Amazon delivery drone strikes North Texas apartment, causing minor damage

https://www.expressnews.com/news/texas/article/amazon-delivery-drone-crash-richardson-texas-21341387.php

by robotnikman • 5 months ago

56 68 5 months ago

expressnews.com

robotnikman• 5 months ago

Other news sources:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/07/delive...

https://www.theverge.com/tech/875475/amazon-delivery-drone-c...

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/08/us/video/amazon-drone-deliver...

cmiles8• 5 months ago

This is the latest in a string of accidents with these drones crashing into things. Not good.

The earlier ones hit a crane which one could argue was an edge case as a temporary structure. This just hit a building which suggests something much more fundamentally wrong with the tech.

ecosystem• 5 months ago

I wonder what the acceptable collisions/delivery needs to be for it to match last mile truck safety level (ie UPS trucks are big and run into things with non-zero frequency)

delecti• 5 months ago

People are more accepting when there's a person who can be punished. There's also the fact that society generally expects cars/trucks hitting things. A drone impact might be a more minor impact, but it's possible for it to hit things that are more shocking to the public if they get hit.

idle_zealot• 5 months ago

I'm sure there's a surprisingly high frequency of "acceptable" collisions if the bar is matching truck-inflicted property damage and injuries. Much like with replacing human drivers with computers, though, merely matching the cost and harms of the existing system is far from enough. Entrenched systems benefit from familiarity with the associated costs and risks, and from any structures built to mitigate them. New solutions have to be much better to gain acceptance.

Fortunately, automated systems can meet that higher threshold so long as we actually aim for it. If you aim for the lower "beats existing systems by some measures" bar then you make stupid decisions and tradeoffs like rushing to market or leaving out more capable sensors. We ought to try to make new technologies as good as possible. Sometimes the market will bet against that, but that's a tide that engineers should fight back against. Trucks kill too many people, and if drones kill half as many that's still unacceptable. We can do better.

freejazz• 5 months ago

The earlier ones hit a crane which one could argue was an edge case as a temporary structure.

I would expect them not to fly into any kind of structure. That they'd hit a crane is pretty insane considering what the results of something like that could be.

sejje2• 5 months ago

I would expect the result to be the same as running into anything else: drone and any payload crash into the ground.

Drones are lightweight, they're not going to do much to heavy machinery. Basically the same as a brick wall.

The real fear is propellers hitting a human. The result is not good at all.

hermannj3142• 5 months ago

Zero? I think the expected number of collisions can be larger than zero. Jimmy Johns sandwich delivery by bicycle has resulted in more collisions than zero and that is arguably safe.

You are setting an impossible standard.

walt_grata• 5 months ago

Vibe steering and navigating

nomel3• 5 months ago

This just hit a building

Please be specific on what you mean by "just"? From the article:

Amazon told CBS Texas that it’s investigating the cause of the crash that happened Wednesday afternoon.

Did it hit a bird? Did the wind blow something into it? Was it a 0.01% occurrence of some hardware failure? Who knows. Design flaw?

Extrapolating a few crashes within this new tech use case to a some fundamental flaw of drone flight isn't reasonable, at the moment.

I suppose a safe alternative would be pneumatic tubes dug to everyone's door. But, only things that are economically feasible can exist in the world. So, instead of perfection, we're left with the iteration and compromise that is engineering, regulations and enforcement to bound it, and insurance to catch the edge cases.

A large part of the FAA regulation around drones is one based on existing in reality, and it's lack of perfection, which is how much damage they can do (this is what limits the weight and speed).

npilk• 5 months ago

As far as I can tell, Zipline are way out ahead in this space right now.

rolph• 5 months ago

"Another clip shows the drone on the ground with smoke coming from it."

if true, its a matter of repetition, and probability, until the time one of these crashes starts something on fire.

hiddencost• 5 months ago

Already safer than delivery vans.

piva00• 5 months ago

Delivery vans don't start fires on the 5th floor, introducing novel risks for the same result usually is not very well accepted by the public.

But also, I won't ever understand the fixation of the USA about having things delivered by drone, it's a really weird behaviour.

rsynnott• 5 months ago

Delivery vans rarely hit buildings. And, one assumes, pretty much never above the ground floor.

bethekidyouwant• 5 months ago

“That’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.”

davidhyde• 5 months ago

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

Looks like they didn’t meet the minimum crew requirement on this one.

eichin• 5 months ago

Anyone else too news-aware and parsed "drone strike" as a verb the first time?

hermannj3142• 5 months ago

The solution space of maximum engagement and easily misinterpreted headlines overlaps quite a bit.

escapecharacter• 5 months ago

“delivery above recommended speed”

aleksiy123• 5 months ago

Yeah, "Amazon drone strikes North Texas" definitely evokes a different image.

MengerSponge• 5 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

netsharc• 5 months ago

Last paragraph:

The Federal Aviation Administration opened an investigation into Amazon’s drone delivery program in November after one of its drone struck an Internet cable line in Waco.

Looks like the rest of that sentence has been cut off: "... but the company doesn't expect to be punished, since it spent $75 million dollars bribing President Trump in the form of the Melania movie.".

delichon• 5 months ago

Sustained winds in Dallas on Wednesday, Feb 4, were around 10–15 mph, with occasional gusts approaching ~30 mph. I wonder how well delivery drone station keeping works when the wind suddenly gusts by 20 mph.

csense2• 5 months ago

There needs to be a legal means for property owners to keep drones off their property -- maybe some kind of "no trespassing" beacon that acts a machine readable "no trespassing" sign? -- and recourse to deal with unwelcome drones.

I was watching a YouTube bodycam video showing police interaction with a guy who got upset that a Walmart delivery drone test was being performed on his property without permission. He shot the drone with a shotgun. I forget if he was arrested on the spot, but I think he got in huge legal trouble -- apparently in the US, shooting at a drone is treated the same as shooting at a manned aircraft, and he might have ended up getting multiple years in prison.

Shooting a human trespasser has a pretty high legal bar, and rightfully so. Shooting a robotic trespasser seems like it shouldn't carry prison time, even if unjustified it should only carry financial penalties. Especially if the law doesn't specify any peaceful recourse to get rid of unwanted robots trespassing on your property.

fsckboy2• 5 months ago

There needs to be a legal means for property owners to keep drones off their property

no, there really doesn't need to be.

i'm not saying that i'm in favor of autonomous drones flying around, i'm simply not in favor of individual people getting their own say about everything we as a society do. democracy: live with the results

it's not shooting at drones that is the big worry, it's missing the drones, and shooting at things if the law doesn't give a peaceful alternate way to get your own way is also not "great" in the pantheon of ideas.

thelock853• 5 months ago

The presence and operation of drones on one’s personal property appears more corporatist in nature than democratic.

antonvs• 5 months ago

democracy: live with the results

The GP was suggesting that democratically, we could define "a legal means for property owners to keep drones off their property". Your comment is the one attempting to preempt democratic consensus.

tartoran• 5 months ago

I think there should be a way for people to have some kind of control when it comes with drones. Imagine there’s a air channel of commercial drones passing by your bedroom window, every 2-5 minutes. They’re noisy and you lose sleep over it. You want no recourse?

superb_dev• 5 months ago

Drone are noisy and invasive. I know I’d be upset if the neighbor boy was flying his camera drone around my property. Amazon doesn’t get a pass just because they’re a corporation. There is all kinds of passive data gathering that a these could be doing

csense2• 5 months ago

no, there really doesn't need to be

Bob the Bully doesn't like you. Whenever you leave your front door, Bob will fly his drone over your head while its onboard speaker continuously curses you out with TTS. Whenever you want to have a romantic moment with your boyfriend / girlfriend, Bob's drone will be watching through the nearest window.

If you ask Bob to stop harassing you, he'll laugh and curse you out in person. If you sue Bob, after thousands in legal fees the court system will say "You're SoL; there's no law that says Bob can't do what he's doing." If involve the police, they'll say "We can't do anything because no illegal activity is occurring." If you shoot down the drone, you'll be sent to prison like the guy in the video.

You only have one realistic option in this situation, "Just put up with it." This certainly seems like a bug in the law that ought to be patched.

gretch• 5 months ago

There needs to be a legal means for property owners to keep drones off their property

I agree. It should be the same one we use for helicopters and airplanes.

Spivak2• 5 months ago

If they fly low enough that I could hit them with a shotgun, they're on my property. This isn't true of planes and helicopters.

These things aren't planes or helicopters and poised to be much more invasive and annoying, why people act like they are just like a passenger airplanes flying a literal mile overhead is baffling. But to that end if Amazon started making deliveries by landing a fucking helicopter in my yard on the regular I would also want them banned.

colechristensen• 5 months ago

It is the same law, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Regulations

But drones are classified differently and the rules need to be updated and tightened up, particularly drones for commercial purposes.

crazygringo7• 5 months ago

There needs to be a legal means for property owners to keep drones off their property

Does there? Why? There's no legal means to keep private aircraft (e.g. a Cessna) from flying over your property as long as they're over 500 feet. Then drones are below that, typically between 50-400 feet.

They're already not allowed to interfere with your property or privacy however. They can't hover to annoy you, or get close to snap pictures or whatever.

If you're concerned about accidents and safety, then the solution is safety regulation. But the idea that drones must keep track of which individual properties allow flight above and which don't, and try to navigate some around some kind of patchwork accordingly, is simply unpractical and unreasonable.

If drones turn out to be a general nuisance then cities/counties can ban them altogether or whatever as a collective decision, but the idea that individual property owners should be able to ban them is a terrible idea.

amanaplanacanal• 5 months ago

Perhaps individual property rights should go up to that 500 foot limit. Or at least some limit. It doesn't seem quite right that property rights end at ground level.

mindslight• 5 months ago

How about we start recognizing that the occasional nuisance scaled up turns into real harm, and prohibit drones owned/operated by non-individuals from flying over anything that isn't a public way or a consensual waypoint?. This retains the ability for individual personal use and even innovation (with one's own skin in the game), while mostly heading off the perverse incentives of businesses creating externalities at scale and then ultimately enclosing the commons.

In general our society desperately needs to stop denying this basic division, and burden individuals less while applying heavier regulations to corporations/LLCs - ie artificial legal entities created by government whose sine-qua-non is already large amounts of paperwork. For another example, most of the opposition to digital privacy regulation would become moot.

hdgvhicv2• 5 months ago

How about drones only fly over public roads when they are below 500 feet?

duxup• 5 months ago

Unnecessarily / unsafely discharging a firearm puts everyone in the area at risk.

wolvoleo• 5 months ago

What goes up, must come down. Not always in a good way.

Or as we pilots say it, takeoff is optional, landing is mandatory.

I'm glad we don't permit this stuff where I live. And do we really need orders in 60 minutes? Next day in the pickup machine around the corner is good enough.

tzs2• 5 months ago

And do we really need orders in 60 minutes?

Probably not necessary, but it can be quite convenient.

In the late '90s a company called Kozmo.com was doing 60 minute delivery in several cities of some basic food and snack, games, CDs, DVDs, magazines, books, and some other things.

It was pretty nice one night when I started watching "Seven Samurai" on a basic cable channel, and about 30 minutes in got annoyed at the number of commercial breaks they were inserting. During the next break I popped onto the computer, ordered the movie on DVD, along with some microwave popcorn and some drinks. I then went back to watching on TV.

About 15 minutes later their driver showed up, and 5 minutes after that I was watching from the DVD and eating my popcorn.

gdulli• 5 months ago

Amazon has successfully trained the population to turn all of their shopping into impulse buy mode.

hulitu• 5 months ago

How times change. Even terrorists are not what they used to be. /s

Amazon delivery drone strikes North Texas apartment, causing minor damage

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