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?
Flying 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.
Contra this assertion, drones are already frequently used around power lines, and as such, "finding hanging wires with a drone" is actually a very active field with fairly robust solutions. Not only are drones used for power line inspections (which are actually a somewhat easier variant of this problem, because the drone usually flies above or adjacent to the power lines in this scenario), but also for infrastructure inspections in direct adjacency to power lines. Power line detect-and-avoid is a headlining feature in one of DJI's newer enterprise platforms, the M400 (where it's based on LIDAR + mmWave Radar fusion).
Also of note, this isn't the first double-failure issue for the MK30 - they had an issue last year at their test facility where their LIDAR malfunctioned in the same way on two drones in the same weather condition (misting), the drones believed they were at 0.0AGL and powered down in flight.
My guess is that detecting wires is also a very active field of research in a military context unfortunately as nets become a common defense mechanism.
Yeah. 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 . Better than getting tangled, I guess.
It does protect, and is already certified and installed on many copters. Still, it's an emergency device, last resort, like parachutes on some small airplanes.
Here's an excellent video from Juan Browne around the challenges that wires present to aircraft operations [1]. Some of these are human factors for manned aircraft, like seeing a wire but then forgetting it's there, but one of his points is that it's simply safest to avoid flying below 1000ft AGL. That's not an option for drones today, and they presumably don't (yet) have the ability of humans to make inferences about the likelihood of cables near cranes and transmission line towers, making them particularly vulnerable.
That's not true, commercial and municipal drones operate above 400ft all the time. Non-commercial/civilian drones piloted by someone without an FAA Part 107 certification and a waiver cannot fly above 400ft. Also, you are allowed to fly 400ft -above- a vertical structure (like a tower) up to 1000ft tall to avoid exactly this type of collision as long as you are within 400ft horizontally of the structure.
EDIT: crud, I did not read your post carefully enough, sorry, you addressed this point exactly. My bad.
If you've ever driven through Seattle, as you come past Boeing Field on I5 there are red spheres on the power lines. These lines are on a hill across the highway from the airport, so there's no way any plane should be there except during an emergency landing due to power loss.
There are situations where aircraft and wires might come in close proximity. It's more accurate to say that be default we keep them way the hell away from each other, we make exceptions for special circumstances, and the exceptions tend to seem far more conservative than you would guess.
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.
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?
You 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.
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 ("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")
> But then how do you deliver to the upper floors of vertical buildings?
Elevators, dumbwaiters, baskets and pulleys, or just go downstairs and get it yourself.
Also, how tall are we talking? Where have you been where the upper floor windows actually open?
edit: the more that I think about this, the more it bothers me. Getting close enough to a building to deliver a package through a window with a drone sounds incredibly improbable and dangerous. A small gust of wind and the drone crashes into the building. You'd need some kind of pad at a distance from the building, or use the roof. Looks like there's a design for that[1].
And what if a package or drone falls from such a height?
I think the concept on its face is flawed, but then again, this exists[2].
> 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.
Many parts of Europe solved it in a more low-tech way: street-side parcel lockers unlocked with your phone. Massively reduces delivery cost (i.e., one driver can deliver far more packages per hour), is pretty convenient and safe (no packages left unattended), and best of all, doesn't require a fleet of UAVs.
You can pretty naturally extend this once you have self-driving vans.
I think Amazon has a proprietary version of this in some parts of the US, but at least where I live, the lockers are a car drive away, which defeats the purpose.
The last tower I worked in wasn't some really big tower (only about 16 stories) but in the lobby near the security booth there was a set of shelves operated by a food delivery company. Every day there would be a few restaurants listed, you'd place your order, and they'd deliver everyone's food around noon to the shelves. You'd just go down and grab your meal.
Seemed to work well enough for the times I used it. Honestly though I really valued the time to take a break and go for a walk and have lunch away from sitting at my desk.
Japan too, convenience stores are everywhere, packages go to lockers in the convenience store, unlock with phone app.
(Of course you can still choose to have them delivered to your door, but I find the delivery people don't ring the doorbell and then mark the delivery as missed, even with instructions to leave the package in front of the door. But that's a separate issue.)
The chinese too, afaik, in shanghai drones deliver parcels in specific parcel stations. Flying drones delivering stuff (through the windows?) to upper floors of buildings sounds like sth between scifi and madness right now. Having specific pickup locations solves a lot of problems like the ones here, as drones can just have to follow specific, predetermined routes that can be more easily monitored, instead of having to go to some random, different address.
Have you ever been inside a tall building? How are you thinking a drone would deliver to the upper floors of vertical buildings? The windows don’t open. There are occasional balconies or terraces, but these are more the exception than the rule, especially for “hungry office workers in a Shenzhen skyscraper.”
Residential buildings usually have operable windows (and often balconies). My condo building is only 17 stories tall, but my windows open all the way. On the other hand, it's an old building and there might be new rules for new buildings, since for those I usually only see the windows open a little.
Still it would be silly to deliver through the window. The rooftop might make more sense (can just drop off package and not accessible to random people on the street).
That 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.
For 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.
A 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.
In 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.
At least in the US, minimum separation is for when you're talking to air traffic control, and MSA is for flying on instruments. Minimum separation when you can see outside and aren't talking to ATC is "don't hit other planes." Minimum altitude is 500ft, or 1000ft over "congested areas," plus 500ft distance from any obstacle. Unless you're flying a helicopter (or powered parachute or hang glider) in which case the only requirement is "the operation is conducted without hazard to persons or property on the surface."
It would make sense for a quadcopter to follow helicopter rules. Obviously it does not follow the "without hazard" requirement if you crash into cables, though.
Fair enough, I am not a pilot, just a nerd so I wasn’t aware of this!
I’d agree the helicopter rules seem most appropriate, though I guess I’d still feel like that would still rule out operating anywhere near a building under construction.
That said, a regular helicopter that suffers a loss of power or other fault, still has options like autorotation to at least attempt a landing without killing anyone on the ground. Do drones have any equivalent ? I.e. if battery is below x% it returns to safe landing spot?
"Without hazard" is pretty subjective, but I agree that it probably shouldn't include casually flying around cranes.
I don't know how drones are programmed, but landing immediately if the battery gets low certainly sounds like a sensible precaution. Electric motors might be reliable enough that you don't have to worry about gracefully handling failure of those. I hope so, because I don't think a quadcopter has much hope if any motor fails.
Was this particular operation careless and wreckless? Could be.
Someone else in the thread said the weather conditions included mist. I'm skeptical misty conditions also permits a minimum 3 miles of visibility, but what do I know I'm just a pilot.
But also, it's possible the waiver I assume Amazon is operating under could include visibility. I assume this because Part 107 requires visual line of sight operation, but Amazon's operation sounds like beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS). I don't know anything about that. I'd like to think the waiver and the operating requirements are public information, but I don't know that either.
Thanks for the context! Makes sense for traditional aircraft to be super conservative like this, especially given they tend to travel very long routes and sometimes have nothing more than a pair of human eyes paying attention to obstacles.
Do you know what are the rules for helicopters in a city? That seems like a closer analogue.
Why do people always get a hard on for bizarre drone rules? Some amateur pilot goes up in a fireball every other week, I think we put up their safety record to that of drones and there are going to be some hard choices to make - I think it's over for our amateur pilots out there.
TBH my concern is less for the fate of people who choose to fly planes or drones - they are the ones making the choice so if they hurt themselves that sucks, but none of my business. However I am concerned for the innocent bystanders who might be under them, who did not choose to risk death or injury by an aircraft, drone or otherwise.
The template for this ofc is how we handle (or don't handle) the danger posed by people inside cars, to people outside cars. In aviation we will do a lot to avoid even one death, in the air or on the ground. But in cars we mostly don't give a crap. It took decades for drunk driving to become unacceptable, but outside of that, we are still pretty ok with death by car. The only survivor of the collision just has to claim the person outside the vehicle "darted" and we all shrug and move on.
I would just love it if we could apply lessons of the past to new technology. Instead we just hand wave it all away. Then in a few decades, if enough people die and their surviving loved ones invest enough time & energy, maybe we'll make a few tweaks to the formula.
So no, we don't need 5nm separations for 20 lb drones. But we do need some sort of structure that recognizes the people under them didn't sign up to be part of the beta test. For bonus points it should also recognize that externalities exist and should be priced but I am not holding my breath.
At 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.
100mph is probably around the top speed for home built FPV quadcopters with 5 inch propellers; that's neither uncommon or expensive. Amazon's drones are probably built for efficiency though so they will go slower than that.
5 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.
I 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.
I 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.
The 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.
Neural 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.
> 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?
The 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.
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.
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.
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.
Correct, 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.
Aerial 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
The 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...
For 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.
The 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.
The 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.
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.
The 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.
I'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.
"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."
They 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.
And if it doesn't perform as expected in the world, all human efforts should be on fixing the actual code. Anything else, especially non-technical conversations, is a waste of human time.
Not 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.
Yes 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.
Flying in uncontrolled airspace in VMC is a “see and avoid” environment, meaning this looks like a pretty bad screw up by Amazon.
The fact that two different drones crashed into the same object raises even more serious questions on the quality of Amazon’s tech and their ability to safely monitor it.
I don't know that amazon engineers should be expected to see e.g. a moving small steel cable under tension.
That and customers are required to select safe delivery drop zones.
I would like to see better "oh shit we're crashing let's try not to kill anyone" protection, e.g. research on improving controlled landings on damaged drones. Maybe refusal to deliver if there are any detected humans in the drop zone (which may well already exist).
It means Amazon’s approach to its “see and avoid” responsibility is fundamentally flawed in some way vs this being a one-off fluke with a broken sensor or other anomaly.
ok but also two drones crashing isn't "more" of a problem than one drone crashing really.
Sounds like the anamoly here was a very unsafe landing zone (which is outside the customer agreement as it happens).
small steel cables take out human pilots too..
Would be really curious how they might guard against adversarial drone deliveries. Kinda weird to have end users basically piloting your $100K (I'm guessing) vehicles.
At the same time? If there's a crash there should be an automatic system which geofences off that area making it impossible for other drones to go near there, while the situation is assessed.
If a drone crashes, obviously no other drones should fly there until a human determines what went wrong and presses the 'resume' button. The fact that that system did not exist is a systemic problem.
The systemic problem is that they didn't spend the engineer-week on it. It's only an engineer week. That pays for itself after avoiding a single drone crash to say nothing of avoiding a second lawsuit.
Wires are somewhere between hard and not possible to see, visually. The "fix" for this might be "that kinda looks like it might be construction over there, go around".
In the sun, at 50mph? 50mph sets the minimum range of the scan (related to the "full stop" distance and fully loaded maneuverability), which sets the acquisition rate and angular resolution requirement to see a thin cable at that distance. I suppose maneuverability would also set the FOV requirement.
Are there any commercial drones that do it "right", with LIDAR?
> Our approval includes the ability to fly Beyond Visual Line of Sight, using our sophisticated on-board detect and avoid system. This is an historic, first-of-its-kind approval for a new drone system and a new operating location following a rigorous FAA evaluation of the safety of our systems and processes.
It's true the FAA would have had to have signed off on these so that will be interesting.
The video also includes a video clip of package delivery, where drone would drop package to the ground, which worked. But then propeller blew the package right into the bush was lmao.
I'm mildly amused by this. It's an open air environment, did someone go stand over one of the crashed drones as it burst into flames and just, breathed deep? Glad they got treatment, plastic smoke is gross.
Also wow, the drones are massive, and apparently flying so low they will hit cranes putting things on single story buildings? That's so stupid.
Dear tech world: Please do not fly 80 pound projectiles just a few feet above my head at speed. Jeeze.
China is way ahead here. There's now a Ministry of the Low Altitude Economy.[1]
There's a Low Altitude Flight Service System, which is air traffic control for drones and flying cars. There are licenses for drone operators, categories of license, (advanced licenses require a flight exam), etc.
China hasn't had much general aviation. There are very few private aircraft. So there was nothing like the US's FAA Flight Service Stations. Plans to change that started in 2018, as a new design, mostly automated. That system also handles drones above 120 meters, or is supposed to.
Delivery is to a box like an Amazon delivery box. Here's the current list of delivery locations and how to use the app to order.[3] Weight limit 2.3kg. Delivery time 15 minutes.
It's still rather limited. You can't have a delivery platform on your balcony yet. Mostly they deliver to parks and big open plazas.
The Shenzhen city administration seems to be very drone-friendly. There are delivery drones.
Advertising drones. Light show drones. Police drones.
Like, they may have trained on power lines, catenaries above rail tracks, network cables, etc. but all of them are horizontal. And the software couldn't recognize vertical cables or cables at an angle.
Little after 10am, pure speculation but wonder if the angle of the sun overwhelmed the dynamic range of the image sensor over a particularly inopportune area of the frame. Guessing no LiDAR on drones like this.
Fine speculation. But they should be smart enough not to fly into their own blind spots e.g. the sun. They would tack back and forth I bet. They have a lot of tricks like this.
I bet it has to be a confluence of factors. I hope Amazon reports openly what went wrong. FAA should demand it. Will be a very interesting report if we ever get to read it.
Given the severity of this it’s likely the NTSB will get involved, and Amazon’s ability to operate would likely be suspended pending a review of their operation.
Based on the descriptions I've read so far, it sounds like the drones didn't give enough space around the crane boom, which it seems like they avoided. That's not to make an excuse. But it's a different defect than failing to detect the crane boom.
My theory could in theory hold if a specular highlight off the boom arm created some type of confusion I suppose, however, I posted it as just thinking aloud, I don't have much faith in my own theory at large.
(my degree is in digital imaging technology so, fun thinking problems for me :)
I wonder if they do a routine map of the delivery area (with a Lidar plane) so they have a high-resolution scan of the city for better pathing. But they didn't expect something like a crane that could be assembled so high and fast to be in the way.
I'm currently in Phoenix and it's a little after 10am and the sun is almost directly overhead at this time of day. Would they need sensors pointing directly overhead in-flight?
No one could have known. And in Phoenix, no less, where it's famously overcast most of the time? Next you're going to tell me that a component overheated or clocked down for thermal throttling - preposterous, Phoenix is great for passive cooling! /s
mmWave is the usual solution for this; I know that Amazon were at least testing using mmWave but I'm not sure if it made it to their production drones.
I can't seem to locate any NOTAMs indicating the presence of the crane. There are NOTAMs for a crane to the NNW of KGRY (Phoenix Goodyear Airport) but Tolleson is to the east of that airport.
Is there a hole in how we're doing NOTAMs if we're expecting to have UAS operating at low altitude away from airports?
Also, what other obstacle data is available? I know the US Gov't aviation maps depict significant man made structures that stick up like towers, windmills, and larger buildings. However, when you look at the NY Heli map, it's clear that not every building in Manhattan is depicted. These are generally low enough that a helo would be operating in see-and-avoid (VFR).
Perhaps there is a new market available for this navigation data...
I looked at the NOTAM guidance and they are simply not required if the crane's boom is lowered at night. Actually this pattern appears in a lot of NOTAM requirements. The FAA is permissive by default and they seem to think you don't need to report things that are 'visible'.
Also, I dont think any of the equipment in this scene needs to be advertised to aircraft. None of this stuff is taller than a normal tree and we aren't filing NOTAMs for the presence of every public park, right?
Terrifying. Imagine being a roofer or other worker when a delivery drone knocks your ass off the n-th floor surface that you're working on. It wouldn't take much to get somebody killed in such a precarious situation.
Impact aside, really, any contact to a soft meat bag by an 80lb machine surrounded by whirling propellers at high rpm will result in an unpleasant outcome.
An 80lb mass moving at any appreciable speed hitting you is going to suck regardless of what it is.
At a leisurely 3 mi/h, wolfram alpha gives this amusing comparison: about 0.36 times the momentum of an American football player moving at a speed of 1 m/s.
The framers have nothing to attach to until there's structure, and they don't really need to get up there much until they do the decking. They can attach lines to the ridge then. So can the roofers when it's their turn.
When I was a roofer, I think we might have used safety lines and harnesses twice, when the pitch was too steep.
I've never seen residential house roofers wearing a safety harness, even on 2-story jobs. There's generally nowhere to clip the harness to on such buildings, so it wouldn't help anyway.
There's roof safety anchor systems which are designed for residential roofs. Look for something like the Ridgepro anchor: https://www.theridgepro.com/
It does seem best when using lag bolts to secure such an anchor to the roof but even when not screwed to the roof should provide some level of fall safety.
They should be, but I also rarely see roofers in harnesses around here on the other side of the country. It's one thing when it's a roofer himself making the (stupid) decision, but a lot of the guys I see actually on the roofs are non-English-speaking laborers basically told to get the job done and not ask questions.
Generally speaking you start doing that stuff once you get to 3 or more storeys, which is why residential mass builds are typically 2 or less. Workers’ compensation will specifically have job categories for work done on buildings 2 storeys or less, and it goes way up once you get to 3 (and even more for 4+).
Even with all the gear, an unpredictable 80 lb object hurtling towards you is a major problem. Not to mention becoming a problem for any standing below.
Was working for a construction guy I overall respected, and he had us going up on a 3-story barn roof without any kind of roped-in protection. Although I was a fairly experienced rock climber (or perhaps because of it), I quit at lunch.
I was very lucky to have had the opportunity to have the backup finances to be able to afford to quit.
I had a chimney inspection and cap on my pretty steep pitched residential roof last year in MA on 2 story house. No harnesses that I saw. Wouldn’t be for me.
Certainly harnesses and other safety gear are much more common in many situations.
A coworker (also works from home) had some commotion across the street, when one of the roofers on his neighbour's place went off the second-story roof. All these guys were wearing harnesses, but not clipped in. The one who fell was luck in that he hit a garden shed roof rather than another 8' to the concrete, but was definitely hurt. Fire department came, yelled at these guys for being idiots. Roofers said they'd comply, and once the FD left, went back to what they were doing. This is right after losing a guy to a fall.
Years ago I heard a comment from someone in the trades that (in his opinion) harnesses are a net negative on typical single-family-houses - the presence of the rigging (particularly when there are multiple workers on the roof) creates trip hazards that make falls and injuries more likely.
Whether or not it's true, if significant numbers of crews believe this they won't be wearing harnesses on low roofs.
Exemplary of the new norm of engineering practice in the US: "if all you have is a shotgun, everything looks like a target." In this context, casualties at ground level be damned.
New? For a country this infantile? Our utterly questionable engineering is the closest thing we have to history.
With the appropriate amount of sarcasm: the Mayflower included several variations of "stock" and countless untold mistakes in the wake! We surely beat those Soviets and Socialism, gosh darn it. Just don't pay attention to the social fabric or what the CIA has done. Nevermind the particularly Aryan scientists, where we found them, or what might happen when they get fat/bored/lazy and procreate. We need The Bomb.
Literally everything around us has the same dangers. Like getting into a car and doing 70mph in the opposite direction of some stranger doing the same speed possibly drunk or high.
This tech will be completely standard and everywhere eventually and no one will pay attention to it. Benefits will outweigh any risks and just like cars people won’t be going around fearing them.
Move fast and break things doesn't work when safety is involved. Did a properly trained and licensed Professional Engineer review the design of Amazon's drones, their safety features and protocols before they got approval to fly outside of private testing facilities? If not, who would insure that hot mess?
nice pictures. that fire proofing around all of the wires is neat, as is that bldc design with the integrated heat-sinks and the huge compute unit with the copper piping to external heat-sinks.
very nice equipment before it was smashed to smithereens.
it's rare to get a glimpse into this stuff internally. Similarly I wish Doordash would show what the Dot looks like under the bonnet so I don't need to wait for the inevitable collision pictures.
The technical side of this emerging consumer-facing robotics thing just fascinates the hell out of me.
The local Walmart nearest me has also started using drone delivery using Zipline drones. It's not a store I frequent, but recently drove past and the landing/launching site has a very unique look to it. At first thought, I thought it was a small carnival type of set up, but realized the rides looked really weird. There's large towers that remind me of the sculptures in Singapore near the ship on stilts building. I just perused Zipline's website hoping to find some imagery, but the site is clearly focused on promotional aspects with happy people receiving packages. zzzzzz.
Zipline drones fly quite high, and instead of descending and landing to deliver their payload, they hover at altitude and lower a "delivery pod" down on a wire. The pod also has maneuvering capabilities, but all of its thrusters are fully enclosed, and it's designed to not cause any damage even it if collides with something during descent or ascent. Overall, a very clever design that should be safer, create no noise on ground level, and be able to deliver into much smaller and more confined landing zones.
Sure, but it's the launch/landing site that is in question. It's not just a helipad set up. It's very sci-fi looking and looks very complicated. I'm wondering if the drone itself lands at the top and then lowers the pod for loading to keep them out of reach of the employees. Probably even touted as a safety feature. I just haven't seen the system in operation, and their website just ignores this part as it's not something necessary for marketing.
There is a bunch of videos on Youtube on Zipline, some of them from the company itself (this one showing specifically the "platform": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=airEzThGlx8), and some from various tech people looking into the whole thing (like Markus Brownlee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88yQTzlmsiA). Probably a better overall source of into than their website.
If an amazon delivery drone uses the same route as a truck, what's the point of the drone? As a crow flies would be the point to be as direct as possible.
Edit: Nevermind. I'm not awake yet. this logic does not compute. please ignore
Nah - at 0:35 into the video on the news page, you can see the crane they actually crashed into. There are boom lifts around, but they hit a proper crane. Pulled this link from the video but no clue how direct linking works with some of these weird sites;
Boom lifts, available in various models such as mini scissor lifts for sale, spider lifts, and tracked scissor lifts, offer excellent mobility, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness for many tasks. Cranes, on the other hand, are essential for heavy lifting and large-scale projects.
I also learned that "spider lifts" look like something a bad guy drives in a sci-fi movie.
Household ownership of cars hit 50% by 1930 but there was no federal seatbelt mandate unitl 1968 or regulation of intoxicated driving until the 1980s.
Don't hold your breath waiting on the US government to give a shit about death and destruction of its people. Let the industry discover the tech and capitalist forces dictate safety, around 2060 we can start having serious conversations about drone safety.
To any of the aspiring Ralph Nader's of the drone industry out there, thank you for your service in advance.
The facts don’t line up with your concerns. Amazon announced prime air in what 2013 IIRC. Now 12 years later they have FAA approval for a small number of test flights. Exactly so they can slowly discover problems like this and fix them. Every safety critical system in the world is iteratively refined based on real world learnings about mistakes - mistakes made after careful design to avoid them. It’s just really really hard.
The discover and fix phase is over. In August 2025, the FAA announced Part 108 which codifies the rules. Up until now, companies have been operating under waivers. The comment period for Part 108 ends on October 6th. After that the rules may be changed slightly and then will be finalized.
You can select a few comments at random and quickly find a pattern: people are concerned that the drones everywhere except in the densest of areas do not have to see where they are going. If they hit a manned aircraft it's the manned aircraft's fault and the drone operator has no legal liability. Does that sound like something FAA employees wrote themselves? How much motivation will be there to "iteratively refine" when they have no legal liability and even admitting that a possible improvement exists would create legal liability?
What do you mean “the discover and fix phase is over”? That implies that safety critical systems stop trying to discover problems and fix them? In what world is that true? You are always learning from mistakes and fixing them. Forever.
I think this is frankly the obvious consequence of the FAA inventing authority to allow commercial drone operations at low altitude (by "invented" I mean completely ignoring the precedent of United States v. Causby which establishes ownership of some airspace above one's property). Commercial drones are flying around at low altitude not because they should, but because they cannot safely share the airspace with other existing airspace users.
The solution here is not more NOTAMs or specific hazard detection; the solution is having commercial drones get the hell out of other people's property (i.e. very low altitudes) and safely share the rest of the airspace with existing users.
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> It's unclear if anyone was injured during the incident.
'It's unclear if' is a phrase that paints a brilliant picture of an organ's journalistic standing.
It means there's no information either way, what follows is pure speculation, probably false, but the author can put whatever idea they want in our heads, since they've prefaced that it 'may or may not be the case'.
It's unclear if the drones had malicious intent. It's unclear if the author was sober while writing and free of criminal record.
That could be misread too though depending on when you're reading it and when you think the article was written in relation to the events. If it's a quick article right after it reads like the original verbiage but if you think it happened a while before the article was written it sounds more authoritative that there were no injuries. The "it is unclear" phrasing makes the ambiguity clear that the author doesn't know if there were any at the time of writing.
And if injuries are later reported people will sneer that 'media always gets it wrong/lies'. If they use plain language and say 'we don't know if anyone was injured yet' then people will sneer that 'I could have wirtten that, they're trying to sensationalize a nothingburger.'
Oh come on. This is just a stub article, saying two drones had crashed and police are investigating. It's clearly going to be a story of strong local and general interest, and they have limited information and a couple of photographs so the story is only a few sentences long for now.
Ranting about deeper meaning of the words in such a minimal bulletin is nonsensical.
It's unclear if this commenter has read more than just the headlines. Maybe they try to argue for the sake of controversy and outrage culture. Maybe they just don't have a brain.
But seriously, the article text doesn't follow up with any speculation and highlights it is a developing story. According to the latest news on TV, someone actually was insured and is now at the hospital. The details are still unclear however. This is very based reporting for the world we currently live in and I would like to see more news stations follow this style instead of jumping to conclusions.
Re-using the motor half of an electric toothbrush after a return doesn't seem egregious, but the fact that they didn't notice the tips were missing means they didn't even open them up to check their cosmetic condition, let alone clean them at all. I think that's the part that makes it bad, rather than reselling them itself.
when your account is blocked you've been flagged for fraud. Nobody's going to talk to you due to legal reasons. You just have to wait for them to either unblock you or until you die.
> when your account is blocked you've been flagged for fraud. Nobody's going to talk to you due to legal reasons.
Devil's advocate, what are the "legal reasons" a human can't talk to someone whose account their company has blocked? Especially when the violation was apparently minor enough that it's only a 2-day temporary block?
There aren’t any “legal reasons”. There is a risk/reward calculation where a gigantic corp concludes the reward of 1 extra customer is less than the risk of 1 potentially problematic customer, so they perform the equivalent of exile.
You're already gonna get screwed by your local government, your homeowners insurer, and all manner of other things on the basis of drone photography. That cat is already out of the bag. At least for the package delivery use case everyday people stand to benefit at least a bit.
I don't think people should shoot them down, but I do think drone-based delivery will be rejected by consumers if it ever reaches significant scale in non-rural areas which will create a self-limiter on growth of usage.
Its cool if a drone delivers your sandwich. But when the sky is littered with them because they are also delivering random stuff to all of your neighbors it very quickly becomes a lot less cool.
Never mind the fact that its concerning from a safety standpoint that one of the biggest players in the space has just proved (twice) that their drones can't even avoid a very large unmoving object.
"but I do think drone-based delivery will be rejected by consumers if it ever reaches significant scale in non-rural areas"
I'd wager it's the opposite: Rural areas would notice the one off noise of a drone flying overhead because humans notice novel sounds more. In an urban area you already have other significant sources of noise (traffic mainly) and if the drones are ubiquitous it might just be more of a background constant that people tune out.
By the way, I see very little discussion on the drones used in the UA-RU war, which should be quite interesting from a hacker's perspective. Technology is going very fast there.
Probably because this thread is only remotely related to that? There's been countless discussions on the topic, doesn't mean every thread has to be about that.
I am personally working on intellectual property related to that. IMO this topic is impossible to discuss online, it’s a magnet for bots and troll farms.
I don't really see what you mean, if you use the HN search Algolia provides, you can see people talking about it from different angles pretty much every day.
Strange, because I never see it on the front page.
Perhaps I should change the way I read HN.
PS: I just searched, and indeed there is a lot of talk about incidents around drones. But what I mean is talk about the technology used in these drones. For example, how do you send a video feed through a kilometers long fiber optic cable that is cheap to produce and lightweight? These are the kind of questions I'm interested in.
There were plenty of proposals back in 2021 about having highways in the sky for drone delivery operations, at least in Canada, so such incidents are avoided, as relying on technology alone isn't enough and the risk plans are only to mitigate rather than eliminate the risks.
That being said, drone delivery will not really become a thing unless the endurance issue is resolved, like a new breakthrough battery technology that gives you at least 4 hours flight time (hybrid drones are noisy), as for any drone to have a proper impact, it should have three items checked: endurance, payload, and range. The last two are pretty much resolved by having modular payloads and flying over the internet, the first one is still pending.
I'm not sure they need endurance, if they're cheap enough companies can just buy a fleet n times larger than the number they need in the air at any given moment and have the others charging at base. Or more likely buy some extra batteries and have someone employed to swap them out when they're getting low.
Why do you think there is any problem with battery endurance? I’m quite sure Amazon has run the numbers on battery life for individual flights and for the lifetime of battery packs many many times. It’s just economics. And has basically nothing to do with safety. Unless a battery fails suddenly and spectacularly, which is rare and probably isn’t what caused it to crash into a crane.
It is for both, manned and unmanned, providing also a map of the network coverage in these “highways” and other active drones as well. I remember seeing a proof of concept platform that provided such functionality in Singapore, I am not sure if it became a reality later though.
It's not a limit, just from my personal exposure in the overall drone delivery, 3-4hrs would provide enough time with margin for any safe delivery, beyond that is definitely better but probably is too hard to achieve. Keep in mind the actual flight time will be less than that, accounting for payload weight and environment like wind and temperature. In cold weather like Canada, the batteries will consume some of their energy to heat themselves before taking off.
What's the math that gets to 3-4 hours? Do the drones usually multiple deliveries in a flight? In my metro I would have assumes that any place is less than 30 minutes flight time from a Whole Foods or Walmart for example. How long does the actual safe delivery take? I assume it just lowers the goods and doesn't wait for the customer, right?
Edit: The Internet tells me that delivery drones fly at 40-60mp/h which is much faster than I assumed and makes the 3-4 hour window even more surprising to me.
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?
Flying 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.
Contra this assertion, drones are already frequently used around power lines, and as such, "finding hanging wires with a drone" is actually a very active field with fairly robust solutions. Not only are drones used for power line inspections (which are actually a somewhat easier variant of this problem, because the drone usually flies above or adjacent to the power lines in this scenario), but also for infrastructure inspections in direct adjacency to power lines. Power line detect-and-avoid is a headlining feature in one of DJI's newer enterprise platforms, the M400 (where it's based on LIDAR + mmWave Radar fusion).
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HFzRTRcjiqg
Also of note, this isn't the first double-failure issue for the MK30 - they had an issue last year at their test facility where their LIDAR malfunctioned in the same way on two drones in the same weather condition (misting), the drones believed they were at 0.0AGL and powered down in flight.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-16/amazon-re...
My guess is that detecting wires is also a very active field of research in a military context unfortunately as nets become a common defense mechanism.
Yeah. 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 . Better than getting tangled, I guess.
On 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
The only safe system is for aircraft to avoid wires.
What they show on video does not protect props. Dumbest invention ever. Never mind that the idea of cutting cable is even worse.
The guy who invented it tested it at various speeds and angles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_strike_protection_system. There are also numerous documented cases of these working as intended in the NTSB database. The FAA did a study and found that wire strike cutters significantly reduced fatalities https://skybrary.aero/sites/default/files/bookshelf/3288.pdf
So no, not a dumb idea according to the FAA's data backed study, the US military, and the people that operate helicopters.
Ok. I am the one who is dumb in here ;) Shit happens
It does protect, and is already certified and installed on many copters. Still, it's an emergency device, last resort, like parachutes on some small airplanes.
Multiple cable cutters are installed on every military helicopter
Interesting. Did not think of military, those might have "special needs"
Here's an excellent video from Juan Browne around the challenges that wires present to aircraft operations [1]. Some of these are human factors for manned aircraft, like seeing a wire but then forgetting it's there, but one of his points is that it's simply safest to avoid flying below 1000ft AGL. That's not an option for drones today, and they presumably don't (yet) have the ability of humans to make inferences about the likelihood of cables near cranes and transmission line towers, making them particularly vulnerable.
[1] https://youtu.be/jjV_k4-DstQ
Drones can reach 1000 ft right? That’s only like 300m. Maybe Amazon doesn’t want to because it costs more battery?
Drones can reach much more than 1000ft, but in the US are not allowed to - 400ft flight ceiling.
Ironically, one exception is flying within 400ft of a structure, as you can then go up to the top of the structure and 400ft above that point.
That's not true, commercial and municipal drones operate above 400ft all the time. Non-commercial/civilian drones piloted by someone without an FAA Part 107 certification and a waiver cannot fly above 400ft. Also, you are allowed to fly 400ft -above- a vertical structure (like a tower) up to 1000ft tall to avoid exactly this type of collision as long as you are within 400ft horizontally of the structure. EDIT: crud, I did not read your post carefully enough, sorry, you addressed this point exactly. My bad.
If you've ever driven through Seattle, as you come past Boeing Field on I5 there are red spheres on the power lines. These lines are on a hill across the highway from the airport, so there's no way any plane should be there except during an emergency landing due to power loss.
There are situations where aircraft and wires might come in close proximity. It's more accurate to say that be default we keep them way the hell away from each other, we make exceptions for special circumstances, and the exceptions tend to seem far more conservative than you would guess.
> ”Long-distance transmission wires are sometimes inspected with helicopters”
In recent years they’ve been moving to drones for this job. Besides improving safety, drones allow increased inspection frequency and reduce costs.
Some crop dusters fly under telephone wires. Not that its a good idea, but some do.
> 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.
> 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?
guy wires
Just add a radius.
You 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.
> "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 ("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")
> But then how do you deliver to the upper floors of vertical buildings?
Elevators, dumbwaiters, baskets and pulleys, or just go downstairs and get it yourself.
Also, how tall are we talking? Where have you been where the upper floor windows actually open?
edit: the more that I think about this, the more it bothers me. Getting close enough to a building to deliver a package through a window with a drone sounds incredibly improbable and dangerous. A small gust of wind and the drone crashes into the building. You'd need some kind of pad at a distance from the building, or use the roof. Looks like there's a design for that[1].
And what if a package or drone falls from such a height?
I think the concept on its face is flawed, but then again, this exists[2].
[1] https://pejaver.com/DronePort/DronePort.htm
[2] https://jedsy.com/
>or just go downstairs and get it yourself.
Entirely defeats the purpose of ordering food.
> 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.
Many parts of Europe solved it in a more low-tech way: street-side parcel lockers unlocked with your phone. Massively reduces delivery cost (i.e., one driver can deliver far more packages per hour), is pretty convenient and safe (no packages left unattended), and best of all, doesn't require a fleet of UAVs.
You can pretty naturally extend this once you have self-driving vans.
I think Amazon has a proprietary version of this in some parts of the US, but at least where I live, the lockers are a car drive away, which defeats the purpose.
The last tower I worked in wasn't some really big tower (only about 16 stories) but in the lobby near the security booth there was a set of shelves operated by a food delivery company. Every day there would be a few restaurants listed, you'd place your order, and they'd deliver everyone's food around noon to the shelves. You'd just go down and grab your meal.
Seemed to work well enough for the times I used it. Honestly though I really valued the time to take a break and go for a walk and have lunch away from sitting at my desk.
Japan too, convenience stores are everywhere, packages go to lockers in the convenience store, unlock with phone app.
(Of course you can still choose to have them delivered to your door, but I find the delivery people don't ring the doorbell and then mark the delivery as missed, even with instructions to leave the package in front of the door. But that's a separate issue.)
The chinese too, afaik, in shanghai drones deliver parcels in specific parcel stations. Flying drones delivering stuff (through the windows?) to upper floors of buildings sounds like sth between scifi and madness right now. Having specific pickup locations solves a lot of problems like the ones here, as drones can just have to follow specific, predetermined routes that can be more easily monitored, instead of having to go to some random, different address.
Have you ever been inside a tall building? How are you thinking a drone would deliver to the upper floors of vertical buildings? The windows don’t open. There are occasional balconies or terraces, but these are more the exception than the rule, especially for “hungry office workers in a Shenzhen skyscraper.”
Residential buildings usually have operable windows (and often balconies). My condo building is only 17 stories tall, but my windows open all the way. On the other hand, it's an old building and there might be new rules for new buildings, since for those I usually only see the windows open a little.
Still it would be silly to deliver through the window. The rooftop might make more sense (can just drop off package and not accessible to random people on the street).
>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?
Yes, but this was thousands of years ago. /s
That 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.
For 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.
I'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.
A 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.
In 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.
At least in the US, minimum separation is for when you're talking to air traffic control, and MSA is for flying on instruments. Minimum separation when you can see outside and aren't talking to ATC is "don't hit other planes." Minimum altitude is 500ft, or 1000ft over "congested areas," plus 500ft distance from any obstacle. Unless you're flying a helicopter (or powered parachute or hang glider) in which case the only requirement is "the operation is conducted without hazard to persons or property on the surface."
It would make sense for a quadcopter to follow helicopter rules. Obviously it does not follow the "without hazard" requirement if you crash into cables, though.
Fair enough, I am not a pilot, just a nerd so I wasn’t aware of this!
I’d agree the helicopter rules seem most appropriate, though I guess I’d still feel like that would still rule out operating anywhere near a building under construction.
That said, a regular helicopter that suffers a loss of power or other fault, still has options like autorotation to at least attempt a landing without killing anyone on the ground. Do drones have any equivalent ? I.e. if battery is below x% it returns to safe landing spot?
"Without hazard" is pretty subjective, but I agree that it probably shouldn't include casually flying around cranes.
I don't know how drones are programmed, but landing immediately if the battery gets low certainly sounds like a sensible precaution. Electric motors might be reliable enough that you don't have to worry about gracefully handling failure of those. I hope so, because I don't think a quadcopter has much hope if any motor fails.
As far as I'm aware 14 CFR 107 lacks anything like what applies to aircraft in case of power plant failure.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/part-91#p-91.119(a)
The catch all under both regulations is anything that's "careless and wreckless"
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/part-107#p-107.23
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/section-91.13
Was this particular operation careless and wreckless? Could be.
Someone else in the thread said the weather conditions included mist. I'm skeptical misty conditions also permits a minimum 3 miles of visibility, but what do I know I'm just a pilot.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/part-107#p-107.51(c)
But also, it's possible the waiver I assume Amazon is operating under could include visibility. I assume this because Part 107 requires visual line of sight operation, but Amazon's operation sounds like beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS). I don't know anything about that. I'd like to think the waiver and the operating requirements are public information, but I don't know that either.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/section-107.31
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/part-107#p-107.205(c)
Those FAA minimum altitudes apply to non-drone aviation. Not to drones.
For drones, there's a different set of FAA (and possibly state) rules.
Thanks for the context! Makes sense for traditional aircraft to be super conservative like this, especially given they tend to travel very long routes and sometimes have nothing more than a pair of human eyes paying attention to obstacles.
Do you know what are the rules for helicopters in a city? That seems like a closer analogue.
Why do people always get a hard on for bizarre drone rules? Some amateur pilot goes up in a fireball every other week, I think we put up their safety record to that of drones and there are going to be some hard choices to make - I think it's over for our amateur pilots out there.
TBH my concern is less for the fate of people who choose to fly planes or drones - they are the ones making the choice so if they hurt themselves that sucks, but none of my business. However I am concerned for the innocent bystanders who might be under them, who did not choose to risk death or injury by an aircraft, drone or otherwise.
The template for this ofc is how we handle (or don't handle) the danger posed by people inside cars, to people outside cars. In aviation we will do a lot to avoid even one death, in the air or on the ground. But in cars we mostly don't give a crap. It took decades for drunk driving to become unacceptable, but outside of that, we are still pretty ok with death by car. The only survivor of the collision just has to claim the person outside the vehicle "darted" and we all shrug and move on.
I would just love it if we could apply lessons of the past to new technology. Instead we just hand wave it all away. Then in a few decades, if enough people die and their surviving loved ones invest enough time & energy, maybe we'll make a few tweaks to the formula.
So no, we don't need 5nm separations for 20 lb drones. But we do need some sort of structure that recognizes the people under them didn't sign up to be part of the beta test. For bonus points it should also recognize that externalities exist and should be priced but I am not holding my breath.
5 miles sounds pretty ridiculous, TBH. These things aren't moving at Mach 3.
At 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.
> 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.
100mph is probably around the top speed for home built FPV quadcopters with 5 inch propellers; that's neither uncommon or expensive. Amazon's drones are probably built for efficiency though so they will go slower than that.
5 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.
Just what I was looking for. Thanks for the context!
not under it at a minimum lol
I 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.
I 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.
The 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.
Neural 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.
Whenever 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” :)
> 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.
Newer DJI drones can see cable down to 4mm using LIDAR and other methods. So yeah, Amazon has some catching up to do.
Humans can’t really see cables when flying either. Drones need to be better.
The 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)
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
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)
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-cras...
Correct, 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.
Aerial 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
The 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...
What happens when they aren't live or is that just a thing that doesn't happen? I know nothing about this topic.
MmWave radar is commonly used for this purpose on both commercial and research UAVs, see e.g.: https://youtu.be/MORFX3CFygk
>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.
A 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.
For 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.
mmWave radar is commonly used for detecting (horizontal) cables of similar thickness in a very common use of enterprise drones: power line inspection.
Even 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.
Drones that can dodge thin wires already exist, seems more like their perception algorithms/onboard vision hardware just arent up to the task
Why is "don't use autonomous drones for such things" not in that list?
>Genuinely curious what the solution here is.
no fly zones around construction sites?
The 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.
The 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.
The solution is don't use delivery drones.
Or cranes, right?
Amazon uses its lobbying powers to make it illegal to operate a crane without submitting an approval request to Amazon and paying a fee.
The solution is to ban drone deliveries in built-up areas. We do not need them.
just... don't fly near active construction sites?
"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.
The 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.
I'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.
Maybe, 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-fur...
They 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.
The code, all of it, is just an implementation detail. All that matters is real world behavior and its consequences.
And if it doesn't perform as expected in the world, all human efforts should be on fixing the actual code. Anything else, especially non-technical conversations, is a waste of human time.
Sure, but the police or feds or FAA aren’t responsible for fixing it. They’re just enforcement
Cables are not hard to see with eyes.
If this were true, aviation cable markers would not be a thing. Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Cavalese_cable_car_crash
Not 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.
Yes 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.
Flying in uncontrolled airspace in VMC is a “see and avoid” environment, meaning this looks like a pretty bad screw up by Amazon.
The fact that two different drones crashed into the same object raises even more serious questions on the quality of Amazon’s tech and their ability to safely monitor it.
Two drones doesn't really mean anything if they were following a similar flight plan to make a delivery at the same location right?
It means it wasn't a fluke or a bug specific to one drone, but something wrong in the overall software approach.
The repetition strongly indicates it’s a bug. No reason to think it points to a fundamental flaw in the approach.
i mean they both flew into invisible drone traps.
I don't know that amazon engineers should be expected to see e.g. a moving small steel cable under tension.
That and customers are required to select safe delivery drop zones.
I would like to see better "oh shit we're crashing let's try not to kill anyone" protection, e.g. research on improving controlled landings on damaged drones. Maybe refusal to deliver if there are any detected humans in the drop zone (which may well already exist).
It means Amazon’s approach to its “see and avoid” responsibility is fundamentally flawed in some way vs this being a one-off fluke with a broken sensor or other anomaly.
ok but also two drones crashing isn't "more" of a problem than one drone crashing really.
Sounds like the anamoly here was a very unsafe landing zone (which is outside the customer agreement as it happens).
small steel cables take out human pilots too..
Would be really curious how they might guard against adversarial drone deliveries. Kinda weird to have end users basically piloting your $100K (I'm guessing) vehicles.
At the same time? If there's a crash there should be an automatic system which geofences off that area making it impossible for other drones to go near there, while the situation is assessed.
If a drone crashes, obviously no other drones should fly there until a human determines what went wrong and presses the 'resume' button. The fact that that system did not exist is a systemic problem.
That sounds like an engineer-week of work not really a ground-up systemic problem. But fair criticism.
The systemic problem is that they didn't spend the engineer-week on it. It's only an engineer week. That pays for itself after avoiding a single drone crash to say nothing of avoiding a second lawsuit.
> see and avoid
Wires are somewhere between hard and not possible to see, visually. The "fix" for this might be "that kinda looks like it might be construction over there, go around".
Even 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.
In the sun, at 50mph? 50mph sets the minimum range of the scan (related to the "full stop" distance and fully loaded maneuverability), which sets the acquisition rate and angular resolution requirement to see a thin cable at that distance. I suppose maneuverability would also set the FOV requirement.
Are there any commercial drones that do it "right", with LIDAR?
well at least it's consistent
second time was because dev rejected bug report without QA replicating it
this is actually hilarious because now they can't call it a fluke or an act of god
Crashing it a second time is, in my books, an act of God. I guess God isn't really that fond of Amazon.
News Media: "Bezos has more money than God"
God: "Hold my staff"
From their brief on the drones themselves: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-drone...
> Our approval includes the ability to fly Beyond Visual Line of Sight, using our sophisticated on-board detect and avoid system. This is an historic, first-of-its-kind approval for a new drone system and a new operating location following a rigorous FAA evaluation of the safety of our systems and processes.
It's true the FAA would have had to have signed off on these so that will be interesting.
The NTSB should be investigating, then.
Maybe the FAA let Amazon self-approve them. Business as usual.
https://www.theverge.com/news/790636/amazon-prime-mk30-drone... gives more information, including that
* No one was injured directly, but someone was treated for smoke inhalation
* The drones "were flying back to back"
* They hit the cable of a crane (including a link to a video showing the crane). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_ZpY6qHcTk
The video also includes a video clip of package delivery, where drone would drop package to the ground, which worked. But then propeller blew the package right into the bush was lmao.
Timestamp for the ADHD's,
https://youtu.be/E_ZpY6qHcTk?t=134
Drop and tumble helps reduce impact energy, might manage to keep the goods intact.
>someone was treated for smoke inhalation
I'm mildly amused by this. It's an open air environment, did someone go stand over one of the crashed drones as it burst into flames and just, breathed deep? Glad they got treatment, plastic smoke is gross.
Also wow, the drones are massive, and apparently flying so low they will hit cranes putting things on single story buildings? That's so stupid.
Dear tech world: Please do not fly 80 pound projectiles just a few feet above my head at speed. Jeeze.
China is way ahead here. There's now a Ministry of the Low Altitude Economy.[1] There's a Low Altitude Flight Service System, which is air traffic control for drones and flying cars. There are licenses for drone operators, categories of license, (advanced licenses require a flight exam), etc.
China hasn't had much general aviation. There are very few private aircraft. So there was nothing like the US's FAA Flight Service Stations. Plans to change that started in 2018, as a new design, mostly automated. That system also handles drones above 120 meters, or is supposed to.
[1] https://businessaviation.aero/evtol-news-and-electric-aircra...
China is way ahead on what exactly? Regulation?
Fast food delivery in Shenzhen:
Shipping end: [1]
Receiving end: [2]
Delivery is to a box like an Amazon delivery box. Here's the current list of delivery locations and how to use the app to order.[3] Weight limit 2.3kg. Delivery time 15 minutes.
It's still rather limited. You can't have a delivery platform on your balcony yet. Mostly they deliver to parks and big open plazas.
The Shenzhen city administration seems to be very drone-friendly. There are delivery drones. Advertising drones. Light show drones. Police drones.
[1] https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/R...
[2] https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/m...
[3] https://shenzhentimes.com/how-to-order-takeout-by-drone-in-s...
An alternative way to look at this is they are (trying to) build the institutions that will pave the way for the success of the technology.
China has so little domestic general aviation that it is common for learning pilots to train in other countries!
Australia gets a lot of Chinese student pilots.
Amazon engineer this morning to colleague: "Hey! Maybe we should include some cranes in our training data."
As someone who has worked in AV perception this is unfortunately way too accurate lol, so much training set whack-a-mole
Like, they may have trained on power lines, catenaries above rail tracks, network cables, etc. but all of them are horizontal. And the software couldn't recognize vertical cables or cables at an angle.
cables at an angle.
With tens of thousands of guyed towers in the United States, that's a bad omission.
I'm not looking forward to _that_ CAPTCHA.
Little after 10am, pure speculation but wonder if the angle of the sun overwhelmed the dynamic range of the image sensor over a particularly inopportune area of the frame. Guessing no LiDAR on drones like this.
Fine speculation. But they should be smart enough not to fly into their own blind spots e.g. the sun. They would tack back and forth I bet. They have a lot of tricks like this.
I bet it has to be a confluence of factors. I hope Amazon reports openly what went wrong. FAA should demand it. Will be a very interesting report if we ever get to read it.
They should learn to shield their sensors with their hand and squint. Humans perfected this millions of years ago :)
Given the severity of this it’s likely the NTSB will get involved, and Amazon’s ability to operate would likely be suspended pending a review of their operation.
Based on the descriptions I've read so far, it sounds like the drones didn't give enough space around the crane boom, which it seems like they avoided. That's not to make an excuse. But it's a different defect than failing to detect the crane boom.
My theory could in theory hold if a specular highlight off the boom arm created some type of confusion I suppose, however, I posted it as just thinking aloud, I don't have much faith in my own theory at large.
(my degree is in digital imaging technology so, fun thinking problems for me :)
I wonder if they do a routine map of the delivery area (with a Lidar plane) so they have a high-resolution scan of the city for better pathing. But they didn't expect something like a crane that could be assembled so high and fast to be in the way.
I'm currently in Phoenix and it's a little after 10am and the sun is almost directly overhead at this time of day. Would they need sensors pointing directly overhead in-flight?
If that's the case my little theory makes no sense. Thanks!
Of course!
btw, the animation on your website is absolutely beautiful. It's both haunting and pretty at the same time, really cool.
man, I can't tell you how much that means to hear! Glad you liked it. Check out the console for more :)
Who could have predicted that drones flying outside during the day might have to deal with direct sunlight?
No one could have known. And in Phoenix, no less, where it's famously overcast most of the time? Next you're going to tell me that a component overheated or clocked down for thermal throttling - preposterous, Phoenix is great for passive cooling! /s
mmWave is the usual solution for this; I know that Amazon were at least testing using mmWave but I'm not sure if it made it to their production drones.
Would that act like radar in mmWave? Send out pulses and see where they come back and time difference to estimate range?
Yep. See eg the TI AWR1843 and related AWR parts.
I spent some time searching the FAA NOTAM database... https://notams.aim.faa.gov/notamSearch/nsapp.html#/
I can't seem to locate any NOTAMs indicating the presence of the crane. There are NOTAMs for a crane to the NNW of KGRY (Phoenix Goodyear Airport) but Tolleson is to the east of that airport.
Is there a hole in how we're doing NOTAMs if we're expecting to have UAS operating at low altitude away from airports?
Also, what other obstacle data is available? I know the US Gov't aviation maps depict significant man made structures that stick up like towers, windmills, and larger buildings. However, when you look at the NY Heli map, it's clear that not every building in Manhattan is depicted. These are generally low enough that a helo would be operating in see-and-avoid (VFR).
Perhaps there is a new market available for this navigation data...
I looked at the NOTAM guidance and they are simply not required if the crane's boom is lowered at night. Actually this pattern appears in a lot of NOTAM requirements. The FAA is permissive by default and they seem to think you don't need to report things that are 'visible'.
Also, I dont think any of the equipment in this scene needs to be advertised to aircraft. None of this stuff is taller than a normal tree and we aren't filing NOTAMs for the presence of every public park, right?
https://i.imgur.com/fmxVXQz.png
Terrifying. Imagine being a roofer or other worker when a delivery drone knocks your ass off the n-th floor surface that you're working on. It wouldn't take much to get somebody killed in such a precarious situation.
Impact aside, really, any contact to a soft meat bag by an 80lb machine surrounded by whirling propellers at high rpm will result in an unpleasant outcome.
An 80lb mass moving at any appreciable speed hitting you is going to suck regardless of what it is.
At a leisurely 3 mi/h, wolfram alpha gives this amusing comparison: about 0.36 times the momentum of an American football player moving at a speed of 1 m/s.
With the information we have about the actual incident, it seems you'd only be at risk of that happening if you were as thin as a cable.
If it runs into the cable and tumbles down on you, it's a very real risk.
It seems like getting hit by a falling drone would be very dangerous if you are a roofer or not.
Or if you're being suspended by the cable of a crane.
Any modern roofer or other worker that could fall far is wearing a safety harness (with some exceptions for flat roofs that have railing set up).
You don’t wear a harness when framing and roofing 1 and 2 storey buildings. What would you even attach yourself to?
“I will not be hit by an 80 pound flying missile” is a reasonable expectation for construction workers
The framers have nothing to attach to until there's structure, and they don't really need to get up there much until they do the decking. They can attach lines to the ridge then. So can the roofers when it's their turn.
When I was a roofer, I think we might have used safety lines and harnesses twice, when the pitch was too steep.
[flagged]
I've never seen residential house roofers wearing a safety harness, even on 2-story jobs. There's generally nowhere to clip the harness to on such buildings, so it wouldn't help anyway.
There's roof safety anchor systems which are designed for residential roofs. Look for something like the Ridgepro anchor: https://www.theridgepro.com/
It does seem best when using lag bolts to secure such an anchor to the roof but even when not screwed to the roof should provide some level of fall safety.
Are these used in practice? In what regions? In Seattle suburbs, I've never seen a crew wearing any kind of attached harness.
They should be, but I also rarely see roofers in harnesses around here on the other side of the country. It's one thing when it's a roofer himself making the (stupid) decision, but a lot of the guys I see actually on the roofs are non-English-speaking laborers basically told to get the job done and not ask questions.
I am going to wager that 90% of resi roofers are not using harnesses unless the pitch of the roof is extreme. It’s all about the couch cushion.
Generally speaking you start doing that stuff once you get to 3 or more storeys, which is why residential mass builds are typically 2 or less. Workers’ compensation will specifically have job categories for work done on buildings 2 storeys or less, and it goes way up once you get to 3 (and even more for 4+).
Even with all the gear, an unpredictable 80 lb object hurtling towards you is a major problem. Not to mention becoming a problem for any standing below.
YUP
Was working for a construction guy I overall respected, and he had us going up on a 3-story barn roof without any kind of roped-in protection. Although I was a fairly experienced rock climber (or perhaps because of it), I quit at lunch.
I was very lucky to have had the opportunity to have the backup finances to be able to afford to quit.
I had a chimney inspection and cap on my pretty steep pitched residential roof last year in MA on 2 story house. No harnesses that I saw. Wouldn’t be for me.
Certainly harnesses and other safety gear are much more common in many situations.
A coworker (also works from home) had some commotion across the street, when one of the roofers on his neighbour's place went off the second-story roof. All these guys were wearing harnesses, but not clipped in. The one who fell was luck in that he hit a garden shed roof rather than another 8' to the concrete, but was definitely hurt. Fire department came, yelled at these guys for being idiots. Roofers said they'd comply, and once the FD left, went back to what they were doing. This is right after losing a guy to a fall.
Years ago I heard a comment from someone in the trades that (in his opinion) harnesses are a net negative on typical single-family-houses - the presence of the rigging (particularly when there are multiple workers on the roof) creates trip hazards that make falls and injuries more likely.
Whether or not it's true, if significant numbers of crews believe this they won't be wearing harnesses on low roofs.
laughs in independent subcontractor
And the not much here is an 80 pounds drone (Mk30).
Thank you, I stand corrected!
Shotguns are now standard issue, Foreman finally gets to work
Exemplary of the new norm of engineering practice in the US: "if all you have is a shotgun, everything looks like a target." In this context, casualties at ground level be damned.
New? For a country this infantile? Our utterly questionable engineering is the closest thing we have to history.
With the appropriate amount of sarcasm: the Mayflower included several variations of "stock" and countless untold mistakes in the wake! We surely beat those Soviets and Socialism, gosh darn it. Just don't pay attention to the social fabric or what the CIA has done. Nevermind the particularly Aryan scientists, where we found them, or what might happen when they get fat/bored/lazy and procreate. We need The Bomb.
Long way to say the absurdity is the joke/point.
Literally everything around us has the same dangers. Like getting into a car and doing 70mph in the opposite direction of some stranger doing the same speed possibly drunk or high. This tech will be completely standard and everywhere eventually and no one will pay attention to it. Benefits will outweigh any risks and just like cars people won’t be going around fearing them.
Sir, a second drone has hit the crane on 96th Avenue.
Move fast and break things doesn't work when safety is involved. Did a properly trained and licensed Professional Engineer review the design of Amazon's drones, their safety features and protocols before they got approval to fly outside of private testing facilities? If not, who would insure that hot mess?
nice pictures. that fire proofing around all of the wires is neat, as is that bldc design with the integrated heat-sinks and the huge compute unit with the copper piping to external heat-sinks.
very nice equipment before it was smashed to smithereens.
it's rare to get a glimpse into this stuff internally. Similarly I wish Doordash would show what the Dot looks like under the bonnet so I don't need to wait for the inevitable collision pictures.
The technical side of this emerging consumer-facing robotics thing just fascinates the hell out of me.
I didn't even know they were using delivery drones yet. Why did they both crash, were they working in tandem carrying one payload or something?
The local Walmart nearest me has also started using drone delivery using Zipline drones. It's not a store I frequent, but recently drove past and the landing/launching site has a very unique look to it. At first thought, I thought it was a small carnival type of set up, but realized the rides looked really weird. There's large towers that remind me of the sculptures in Singapore near the ship on stilts building. I just perused Zipline's website hoping to find some imagery, but the site is clearly focused on promotional aspects with happy people receiving packages. zzzzzz.
https://www.zipline.com/
Zipline drones fly quite high, and instead of descending and landing to deliver their payload, they hover at altitude and lower a "delivery pod" down on a wire. The pod also has maneuvering capabilities, but all of its thrusters are fully enclosed, and it's designed to not cause any damage even it if collides with something during descent or ascent. Overall, a very clever design that should be safer, create no noise on ground level, and be able to deliver into much smaller and more confined landing zones.
Sure, but it's the launch/landing site that is in question. It's not just a helipad set up. It's very sci-fi looking and looks very complicated. I'm wondering if the drone itself lands at the top and then lowers the pod for loading to keep them out of reach of the employees. Probably even touted as a safety feature. I just haven't seen the system in operation, and their website just ignores this part as it's not something necessary for marketing.
There is a bunch of videos on Youtube on Zipline, some of them from the company itself (this one showing specifically the "platform": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=airEzThGlx8), and some from various tech people looking into the whole thing (like Markus Brownlee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88yQTzlmsiA). Probably a better overall source of into than their website.
That is so cool :)
And it looks much safer than Amazon's approach of directly landing the heavy drone in your garden.
That first video you linked confirmed my suspicions. thanks
I was thinking maybe they used the same route planning system, so their routes were identical.
I'd laugh pretty hard if the second one was an automatic redelivery attempt.
"Something went wrong with the drone. Send another!"
If an amazon delivery drone uses the same route as a truck, what's the point of the drone? As a crow flies would be the point to be as direct as possible.
Edit: Nevermind. I'm not awake yet. this logic does not compute. please ignore
Without knowing anything about their routing, I think grandparent is saying they likely were on the same vector, perhaps same destination.
wow, your interpretation is much better than whatever went through my head. i'm going with too early in the morning. not enough coffee.
Been using them for years, I got a package by drone the other day.
Yeah but it’s in a pretty limited zone IIRC. Just some states and areas have it, and it’s definitely not yet a common practice.
The crash site is intriguing, want to see what tech they're using
Interesting to me that _two_ managed to hit a boom lift.
Begun, the drone wars have
Two Amazon deliver drones crash into a crane
One drone says to the other:
“They’ll do anything to stop us from unionizing”
The other responds:
“I just got put on PIP too…”
We could have universal health care, but I guess we're going to get delivery drones instead...
"Crane" is a highly optimistic word for what looks like a telescoping boom lift.
Edit: per below was actually a crane
Nah - at 0:35 into the video on the news page, you can see the crane they actually crashed into. There are boom lifts around, but they hit a proper crane. Pulled this link from the video but no clue how direct linking works with some of these weird sites;
https://cf.cdn.uplynk.com/ause1/slices/14f/5c3d34b8b29a45469...
Thanks! I took a quick look at the image in the article, and wrongly assumed they pictured the thing that it hit.
Today I learned:
Boom lifts, available in various models such as mini scissor lifts for sale, spider lifts, and tracked scissor lifts, offer excellent mobility, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness for many tasks. Cranes, on the other hand, are essential for heavy lifting and large-scale projects.
I also learned that "spider lifts" look like something a bad guy drives in a sci-fi movie.
Boom and bucket lifts all conveniently say "Do not use as a crane"
It's so convenient to ignore too!
It's a local news station who's targeting the lowest common denominator, so it's an acceptable usage in this case.
EDIT: NM, it was a crane after all.
Gad. Zoox. I hope it's not the same team doing both.
Trying too hard to push a Jetson’s future on us that no one wants…
I feel like soon kids will order the cheapest thing on Amazon for the free drone it comes with.
Speak for yourself. I want drones to deliver stuff directly to me.
Would be nice to have a sort of assistant drone. Pop open the sunroof "check how far up the road the traffic jam lasts".
I want my coffee lowered directly into my hand.
Oh man that Amazon paycheck gonna be huge.
Well thanks to tort reform likely not:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(film)
Household ownership of cars hit 50% by 1930 but there was no federal seatbelt mandate unitl 1968 or regulation of intoxicated driving until the 1980s.
Don't hold your breath waiting on the US government to give a shit about death and destruction of its people. Let the industry discover the tech and capitalist forces dictate safety, around 2060 we can start having serious conversations about drone safety.
To any of the aspiring Ralph Nader's of the drone industry out there, thank you for your service in advance.
The facts don’t line up with your concerns. Amazon announced prime air in what 2013 IIRC. Now 12 years later they have FAA approval for a small number of test flights. Exactly so they can slowly discover problems like this and fix them. Every safety critical system in the world is iteratively refined based on real world learnings about mistakes - mistakes made after careful design to avoid them. It’s just really really hard.
The discover and fix phase is over. In August 2025, the FAA announced Part 108 which codifies the rules. Up until now, companies have been operating under waivers. The comment period for Part 108 ends on October 6th. After that the rules may be changed slightly and then will be finalized.
https://www.regulations.gov/document/FAA-2025-1908-0023
You can select a few comments at random and quickly find a pattern: people are concerned that the drones everywhere except in the densest of areas do not have to see where they are going. If they hit a manned aircraft it's the manned aircraft's fault and the drone operator has no legal liability. Does that sound like something FAA employees wrote themselves? How much motivation will be there to "iteratively refine" when they have no legal liability and even admitting that a possible improvement exists would create legal liability?
What do you mean “the discover and fix phase is over”? That implies that safety critical systems stop trying to discover problems and fix them? In what world is that true? You are always learning from mistakes and fixing them. Forever.
I think this is frankly the obvious consequence of the FAA inventing authority to allow commercial drone operations at low altitude (by "invented" I mean completely ignoring the precedent of United States v. Causby which establishes ownership of some airspace above one's property). Commercial drones are flying around at low altitude not because they should, but because they cannot safely share the airspace with other existing airspace users.
The solution here is not more NOTAMs or specific hazard detection; the solution is having commercial drones get the hell out of other people's property (i.e. very low altitudes) and safely share the rest of the airspace with existing users.
If these things start hurting human workers I reserve the right to shoot them out of the sky.
Amazon has assured us there is nothing wrong with the drones and they pose absolutely no safety hazard even though they crashed.
> Genuinely curious what the solution here is.
One obvious solution is to ditch drone delivery entirely. It's not a foregone conclusion that we must deliver trinkets by drone.
Alternative working link: https://www.theverge.com/news/790636/amazon-prime-mk30-drone...
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Thanks, I've added that link to the toptext.
> It's unclear if anyone was injured during the incident.
'It's unclear if' is a phrase that paints a brilliant picture of an organ's journalistic standing.
It means there's no information either way, what follows is pure speculation, probably false, but the author can put whatever idea they want in our heads, since they've prefaced that it 'may or may not be the case'.
It's unclear if the drones had malicious intent. It's unclear if the author was sober while writing and free of criminal record.
I think they're just trying to get ahead of the question everyone wants answered, and they're saying they don't know yet.
How about "there are no reports of injuries"?
That could be misread too though depending on when you're reading it and when you think the article was written in relation to the events. If it's a quick article right after it reads like the original verbiage but if you think it happened a while before the article was written it sounds more authoritative that there were no injuries. The "it is unclear" phrasing makes the ambiguity clear that the author doesn't know if there were any at the time of writing.
And if injuries are later reported people will sneer that 'media always gets it wrong/lies'. If they use plain language and say 'we don't know if anyone was injured yet' then people will sneer that 'I could have wirtten that, they're trying to sensationalize a nothingburger.'
How about: "As of the time of writing, we don't know of any reports of injuries"?
There's no need to use 15 words when 9 will do.
"At the time of writing there are no reports of injuries."
Honestly, that's redundant, because it's obvious in context.
Per the video report, someone went to the hospital with difficulties breathing from fumes.
Oh come on. This is just a stub article, saying two drones had crashed and police are investigating. It's clearly going to be a story of strong local and general interest, and they have limited information and a couple of photographs so the story is only a few sentences long for now.
Ranting about deeper meaning of the words in such a minimal bulletin is nonsensical.
Virtually all journalism is this bad though.
It's unclear if this commenter has read more than just the headlines. Maybe they try to argue for the sake of controversy and outrage culture. Maybe they just don't have a brain.
But seriously, the article text doesn't follow up with any speculation and highlights it is a developing story. According to the latest news on TV, someone actually was insured and is now at the hospital. The details are still unclear however. This is very based reporting for the world we currently live in and I would like to see more news stations follow this style instead of jumping to conclusions.
The sentence I quoted is not in the headline.
It's literally still in the subheading. Congrats on not reading more than the boldest letters at the very top either.
It's actually the second to last paragraph of the "article" so proves that you made it at least most of the way through.
It was added as a subheading.
> Two Amazon delivery drones crash into crane in commercial area of Tolleson, AZ
What stupid crane flies into the path of delivery drones ? /s
Commercial cranes, no less. They think they can compete with storks? Come on.
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don't worry you'll get it back when it's restocked (returned items)
my buddy bought these electric tooth brushes recently and the tips were missing inside ha, someone took them out and returned em
they resold returned tooth brushes? eww.
Re-using the motor half of an electric toothbrush after a return doesn't seem egregious, but the fact that they didn't notice the tips were missing means they didn't even open them up to check their cosmetic condition, let alone clean them at all. I think that's the part that makes it bad, rather than reselling them itself.
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when your account is blocked you've been flagged for fraud. Nobody's going to talk to you due to legal reasons. You just have to wait for them to either unblock you or until you die.
> when your account is blocked you've been flagged for fraud. Nobody's going to talk to you due to legal reasons.
Devil's advocate, what are the "legal reasons" a human can't talk to someone whose account their company has blocked? Especially when the violation was apparently minor enough that it's only a 2-day temporary block?
There aren’t any “legal reasons”. There is a risk/reward calculation where a gigantic corp concludes the reward of 1 extra customer is less than the risk of 1 potentially problematic customer, so they perform the equivalent of exile.
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You're already gonna get screwed by your local government, your homeowners insurer, and all manner of other things on the basis of drone photography. That cat is already out of the bag. At least for the package delivery use case everyday people stand to benefit at least a bit.
I don't think people should shoot them down, but I do think drone-based delivery will be rejected by consumers if it ever reaches significant scale in non-rural areas which will create a self-limiter on growth of usage.
Its cool if a drone delivers your sandwich. But when the sky is littered with them because they are also delivering random stuff to all of your neighbors it very quickly becomes a lot less cool.
Never mind the fact that its concerning from a safety standpoint that one of the biggest players in the space has just proved (twice) that their drones can't even avoid a very large unmoving object.
"but I do think drone-based delivery will be rejected by consumers if it ever reaches significant scale in non-rural areas"
I'd wager it's the opposite: Rural areas would notice the one off noise of a drone flying overhead because humans notice novel sounds more. In an urban area you already have other significant sources of noise (traffic mainly) and if the drones are ubiquitous it might just be more of a background constant that people tune out.
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By the way, I see very little discussion on the drones used in the UA-RU war, which should be quite interesting from a hacker's perspective. Technology is going very fast there.
Seriously, why is this downvoted?
Probably because this thread is only remotely related to that? There's been countless discussions on the topic, doesn't mean every thread has to be about that.
I mean on Hacker News in general.
I am personally working on intellectual property related to that. IMO this topic is impossible to discuss online, it’s a magnet for bots and troll farms.
I don't really see what you mean, if you use the HN search Algolia provides, you can see people talking about it from different angles pretty much every day.
Strange, because I never see it on the front page.
Perhaps I should change the way I read HN.
PS: I just searched, and indeed there is a lot of talk about incidents around drones. But what I mean is talk about the technology used in these drones. For example, how do you send a video feed through a kilometers long fiber optic cable that is cheap to produce and lightweight? These are the kind of questions I'm interested in.
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
There were plenty of proposals back in 2021 about having highways in the sky for drone delivery operations, at least in Canada, so such incidents are avoided, as relying on technology alone isn't enough and the risk plans are only to mitigate rather than eliminate the risks.
That being said, drone delivery will not really become a thing unless the endurance issue is resolved, like a new breakthrough battery technology that gives you at least 4 hours flight time (hybrid drones are noisy), as for any drone to have a proper impact, it should have three items checked: endurance, payload, and range. The last two are pretty much resolved by having modular payloads and flying over the internet, the first one is still pending.
I'm not sure they need endurance, if they're cheap enough companies can just buy a fleet n times larger than the number they need in the air at any given moment and have the others charging at base. Or more likely buy some extra batteries and have someone employed to swap them out when they're getting low.
Why do you think there is any problem with battery endurance? I’m quite sure Amazon has run the numbers on battery life for individual flights and for the lifetime of battery packs many many times. It’s just economics. And has basically nothing to do with safety. Unless a battery fails suddenly and spectacularly, which is rare and probably isn’t what caused it to crash into a crane.
I thought this is a thing for autonomous vehicles carrying people at least I remembering seeing something with Honda
It is for both, manned and unmanned, providing also a map of the network coverage in these “highways” and other active drones as well. I remember seeing a proof of concept platform that provided such functionality in Singapore, I am not sure if it became a reality later though.
Why is 4 hours a limit?
It's not a limit, just from my personal exposure in the overall drone delivery, 3-4hrs would provide enough time with margin for any safe delivery, beyond that is definitely better but probably is too hard to achieve. Keep in mind the actual flight time will be less than that, accounting for payload weight and environment like wind and temperature. In cold weather like Canada, the batteries will consume some of their energy to heat themselves before taking off.
What's the math that gets to 3-4 hours? Do the drones usually multiple deliveries in a flight? In my metro I would have assumes that any place is less than 30 minutes flight time from a Whole Foods or Walmart for example. How long does the actual safe delivery take? I assume it just lowers the goods and doesn't wait for the customer, right?
Edit: The Internet tells me that delivery drones fly at 40-60mp/h which is much faster than I assumed and makes the 3-4 hour window even more surprising to me.