in the world is iteratively refined based on real world learnings about mistakes - mistakes made after careful design to avoid them. It’s just really really hard.

Atheros4• 10 months ago

The discover and fix phase is over. In August 2025, the FAA announced Part 108 which codifies the rules. Up until now, companies have been operating under waivers. The comment period for Part 108 ends on October 6th. After that the rules may be changed slightly and then will be finalized.

https://www.regulations.gov/document/FAA-2025-1908-0023

You can select a few comments at random and quickly find a pattern: people are concerned that the drones everywhere except in the densest of areas do not have to see where they are going. If they hit a manned aircraft it's the manned aircraft's fault and the drone operator has no legal liability. Does that sound like something FAA employees wrote themselves? How much motivation will be there to "iteratively refine" when they have no legal liability and even admitting that a possible improvement exists would create legal liability?

crazygringo• 10 months ago

To be clear, they crashed into the vertical cable hanging down from the end of the crane. Not into the structure of the crane itself.

So it's not as bad as "they don't see cranes". But it absolutely raises the question of whether they can see cables, whether hanging from cranes or spanning telephone poles.

And honestly, cables are really hard to see in the air. That's literally why high-voltage power lines hang those big red-orange marker balls on them for pilots to see.

Genuinely curious what the solution here is. Hard-code some logic to identify cranes and always assume there's a cable dangling from the end? Never fly underneath anything? Implement some kind of specialized detection for thin cables if that's possible?

delfinom• 10 months ago

Amazon uses its lobbying powers to make it illegal to operate a crane without submitting an approval request to Amazon and paying a fee.

JCM96• 10 months ago

That doesn’t make it better. The cable hangs down from the crane and thus the rest of the structure is still nearby. The drone should be well clear of any obstructions precisely to avoid this sort of thing from happening with hard-to-see ancillary obstructions. Something went really wrong here with the tech.

jahsome2• 10 months ago

I'm genuinely curious what you'd define "nearby" and "well clear" as in concrete numbers.

For the sake of clarity: I am not arguing against your point, nor am I defending Amazon or the tech in any way shape or form.

JCM96• 10 months ago

For manned flight instrument approaches the FAA has very nuanced math that defines this which typically comes down to a few hundred feet. That translates pretty well here too. Amazon will need to explain to the FAA why they were flying anywhere near this crane let alone that close and below the hight of its support structure. There’s no real defense for doing something that stupid.

dheera3• 10 months ago

"The Tolleson Police Department is investigating"

The police is not qualified to investigate this. The only people that should be investigating is people who understand the code that the drones run.

Accidents will happen as long as we, as a society, agree and desire to have new tech. The investigations and bug fixes should be left to people who understand the tech.

JCM96• 10 months ago

The Feds will quickly arrive and take over. Aviation issues are Federal matters. The only role of local law enforcement and emergency response is to provide any first aid and then secure the scene for the Feds. Unless lives are at risk local police shouldn’t even touch anything. They put up yellow tape around the scene and keep it secure until the FAA and/or NTSB arrive.

atm3ga• 10 months ago

I'm not sure why this is getting down voted. Indeed, the FAA is the correct investigating body here as the local police department has no jurisdiction over aviation accidents. They should have immediately called in the FAA to investigate.

djtriptych5• 10 months ago

For commercial deliveries I would expect them to designate a landing zone guaranteed to be free of obstacles vertically. I'm guessing that installing radar detailed enough to see swinging cables is nearly impossible.

bri3d3• 10 months ago

mmWave radar is commonly used for detecting (horizontal) cables of similar thickness in a very common use of enterprise drones: power line inspection.

gpm• 10 months ago

Never fly underneath anything?

This honestly seems like the obvious approach. Even if we suppose you have perfect sensors flying underneath something still means something might be dropped on you... why risk it when you can just fly above it?

fallingmeat• 10 months ago

guy wires

idontwantthis• 10 months ago

The fact that these things are flying without rock solid “avoid this giant fucking thing” logic is asinine. The solution is don’t fly like a child playing a flight sim for the first time. Don’t zip around anything let alone construction cranes. Use common sense flight paths, decks and ceilings like everything else in the air.

m-schuetz• 10 months ago

Aerial Lidar is pretty good at detecting power line cables. Power line mapping is a major use case for it. However, that's in large part because at the scan distance, the beam already has quite a big diameter that is likely to hit the cable. Maybe a higher beam radius scanner could work out for close-distance cable detection

andrewl-hn2• 10 months ago

You may have a tall mas or an antenna and massive cables stretching at angles around it for support. The distance between the base of the mast and the base of supporting cables can be quite large, so even a simple logic like "stay 100m away from tall structures" can be insufficient.

It would be interesting to see what comes out of this investigation. Hopefully the injured person will be alright.

snickerbockers• 10 months ago

so even a simple logic like "stay 100m away from tall structures" can be insufficient.

Wasn't this problem solved thousands of years ago by euclid?

perihelions2• 10 months ago

"stay 100m away from tall structures"

But then how do you deliver to the upper floors of vertical buildings? That must be half the near-term market for these kinds of drones: people in dense, urban areas well-served by local droneports, who are looking for convenience above all else.

If you can't safely manage urban canyons—you can't manage. It'd be like selling self-driving cars that are only approved for private racetracks.

Here's a curious article I read the other day, that underscores the market factor:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45445406 ("What It Takes to Get Lunch Delivered to the 70th Floor in a Shenzhen Skyscraper (nytimes.com)" / "An informal network of last-mile runners close the gap between harried delivery drivers and hungry office workers in a Shenzhen skyscraper")

sva_• 10 months ago

I suppose recognizing that there is a cable even when we don't clearly see it, but we know it is there because we know the concept of a crane, is exactly the amodal completion of our brain's top-down perceptual inference that CNNs and whatever else those drones use are currently still lacking?

It shouldn't be necessary to hardcore such things if the goal is to build something resembling intelligence.

Of course for a drone it might be more feasible to do so though.

mr_toad2• 10 months ago

Neural nets in drones are only used for object recognition. Beyond that, drones (and other autonomous vehicles) aren’t doing any sort of reasoning or decision making, they follow rules, they’re just robots.

Although I hear that Tesla is thinking about using AI for decision making as well, which I find quite scary. Frankly I think it’s safer if vehicles don’t have concepts and intelligence, and just follow the rules.

dghlsakjg2• 10 months ago

The easy answer is to follow the same rule that you have for every other certificated aircraft and operator: Never fly under a structure. When humans do stupid shit like this, we take away their license.

I don't think they will take away their license, but AMZN should have to explain exactly how their drones managed to crash by flying themselves under an obstruction twice in a row.

jabroni_salad2• 10 months ago

I had a look at the video... if that's the crane that was in the incident then the drone was simply way too low for cruising. This isn't a tower crane with a flight restriction. They were moving equipment on the roof of a single story building.

codedokode2• 10 months ago

Cables are not hard to see with eyes.

tifik• 10 months ago

If this were true, aviation cable markers would not be a thing. Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Cavalese_cable_car_crash

numpad02• 10 months ago

Not at a distance. They're basically transparent even to our naked eyes at aircraft speed and distance scales. Let alone to digital cameras on flying robots. They'll probably have to either use really good active sensors(ITAR), or infer possible areas of danger from visually cable-end-like features.

numpad02• 10 months ago

Flying machines are never to be flown near cables. It's not like human pilots on a helicopter can detect and avoid the cables in the first place.

Long-distance transmission wires are sometimes inspected with helicopters, so I guess there are exceptions and protocols, but outside those, flying machines just aren't supposed to fly near cables except for explicit intent to catch them. Especially across or under. You may only approach in slow parallel motions and/or back off.

foobarbecue• 10 months ago

Yeah. Friend of mine was a news helicopter pilot and he had one of these systems that will cut a cable if you hit one by accident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6CsNqhAeeQ . Better than getting tangled, I guess.

WrongOnInternet• 10 months ago

Some crop dusters fly under telephone wires. Not that its a good idea, but some do.

Reason077• 10 months ago

”Long-distance transmission wires are sometimes inspected with helicopters”

In recent years they’ve been moving to drones for this job. Besides improving safety, drones allow increased inspection frequency and reduce costs.

scottbez1• 10 months ago

Here's an excellent video from Juan Browne around the challenges that wires present to aircraft operations [1]. Some of these are human factors for manned aircraft, like seeing a wire but then forgetting it's there, but one of his points is that it's simply safest to avoid flying below 1000ft AGL. That's not an option for drones today, and they presumably don't (yet) have the ability of humans to make inferences about the likelihood of cables near cranes and transmission line towers, making them particularly vulnerable.

[1] https://youtu.be/jjV_k4-DstQ

bri3d3• 10 months ago

Contra this assertion, drones are already frequently used around power lines, and as such, "finding hanging wires with a drone" is actually a very active field with fairly robust solutions. Not only are drones used for power line inspections (which are actually a somewhat easier variant of this problem, because the drone usually flies above or adjacent to the power lines in this scenario), but also for infrastructure inspections in direct adjacency to power lines. Power line detect-and-avoid is a headlining feature in one of DJI's newer enterprise platforms, the M400 (where it's based on LIDAR + mmWave Radar fusion).

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HFzRTRcjiqg

Also of note, this isn't the first double-failure issue for the MK30 - they had an issue last year at their test facility where their LIDAR malfunctioned in the same way on two drones in the same weather condition (misting), the drones believed they were at 0.0AGL and powered down in flight.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-16/amazon-re...

hinkley• 10 months ago

If you've ever driven through Seattle, as you come past Boeing Field on I5 there are red spheres on the power lines. These lines are on a hill across the highway from the airport, so there's no way any plane should be there except during an emergency landing due to power loss.

There are situations where aircraft and wires might come in close proximity. It's more accurate to say that be default we keep them way the hell away from each other, we make exceptions for special circumstances, and the exceptions tend to seem far more conservative than you would guess.

zoklet-enjoyer• 10 months ago

The solution is don't use delivery drones.

MaxikCZ• 10 months ago

Or cranes, right?

willmadden• 10 months ago

Correct, never fly underneath anything. Telephone poles? Trees? Assume there is a solid wall between the highest point on any two objects except within a few yards of the delivery spot.

thebigman433• 10 months ago

Drones that can dodge thin wires already exist, seems more like their perception algorithms/onboard vision hardware just arent up to the task

TheSoftwareGuy• 10 months ago

Hard-code some logic to identify cranes and always assume there's a cable dangling from the end.

Probably this one. Even if the drone sees the crane, there's no guarantee the cable won't move faster than the drone can react.

NooneAtAll3• 10 months ago

just... don't fly near active construction sites?

notatoad• 10 months ago

Genuinely curious what the solution here is.

no fly zones around construction sites?

spaceywilly• 10 months ago

The same problem actually already exists for non-drone planes, because they must be able to operate in poor visibility conditions. FAA issues notams for construction cranes if they pose a risk to nearby airports. One solution for drones would be to extend these notams to all cranes/other obstacles, and the drones must subscribe to these notams to operate in the airspace.

_grilled_cheese• 10 months ago

The company that I work for builds power line detectors for helicopters. They sense the electromagnetic fields generated by the lines and alert the pilot when the field strength exceeds a threshold. I would imagine this tech could be easily adapted for a drone.

Obviously that wouldn't work for a crane though...

heavyset_go3• 10 months ago

What happens when they aren't live or is that just a thing that doesn't happen? I know nothing about this topic.

squigz• 10 months ago

Why is "don't use autonomous drones for such things" not in that list?

0x0203• 10 months ago

Genuinely curious what the solution here is.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the drone shouldn't be flying anywhere near the crane. It's an active construction zone with a structure that moves and swings about in unpredictable ways with people and equipment moving about below. It shouldn't be delivering to the construction zone, and if it can't figure out how to stay out of the area, it doesn't belong in the sky.

There are some FAA requirements about cranes/temporary structures that would give pilots an appropriate NOTAM, but I don't know if all cranes require this. That said, I'd argue that if it isn't tall enough to require notifying the FAA, the drone is flying too low.

heavyset_go3• 10 months ago

A human is smart enough to know how cranes work and not to fly into/under them.

Maybe the solution is not to cheap out by trying to squeeze every possible cent out of package delivery and pay to keep humans in the loop.

gnulinux996• 10 months ago

raises the question of whether they can see cables

Should the drone's vision be comparable to a humans though? I feel like drones can either see or don't. If we go and try to tackle every corner case then nothing would come of it.

Also, do I - as a citizen - have to bear the externalities of Amazon's beta testing?

Genuinely curious what the solution here is

Walk to the store to get your package.

karunamurti• 10 months ago

Newer DJI drones can see cable down to 4mm using LIDAR and other methods. So yeah, Amazon has some catching up to do.

jamiek88• 10 months ago

Humans can’t really see cables when flying either. Drones need to be better.

cmurf2• 10 months ago

The video perspective might be misleading - but if the area surrounding the crane is as totally devoid from other obstacles as it appears? I wonder if the operator maybe didn't see the crane. How is that possible? No idea.

14 CFR 107 covers visual line of sight commercial UAS operations. My two cents is the operator should fly around or over and well clear of the crane. They're given a wide latitude. If within 400' of a structure, they can fly up to 400' above the highest point of that structure.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/part-107#p-107.51(b)

However, it seems probable these operations are BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight), which requires a waiver from the FAA. In which case most of 107.205 applies. I'm not sure if the operating agreement between Amazon and FAA is public information.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/part-107#p-107.205

Avoiding structures is pretty basic to operational control and responsibility. The fact they hit a seemingly obvious and avoidable structure, the ensuing loss of control being inevitable, which can (and in this case did) lead to on the ground injuries. Pretty remarkable operational failure in my opinion.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/part-107#p-107.23(a)

We’ve completed our own internal review of this incident and are confident that there wasn’t an issue with the drones or the technology that supports them, Terrence Clark, an Amazon spokesperson told CNN. Nonetheless, we’ve introduced additional processes like enhanced visual landscape inspections to better monitor for moving obstructions such as cranes.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/02/us/arizona-amazon-drones-cras...

nhma• 10 months ago

MmWave radar is commonly used for this purpose on both commercial and research UAVs, see e.g.: https://youtu.be/MORFX3CFygk

nakedrobot22• 10 months ago

Even very small and cheap lidar can see cables just fine.

I work with 3d scanning lidar every day and I know this as a fact.

They have no excuse there.

surfingdino• 10 months ago

The solution is to ban drone deliveries in built-up areas. We do not need them.

tantalor• 10 months ago

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

hulitu2• 10 months ago

Two Amazon delivery drones crash into crane in commercial area of Tolleson, AZ

What stupid crane flies into the path of delivery drones ? /s

rkomorn• 10 months ago

Commercial cranes, no less. They think they can compete with storks? Come on.

JKCalhoun• 10 months ago

Trying too hard to push a Jetson’s future on us that no one wants…

I feel like soon kids will order the cheapest thing on Amazon for the free drone it comes with.

UltraSane2• 10 months ago

Speak for yourself. I want drones to deliver stuff directly to me.

asdff• 10 months ago

Would be nice to have a sort of assistant drone. Pop open the sunroof "check how far up the road the traffic jam lasts".

AfterHIA• 10 months ago

If these things start hurting human workers I reserve the right to shoot them out of the sky.

bronco21016• 10 months ago

I spent some time searching the FAA NOTAM database... https://notams.aim.faa.gov/notamSearch/nsapp.html#/

I can't seem to locate any NOTAMs indicating the presence of the crane. There are NOTAMs for a crane to the NNW of KGRY (Phoenix Goodyear Airport) but Tolleson is to the east of that airport.

Is there a hole in how we're doing NOTAMs if we're expecting to have UAS operating at low altitude away from airports?

Also, what other obstacle data is available? I know the US Gov't aviation maps depict significant man made structures that stick up like towers, windmills, and larger buildings. However, when you look at the NY Heli map, it's clear that not every building in Manhattan is depicted. These are generally low enough that a helo would be operating in see-and-avoid (VFR).

Perhaps there is a new market available for this navigation data...

jabroni_salad2• 10 months ago

I looked at the NOTAM guidance and they are simply not required if the crane's boom is lowered at night. Actually this pattern appears in a lot of NOTAM requirements. The FAA is permissive by default and they seem to think you don't need to report things that are 'visible'.

Also, I dont think any of the equipment in this scene needs to be advertised to aircraft. None of this stuff is taller than a normal tree and we aren't filing NOTAMs for the presence of every public park, right?

https://i.imgur.com/fmxVXQz.png

lamontcg• 10 months ago

We could have universal health care, but I guess we're going to get delivery drones instead...

Animats2• 10 months ago

China is way ahead here. There's now a Ministry of the Low Altitude Economy.[1] There's a Low Altitude Flight Service System, which is air traffic control for drones and flying cars. There are licenses for drone operators, categories of license, (advanced licenses require a flight exam), etc.

China hasn't had much general aviation. There are very few private aircraft. So there was nothing like the US's FAA Flight Service Stations. Plans to change that started in 2018, as a new design, mostly automated. That system also handles drones above 120 meters, or is supposed to.

[1] https://businessaviation.aero/evtol-news-and-electric-aircra...

rektomatic• 10 months ago

China is way ahead on what exactly? Regulation?

Seattle3503• 10 months ago

An alternative way to look at this is they are (trying to) build the institutions that will pave the way for the success of the technology.

Animats2• 10 months ago

Fast food delivery in Shenzhen:

Shipping end: [1]

Receiving end: [2]

Delivery is to a box like an Amazon delivery box. Here's the current list of delivery locations and how to use the app to order.[3] Weight limit 2.3kg. Delivery time 15 minutes.

It's still rather limited. You can't have a delivery platform on your balcony yet. Mostly they deliver to parks and big open plazas.

The Shenzhen city administration seems to be very drone-friendly. There are delivery drones. Advertising drones. Light show drones. Police drones.

[1] https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/R...

[2] https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/m...

[3] https://shenzhentimes.com/how-to-order-takeout-by-drone-in-s...

mrguyorama3• 10 months ago

China has so little domestic general aviation that it is common for learning pilots to train in other countries!

Australia gets a lot of Chinese student pilots.

serf• 10 months ago

nice pictures. that fire proofing around all of the wires is neat, as is that bldc design with the integrated heat-sinks and the huge compute unit with the copper piping to external heat-sinks.

very nice equipment before it was smashed to smithereens.

it's rare to get a glimpse into this stuff internally. Similarly I wish Doordash would show what the Dot looks like under the bonnet so I don't need to wait for the inevitable collision pictures.

The technical side of this emerging consumer-facing robotics thing just fascinates the hell out of me.

bcrl• 10 months ago

Move fast and break things doesn't work when safety is involved. Did a properly trained and licensed Professional Engineer review the design of Amazon's drones, their safety features and protocols before they got approval to fly outside of private testing facilities? If not, who would insure that hot mess?

tt_dev• 10 months ago

Two Amazon deliver drones crash into a crane

One drone says to the other:

“They’ll do anything to stop us from unionizing”

The other responds:

“I just got put on PIP too…”

cpgxiii• 10 months ago

I think this is frankly the obvious consequence of the FAA inventing authority to allow commercial drone operations at low altitude (by "invented" I mean completely ignoring the precedent of United States v. Causby which establishes ownership of some airspace above one's property). Commercial drones are flying around at low altitude not because they should, but because they cannot safely share the airspace with other existing airspace users.

The solution here is not more NOTAMs or specific hazard detection; the solution is having commercial drones get the hell out of other people's property (i.e. very low altitudes) and safely share the rest of the airspace with existing users.

patrick451• 10 months ago

Genuinely curious what the solution here is.

One obvious solution is to ditch drone delivery entirely. It's not a foregone conclusion that we must deliver trinkets by drone.

johnnienaked• 10 months ago

Amazon has assured us there is nothing wrong with the drones and they pose absolutely no safety hazard even though they crashed.

Two Amazon delivery drones crash into crane in commercial area of Tolleson, AZ

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