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Amazon delivery drone strikes North Texas apartment, causing minor damage
by robotnikman
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.
> 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.
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.
Relevant xkcd:
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.
I agree with you that FAR covers all airspace. There's an interesting case on airspace (over an Indian reservation) & an emergency landing that's winding its way through the courts right now [0]
[0] https://avweb.com/aviation-news/aviation-law/aopa-asks-feds-...
Unnecessarily / unsafely discharging a firearm puts everyone in the area at risk.
> 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.
How about drones only fly over public roads when they are below 500 feet?
But why?
If you're concerned about safety, you'd prefer an out-of-control drone hits a car instead of a backyard or farmer's field?
And if you're concerned about noise, homes tend to be along roads anyways. So it's not going to change that.
And FYI, they're basically always below 500 feet, so they don't hit planes.
I believe that they were responding to this specific part of your comment:
> 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
Flying over public roads would be a way to avoid flying over properties that do not allow drones and would not be unpractical.
OK, but the point is, it doesn't fix any problems either.
But it does create them, if drones have to travel 2x as far by following roads, which wastes energy, limits range, and requires flying more drones to achieve the same level of e.g. deliveries.
The larger point is that property owners don't have a legitimate reason to ban drones passing 200 ft over their house. If they're bothered by noise, why are they going to be any less bothered because the drone is flying 50 ft away over the road at the end of their driveway? If they're worried about drones falling out of the sky, they're still going to be bothered about their car being hit during their entire morning and evening commute.
Seems the drones are creating the problem.
Which is exactly why I said, if you want to ban drones in general then just ban them in general.
It doesn't make any sense to ban them over individual properties. Or to ban them from private properties but allow them over roads.
For now, they're not a problem. If they become one, then we decide what to do about it collectively, democratically.
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.
Your property rights don't end at ground level.
They do go up into the air, but it's basically "dozens" of feet, as opposed to hundreds. Drones can't fly at 10 ft above your property, that's clearly considered trespass/nuisance. But at 300 ft it's totally fine.
There's no exact precise "hard" limit like 100 ft because there doesn't need to be, and it depends on the height of your home, etc. But drones already aren't allowed to just hover above your pool at eye level. But if it's just passing overhead with plenty of room to spare and not specifically bothering you, then that doesn't belong to your property. Nor should it.
You probably didn't have rights to the minerals below ground level, either!
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.
>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.
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?
Commercial drones aren't allowed to fly by your bedroom window. They're flying 200-400 feet up in the air on their way somewhere, not at 15 ft next to houses. Also, the whole point is that there generally is no "air channel" because they can fly in a direct line to wherever they're going.
And if you think you're supposed to get recourse, what do you do about the noise of traffic in the street, the neighbor's lawnmower, planes passing overhead, or trains on the closest train track?
Fortunately, the walls and windows of your home already block out most noise, and if you're really sensitive when you sleep then you use a white noise machine or wear earplugs.
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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
> 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.
The presence and operation of drones on one’s personal property appears more corporatist in nature than democratic.
the current legal definition of property does not include the air above. it's what allows them, and airplanes, to fly over.
The top post is about property damage not flying over. This comment is in response to the idea that drone delivery is a democratically expressed need or want. I think it’s a corporate need advancing capital over labor in the name of convenience. Perhaps people only care about convenience but I’m not sure that makes it democratic.
Also I’m not a property rights lawyer but I’d contest the idea that you don’t even own an inch or a foot or several feet above your property, otherwise it would be impossible to build up. Please share a source on your “current legal definition” either in North Texas municipality where drone crash occurred or otherwise.
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> The top post is about property damage not flying over.
No, it was specifically about property damage from a failure during flight, while attempting to traverse a property, with that temporary traversal being legal.
> Please share a source on your “current legal definition” either in North Texas municipality
This is the domain of the FAA. Municipalities have very little power in what they can regulate, because aviation and airspace is federally regulated by the FAA, as made clear, with many examples, in this FAA fact sheet [1]. Restrictions like minimum altitude, for the sake of reasonable privacy, would be ok. Extending that to 400 ft, which is the ceiling that drones can operate, would not.
But, none of this is related to a drone having a failure mid flight, which may caused the drone to dip belowsome local operating altitude restrictions. But, losing altitude from catastrophic failure is not "operating". And, anything related to safety, which is the domain of failure, is entirely regulated by the FAA, which municipalities have zero say in [1]. It was only a scratch because the FAA limited the speed and weight with that in mind.
> I’d contest the idea that you don’t even own an inch or a foot or several feet above your property
They regulate airspace for the purpose of flight. If you extend your house up, then it's no longer airspace that can be flown in. They don't own the space in the air, clearly. But you don't also own the right to that airspace that exists above property, for the purpose of flight. Start with the assumption that the regulations are reasonable.
And, this isn't a just a commercial thing. The drone you buy from the hobby store falls under similar regulations. For slightly relaxed regulations, that these Amazon drones operate under, you get a Part 107 license. Operating altitude limitations don't even change, with the exception that you can exceed the 400ft ceiling while traversing over a 400ft tall building (or 300ft building if local privacy minimum is 100ft).
[1] https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/State-Local-Regulati...
> 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.
That's already highly illegal, it's called harassment and invasion of privacy and there are laws against it. Laws specifically against voyeurism, unlawful video surveillance, harassment and stalking, intrusion upon seclusion, nuisance...
This would easily meet the bar for a harassment complaint.
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.
> 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.
Amazon has successfully trained the population to turn all of their shopping into impulse buy mode.
As far as I can tell, Zipline are way out ahead in this space right now.
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.
"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.
Already safer than delivery vans.
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.
Delivery vans rarely hit buildings. And, one assumes, pretty much never above the ground floor.
“That’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
Looks like they didn’t meet the minimum crew requirement on this one.
Anyone else too news-aware and parsed "drone strike" as a verb the first time?
Yeah, "Amazon drone strikes North Texas" definitely evokes a different image.
The solution space of maximum engagement and easily misinterpreted headlines overlaps quite a bit.
“delivery above recommended speed”
[flagged]
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.".
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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).
>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.
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.
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.
Also drone and payload falling to the ground from any kind of height could cause serious injury or death if it falls on someone.
Which is the argument against flying cars. Uncontrolled flying car crashes over populated areas could be catastrophic.
Easy, don't walk near buildings then! /s
I expect some kind of automatic drone parachute system to develop.
I think parachutes take more height to work properly, compared to building heights.
Maybe if they fly at much higher altitudes for most of the flight.
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.
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