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Amazon faces FAA probe after delivery drone snaps internet cable in Texas
- idiocratically 10mo agoDeliveries should only be executed by humans.
- bri3d 10mo agoVideo: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/089CBuGTkcY https://www.youtube.com/shorts/089CBuGTkcY (it's also in the article; my ad blocker must have gotten me on this one). Amazon are not having a good run with these lately. The double crane cable incident ( https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/02/us/arizona-amazon-drones-crash https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/02/us/arizona-amazon-drones-cras... ) and the LIDAR failsafe issue ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-16/amazon-removed-backup-landing-sensor-before-drone-crashes https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-16/amazon-re... ) were both rather surprising from a process and management standpoint. This issue seems more like a run of the mill "problem with drone delivery conceptually" that Amazon will have to deal with.
- purplecats 10mo ago> not sure why it's not linked that I can find in the article from the same source? the point is not news, its to keep you on their sites as long as possible with no escape
- jonny_eh 10mo agoI half expected the shared clip to be this scene from Pluribus: https://youtu.be/r3D3dg23tyA?t=129 https://youtu.be/r3D3dg23tyA?t=129
- nullify88 10mo agoThat scene really cracked me up. The show is shot very well. It's good to have Vince Gilligan back on the TV again.
- itishappy 10mo agoThe article contains the exact same clip without edited audio.
- bri3d 10mo agoI think my ad blocker must have filtered the element. Post updated, thanks.
- ThePowerOfFuet 10mo agoLink with playback controls: https://youtube.com/watch?v=089CBuGTkcY https://youtube.com/watch?v=089CBuGTkcY
- bpodgursky 10mo agoMaybe we should consider this a chaos monkey test rather than castigating Amazon. If Amazon can accidentally take down internet in a large area with a cheap commercial drone... what can a genuine bad actor do with a few thousand of these. If this is any indicator, half the country is going to be blind and deaf in the first day of a Taiwan war, it's going to be be over before we even get back online.
- engineer_22 10mo agothe ukrainians destroyed hundred million dollar russian bombers with a drone attack in July. drone warfare is very much on-the-radar
- observationist 10mo agoIt's an ethernet cable, looks like? That's pretty cool that a drone has enough power to break an ethernet cable. It just got tangled in a single cable, looks like it was run across someone's back yard. That's not a bad failure mode, imo - gives them a little exercise in problem solving, figuring out how to prevent ethernet/cable collisions and snags, and maybe results in sensor upgrades, or they figure out good detangling maneuvers or something. One cable getting damaged is inconvenient, but I'd have to laugh it off if it were my service. 5G would be a good enough backup in the meantime, and how often are you going to get to see these types of accidents (hopefully almost never) so it'd be cool to have a story. "I ordered some flaming hot cheetos from a drone, and it broke my internet cable!"
- malfist 10mo agoOne internet cable isn't a big deal until it is. Or until it isn't an internet cable. That's what we investigate both near misses and minor issues
- d-lisp 10mo agoIt would be great that the drone had some kind of tactile sensibility. Go slowly in the opposite direction of said contact first, then if that is not working try to rotate on one of the horizontal axis while going in the opposite direction to see if it make a difference, and if it doesn't then something is stuck on your skin, and you should be able to notice that your weight is not the same as before; if that's not the case, then maybe your sensor is just broken, but then maybe you could be able to notice some difference in the power consumption of the tactile components array, and if that's not the case ... well, maybe that sensor is off too ? Wait ... what are you doing in Madrid ?
- dylan604 10mo agoThat would be okay if you were flying forward at a snail's pace so that initial contact doesn't take out the drone. i'm thinking of all of the times my Roomba has plowed full speed into something and then slowly backed away. If drone behaved that way, it wouldn't be very good. i'm also thinking of all of the times my drones acted that way when i was learning to fly and getting cocky. it wasn't good for them
- binarymax 10mo ago[flagged]
- engineer_22 10mo agono, you're probably not the only one. bring it up at the next concerned citizens action committee meeting
- rogerrogerr 10mo agoSolid meh from me. Only thing I really don’t like about it is it’s likely to impact the personal rights to fly drones we enjoy today (which are already being chipped away). Otherwise, they’re probably not very loud or frequent, don’t really present much of a privacy issue vs. what street view already has, and they maybe make the roads a bit safer. Might take some jobs away from delivery van drivers. Nothing seems worth getting overly concerned for.
- asdff 10mo agoProbably half my immediate neighbors get an amazon delivery a day. The truck makes sometimes two or three stops throughout the day and is there for like 15-20 minutes running packages. The thought of that replaced with drone traffic is crazy. It would be like dozens of landings and overflights per hour. It is already bad enough when the realtors fly their drones overhead. I can't imagine the birds and bees aren't getting stressed out if it's managing to piss me off.
- TRiG_Ireland 10mo agoWhat on earth are people buying that's delivered so frequently? I find the whole concept of frequent deliveries confusing.
- dylan604 10mo agowho cares what they are buying. it's truly none of your business. there are people that buy things on a whim and do not even for a second think about slowing down to buy things at once to reduce the number of deliveries. if they did that, they'd forget about it and not actually purchase that whim. there could also be multiple independent people at the same address buying things in this manner.
- callamdelaney 10mo ago[flagged]
- kazinator 10mo ago[flagged]
- AngryData 10mo agoWell these aren't just toy drones, these are 75+ pound drones before you add the package. You need to get your drone licensed to fly one even a fraction of that weight.
- teachrdan 10mo agoDoes Mikey aspire to have millions of RC cars driving 24 hours a day all over the country?
- malfist 10mo agoDoes Mikey's rc car weigh over a hundred pounds and travel at 100mph?
- mig39 10mo agoLooking at the video, the cable looks ... fragile. Would a large bird landing on it do the same amount of damage? Shouldn't it be thick, armoured cable, attached to a strong wire or something?
- pavon 10mo agoIt is a standard outdoor coaxial cable. Perhaps it looks thin because you are mentally scaling to the size of smaller hobby drones. Edit: The MK30 is 78 pounds, and about 6 feet diameter. Here is an image with a human for scale: https://dronexl.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Amazon-Prime-Air-Unveils-Its-Game-Changing-MK30-Drone-0105.jpg.webp https://dronexl.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Amazon-Prime-A...
- Aloisius 10mo agoThe cable was described in the news as thin. It isn't that high off the ground and with or without the drone in view, it looks thin. Maybe it's an RG6 drop, but it could also be ethernet or a fiber drop. They're all thin wires, though.
- venturecruelty 10mo agoShouldn't drones run by trillion-dollar companies not crash into stuff?
- hk1337 10mo agoWhy would Amazon be in trouble for not knowing the customer has an Ethernet cable stretched across their yard? Even AT&T (Southwestern Bell) buried drops from the pedestal to the house.
- dec0dedab0de 10mo agobecause it should be able to detect and avoid any number of obstacles. what if the next time it hits a clothes line and lands on someone? the FAA investigates anything that might cause shit to fall out of the sky
- AngryData 10mo agoWould you say the same thing if a delivery driver drove through some other cables or objects on your property and broke them despite being in a clear and nominally safe area?
- hk1337 10mo agoYes
- next_xibalba 10mo agoI'm generally pretty gung ho about tech adoption. Nuclear? Yes! LLMs everywhere? Let's try it! Crypto? OK... give it a go! Self driving cars? Heck yeah! But I really, really don't want drones flying over my house, polluting the already noisy soundscape, etc. This just strikes me as a terrible idea.
- teachrdan 10mo agoMy dream is that an increase in drones would lead to a decrease in vehicular deliveries, to the point that there would be a net decrease in noise. But in my heart of hearts I am certain the convenience of drone delivery -- and an absence of sufficient regulation -- would lead to a drastic net increase in noise instead.
- hamdingers 10mo agoThis dream is naive. One truck rumbling (or humming, in the near future) through your neighborhood delivering packages to each of your neighbors over the course of 30 minutes will be replaced with one drone per neighbor. If they must exist, I hope they're priced/taxed such that they're used sparingly.
- fragmede 10mo agoBit of a travelling salesman problem, but I think a hybrid approach would be optimal. Have the delivery van drive to a neighborhood, then release drones from the van to deliver packages to individual houses.
- ssl-3 10mo agoNow instead of just one truck for a whole route of deliveries, or one noisy drone per individual delivery, we get multiple particular corners in any given area where the sound is concentrated like a buzzsaw testing facility every day because that's where the Amazon dudes like to park and release the drones. It'll be awesome when they decide that the parking spot in front of my house -- with no trees or overhead lines -- is an ideal place for drone staging. (And no, I'm not particularly worried about any of these noise issues. I predict that it'll all sort itself out just fine. Besides, I personally think the spectacle of a swarm of package delivery drones leaping forth from a truck is something that I would never tire of observing. But it is fun to think about the problems and the solutions. The deeper one dives, the more complex they get.)
- riotnrrd 10mo agoI used to work in perception for autonomous aerial vehicles and horizontal wires were the hardest common object to avoid. Traditional stereo won't help you localize them -- wires are thin so even mere detection can be hard, and one portion of a wire looks much like another so feature matching fails resulting in bad or no depth estimates -- and LIDAR sacrifices resolution for weight and power consumption (which both have to be optimizied for drones). It's been years since I've worked in this field, and Amazon has many smart people thinking about it but I'm not surprised it's still a difficult problem.
- vpShane 10mo agoAh yeah I came up with the solution to that one. It's 'don't fly drones over our heads' approach. Also the 'upgrade the fragile infrastructure so a light breeze doesn't take out millions of people's power.'
- venturecruelty 10mo agoSorry, not profitable enough, not a "team player". Please enjoy these weekly 1:1s with your manager and HR.
- bri3d 10mo agoDefinitely tough. mmWave radar is useful for this use case; I know Amazon were testing it on earlier drones but I'm not sure if they still use it.
- londons_explore 10mo agoCables don't move often. Why not simply have a map of all of them? Google sell maps of things like this from street view data.
- riotnrrd 10mo agoAll cables? Everywhere in the entire country? Accurate to the centimeter level and updated on the hour? Edit: This was flippant, but the real issues are: any map you get will be incomplete and obsolete almost immediately and cables move and sway in the breeze.
- LogicFailsMe 10mo agoI'm sure this will sound a bit whack to some of the sorts on here but honestly, who cares? I was at the principal engineers offsite summit in scenic Cle Ellum when they supposedly announced prime Air. I know, I know, what the f** ever, but there was something very ominous and significant at this unveiling. If this were my demo and my unveiling, I would have had a drone pick up a package at one side of the auditorium and drop it off at the other side of the auditorium. What we got was a mock package and a mock drone and lots of talky talk from a guy who didn't last long at Amazon. This set the tone for everything going forward. And the engineers of tech, the real engineers of tech, not the toxic empathy talkers who can't do anything (tm), need to put these people in their place or the enshittification will continue unopposed. I'm mostly out of f**s here having made what I needed to make but it's fun to post here in a position of not caring what people think of me anymore. Make of that what you will. Edit: Come on PE snowflakes! You want to talk about that thread on the principal engineering list about how long it had been since any of you had actually written a line of code? I do. It explains a lot about you guys. And don't get me started about that urgent missive about only hiring fungible people. Because fungible equals generalist and that's why both you and Google have the horrible retention rates you have. I can tell I'm not the only one that was in the room for that ridiculous presentation from the downvotes. Keep going and no worries, Amazon will have more than enough money to acquihire the people that actually solve these problems.
- ynab6 10mo agoLike Jesus before him: they hated him, for he told them the truth.
- LogicFailsMe 10mo agoIn tech, no one is Jesus but many are John the Baptist.
- drjasonharrison 10mo agoJesus saves but John makes backups and Moses takes them offsite.
- cmiles8 10mo agoThis comes after the incident where multiple drones crashed into a crane. Given that prior incident and now this the FAA will likely not be too kind to Amazon. The permission on drone tech is predicated on very strong “see and avoid” technology. Given two pretty bad screw-ups now in as many months the FAA won’t be amused at the failures in the tech on these drones.
- drjasonharrison 10mo agoAnd that crane cable was much thicker! And it was two drones in a short period of time!
- Computer0 10mo agoIt will definitely be used for surveillance as well if the doorbells are anything to go by.
- dwa3592 10mo agoFucking, learn it from the self driving car companies. fly your drones for at least 6 months in the city, make high resolution 3d maps of the area, identify the no fly zones, train models on these. I can't believe their drones are crashing into stationary cranes.
- drjasonharrison 10mo ago"But the crane wasn't there yesterday!"
- dwa3592 10mo agolmao
- gerdesj 10mo agoA commenter here notes that detecting power lines is a really hard problem. However surely there is a set of simpler solutions to the problem than actually trying to spot power lines. This sort of thing is a largely solved problem for bigger aircraft and a similar approach with quite a lot of international regulation and agreement seems to be needed. Drones could be given a cross section of airspace to work within that is say a horizontal slice about 50m to 100m above ground level, with various rules on resolution (ie what constitutes ground level at any point on the planet). The minimum height should clear most obstacles that are hard to spot. There would be flight corridors defined between take off and landing zones. There would be exclusion zones around areas such as air fields and military locations etc. Drones could even be allowed to use commercial airspace provided they follow the existing rules and are detectable and contactable etc. The tricky bit is working out take off and landing zones and rules for them. At the moment, aircraft try to avoid flying over habitation zones. I live near to a helicopter factory and used to work there so I have some idea of the issues involved. There are lots more rules that could be added for safety. For example, requiring height when flying in a non corridor depend on direction. However, I'm only allowing a 50m zone here but then a drone is only about 1m "tall". Even something as simple as divide the compass up into say 16 zones for wind Beaufort 0-2, eight zones for 3-4, four zones for 5-6 and ban flight at 7+. Those wind designations might depend on gust speeds or constant and could be transmitted. The idea is that things get a bit random as the wind speed increases. Divide the allowable height by the number of zones and set your height accordingly. So flying directly north will be at say 50m and directly south at 100m. The wind speed should also indicate the density of drones allowed per horizontal area. That will need some experimentation and legislation to determine what is "acceptable".
- protocolture 10mo agoShow me the line lmao. You see these rural cowboys stringing 1 - 2 cores over a long distance, I have seen them just going right through or even resting on trees. The solution is probably a dial before you dig style registry that corresponds to an altitude floor, but I honestly doubt the ability of rural telco to meet that requirement.
- ynab6 10mo agoAh yes, expending 100x the energy to deliver 1/10th of the payload. Bring on the drone infested future!