4 ms·

Amazon delivery drone strikes North Texas apartment, causing minor damage

56 points by robotnikman 8mo ago

gib444 8mo ago
[flagged]
robotnikman 8mo ago
Other news sources: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/07/delivery-drone-amazon-crash-texas-apartment/88565912007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/07/delive... https://www.theverge.com/tech/875475/amazon-delivery-drone-crash-texas https://www.theverge.com/tech/875475/amazon-delivery-drone-c... https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/08/us/video/amazon-drone-delivery-falls-from-sky-texas-hnk-vrtc-digvid https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/08/us/video/amazon-drone-deliver...
cmiles8 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.
    - computomatic 8mo ago
      > merely matching the cost and harms of the existing system is far from enough The new system needs to be better but that doesn’t necessarily mean safer. For delivery, that could mean cheaper and faster and more convenient. Autonomous vehicles are a special case because those accidents tend to cause death and serious injury. As long as delivery drones can avoid killing multiple people per year, they are probably fine to compete on other metrics.
      - doubled112 8mo ago
        If Amazon handled it the right way, their drone smashing through your window could be a mere inconvenience. In comparison to the way their delivery drivers drive down my sidewalk, I can see the drone being a safety win.
- freejazz 8mo 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.
  - sejje 8mo 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.
    - ncallaway 8mo ago
      Also drone and payload falling to the ground from any kind of height could cause serious injury or death if it falls on someone.
      - coldcode 8mo ago
        Which is the argument against flying cars. Uncontrolled flying car crashes over populated areas could be catastrophic.
      - ares623 8mo ago
        Easy, don't walk near buildings then! /s
    - DasIch 8mo ago
      They weigh 80-85lbs and travel at speeds of around 50mph. The impact would be quite serious, if they crash at speed but even falling on a car or a human would be quite serious, possibly deadly, even if the propellers don't spin.
    - BurningFrog 8mo ago
      I expect some kind of automatic drone parachute system to develop.
- walt_grata 8mo ago
  Vibe steering and navigating
- nomel 8mo 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 8mo ago
As far as I can tell, Zipline are way out ahead in this space right now.
rolph 8mo 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 8mo ago
  Already safer than delivery vans.
  - piva00 8mo 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 8mo ago
    Delivery vans rarely hit buildings. And, one assumes, pretty much never above the ground floor.
bethekidyouwant 8mo ago
“That’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.”
- davidhyde 8mo ago
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM Looks like they didn’t meet the minimum crew requirement on this one.
eichin 8mo ago
Anyone else too news-aware and parsed "drone strike" as a verb the first time?
- hermannj314 8mo ago
  The solution space of maximum engagement and easily misinterpreted headlines overlaps quite a bit.
- escapecharacter 8mo ago
  “delivery above recommended speed”
- aleksiy123 8mo ago
  Yeah, "Amazon drone strikes North Texas" definitely evokes a different image.
- MengerSponge 8mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
netsharc 8mo 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 8mo 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.
csense 8mo 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.
- fsckboy 8mo 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.
  - thelock85 8mo ago
    The presence and operation of drones on one’s personal property appears more corporatist in nature than democratic.
    - nomel 8mo ago
      the current legal definition of property does not include the air above. it's what allows them, and airplanes, to fly over.
wolvoleo 8mo 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.
- tzs 8mo 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 8mo ago
  Amazon has successfully trained the population to turn all of their shopping into impulse buy mode.
hulitu 8mo ago
How times change. Even terrorists are not what they used to be. /s

56 points by robotnikman 8mo ago

[flagged]

Other news sources: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/07/delivery-drone-amazon-crash-texas-apartment/88565912007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/07/delive... https://www.theverge.com/tech/875475/amazon-delivery-drone-crash-texas https://www.theverge.com/tech/875475/amazon-delivery-drone-c... https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/08/us/video/amazon-drone-delivery-falls-from-sky-texas-hnk-vrtc-digvid https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/08/us/video/amazon-drone-deliver...

cmiles8 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.
  - computomatic 8mo ago
    > merely matching the cost and harms of the existing system is far from enough The new system needs to be better but that doesn’t necessarily mean safer. For delivery, that could mean cheaper and faster and more convenient. Autonomous vehicles are a special case because those accidents tend to cause death and serious injury. As long as delivery drones can avoid killing multiple people per year, they are probably fine to compete on other metrics.
    - doubled112 8mo ago
      If Amazon handled it the right way, their drone smashing through your window could be a mere inconvenience. In comparison to the way their delivery drivers drive down my sidewalk, I can see the drone being a safety win.
freejazz 8mo 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.
- sejje 8mo 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.
  - ncallaway 8mo ago
    Also drone and payload falling to the ground from any kind of height could cause serious injury or death if it falls on someone.
    - coldcode 8mo ago
      Which is the argument against flying cars. Uncontrolled flying car crashes over populated areas could be catastrophic.
    - ares623 8mo ago
      Easy, don't walk near buildings then! /s
  - DasIch 8mo ago
    They weigh 80-85lbs and travel at speeds of around 50mph. The impact would be quite serious, if they crash at speed but even falling on a car or a human would be quite serious, possibly deadly, even if the propellers don't spin.
  - BurningFrog 8mo ago
    I expect some kind of automatic drone parachute system to develop.
walt_grata 8mo ago
Vibe steering and navigating
nomel 8mo 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 8mo ago

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

rolph 8mo 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 8mo ago
Already safer than delivery vans.
- piva00 8mo 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 8mo ago
  Delivery vans rarely hit buildings. And, one assumes, pretty much never above the ground floor.

bethekidyouwant 8mo ago

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

davidhyde 8mo ago
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM Looks like they didn’t meet the minimum crew requirement on this one.

eichin 8mo ago

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

hermannj314 8mo ago
The solution space of maximum engagement and easily misinterpreted headlines overlaps quite a bit.
escapecharacter 8mo ago
“delivery above recommended speed”
aleksiy123 8mo ago
Yeah, "Amazon drone strikes North Texas" definitely evokes a different image.
MengerSponge 8mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

netsharc 8mo 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 8mo 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.

csense 8mo 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.

fsckboy 8mo 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.
- thelock85 8mo ago
  The presence and operation of drones on one’s personal property appears more corporatist in nature than democratic.
  - nomel 8mo ago
    the current legal definition of property does not include the air above. it's what allows them, and airplanes, to fly over.

wolvoleo 8mo 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.

tzs 8mo 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 8mo ago
Amazon has successfully trained the population to turn all of their shopping into impulse buy mode.

hulitu 8mo ago

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