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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 "th
by crazygringo 1y 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 1y agoAmazon uses its lobbying powers to make it illegal to operate a crane without submitting an approval request to Amazon and paying a fee.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- JCM9 1y agoThat 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.
- jahsome 1y agoI'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.
- lawlessone 1y agonot under it at a minimum lol
- burkaman 1y agoA human operator would see a moving crane and say "that's a construction site, I'm going to go around". They would not fly directly under a crane even if it visually looked clear. In this case the crane was actively lowering something, so the drone not only missed the cable but it flew directly in between the crane and a visible object hanging in the air below the crane. For concrete numbers, I would say stay 50 yards away from construction equipment, and always laterally or above, not below. Honestly these drones are enormous so I think "don't go under" can just be a blanket rule. They can't be going under trees or bridges or overpasses either, they're too big. Edit: Also, the drones themselves should be far enough apart that if one crashes the other has time to react and stop or change course. I don't have a concrete number there, it depends on their speed and acceleration, but they shouldn't be flying so close that if one crashes they all will.
- appreciatorBus 1y agoIn non-drone aviation, we require vehicles to be separated from each other by 5 nautical miles horizontally and 2,000 feet vertically. Additionally every area of the planet they fly over has an MSA figure - Minimum Safe Altitude - which is supposed to guarantee 1000 feet clearance over any obstacles or terrain. Both of these allow healthy margins of error, whether that error is from a human pilot or ATC, or from computer systems - either in the vehicle or the ground. I'd argue these would be a great place to start for drone aviation. If such limits make drone burrito or toilet paper delivery expensive, that seems fine.
- jahsome 1y agoJust what I was looking for. Thanks for the context!
- CamperBob2 1y ago5 miles sounds pretty ridiculous, TBH. These things aren't moving at Mach 3.
- bell-cot 1y agoAt a mere (say) 240mph, 5 miles is 75 seconds. Talk to an experienced pilot about how short a time that is, when a bottom-10% pilot is trying to figure out some problem with his instrumentation, or has set his radio to the wrong frequency, or whatever.
- mr_toad 1y ago> At a mere (say) 240mph, 5 miles is 75 seconds. The world record holder for a quadcopter drone is 224 mph. Not many drones can beat 100 mph. According to one article I found Amazons drones can manage 50mph.
- bell-cot 1y ago5 miles at 50mph would give only Amazon 360 seconds to fix the bug that caused the first drone to crash. Or figure things out enough to get the second drone into manual override mode.
- JCM9 1y agoFor 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.
- dheera 1y 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.
- JCM9 1y agoThe 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 1y agoI'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.
- orbisvicis 1y agoMaybe, maybe not: "The NTSB will retain far more employees than during prior shutdowns when it had to furlough 90% or more of its workers. In 2019, the agency did not send investigators to 22 accidents because of the funding lapse. But it made the case to White House budget officials that it needed more personnel for critical functions." https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/faa-would-furlough-11000-employees-us-government-shutdown-2025-09-30/ https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/faa-would-fur...
- dheera 1y agoThey should call in a bunch of robotics and PyTorch experts to investigate the code, actually, and preferably also submit a pull request to Amazon. Amazon should be required to pay this "squat team". The FAA does not have the expertise to diagnose this.
- djtriptych 1y agoFor 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.
- bri3d 1y agommWave radar is commonly used for detecting (horizontal) cables of similar thickness in a very common use of enterprise drones: power line inspection.
- gpm 1y 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 1y agoguy wires
- lttlrck 1y agoJust add a radius.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- idontwantthis 1y agoThe 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 1y agoAerial 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-hn 1y agoYou 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 1y 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?
- hulitu 1y agoYes, but this was thousands of years ago. /s
- perihelions 1y 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 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")
- diggan 1y ago> But then how do you deliver to the upper floors of vertical buildings? Maybe asking the obvious, do you need to? Why not drop the package downstairs, people can use the elevator like normal people? Assuming there is some sort of hand-off with identification.
- sva_ 1y agoI 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_toad 1y agoNeural 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.
- gessha 1y agoWhenever I see someone say AI without specifying what branch of AI it is(CV, NLP, etc), I can’t take anything they say seriously. Also, It’s sad to see GOFAI being called “rules” :)
- dghlsakjg 1y agoThe 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_salad 1y agoI 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.
- codedokode 1y agoCables are not hard to see with eyes.
- tifik 1y agoIf this were true, aviation cable markers would not be a thing. Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Cavalese_cable_car_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Cavalese_cable_car_crash
- numpad0 1y agoNot 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.
- codedokode 1y agoYes human also cannot see them from far away and flying at high speed but what I wanted to point out is that robots usually get the cheapest and lowest quality sensors.
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- numpad0 1y agoFlying 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 1y agoYeah. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6CsNqhAeeQ . Better than getting tangled, I guess.
- bb611 1y agoOn the other hand, sometimes cutting the cable is at least as dangerous as causing the aircraft to crash, for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Cavalese_cable_car_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Cavalese_cable_car_crash The only safe system is for aircraft to avoid wires.
- FpUser 1y agoWhat they show on video does not protect props. Dumbest invention ever. Never mind that the idea of cutting cable is even worse.
- zoklet-enjoyer 1y agoThe solution is don't use delivery drones.
- MaxikCZ 1y agoOr cranes, right?
- willmadden 1y agoCorrect, 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 1y agoDrones that can dodge thin wires already exist, seems more like their perception algorithms/onboard vision hardware just arent up to the task
- TheSoftwareGuy 1y 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 1y agojust... don't fly near active construction sites?
- notatoad 1y ago>Genuinely curious what the solution here is. no fly zones around construction sites?
- spaceywilly 1y agoThe 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 1y agoThe 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_go 1y agoWhat happens when they aren't live or is that just a thing that doesn't happen? I know nothing about this topic.
- squigz 1y agoWhy is "don't use autonomous drones for such things" not in that list?
- 0x0203 1y 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_go 1y agoA 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 1y 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 1y agoNewer DJI drones can see cable down to 4mm using LIDAR and other methods. So yeah, Amazon has some catching up to do.
- jamiek88 1y agoHumans can’t really see cables when flying either. Drones need to be better.
- cmurf 1y agoThe 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) 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 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) 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-crash https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/02/us/arizona-amazon-drones-cras...
- nhma 1y agoMmWave radar is commonly used for this purpose on both commercial and research UAVs, see e.g.: https://youtu.be/MORFX3CFygk https://youtu.be/MORFX3CFygk
- nakedrobot2 1y agoEven 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 1y agoThe solution is to ban drone deliveries in built-up areas. We do not need them.