The sound of same-day drone delivery

TL;DR: One Texas suburb is dealing with a new kind of buzzing pest: morning-to-night drone deliveries from Amazon. Residents aren’t thrilled with the noise (or the privacy issues)—but as robo-deliveries scale up, drones could be the next neighborhood tech nuisance locals mobilize against.

What happened: One resident in Richardson, Texas, counted 52 drones overhead on a single Friday—and told The New York Times this was a slow day. Sometimes, over 100 of these aircraft might zoom overhead from 7am to 8pm.

Many of the drones are part of Amazon’s Prime Air delivery program, which started operating in Richardson last December. The company’s pitch for it: Place an order and you can get, say, cold medicine in as little as 30 minutes. And yet for all this supposed convenience, plenty of Richardson households are disgruntled. The main pain point is the persistent noise, which is pushing locals to complain to Amazon—and even warn officials in other cities where delivery drones are landing next.

A droning buzzkill: One Richardson homeowner says she can hear the flying machines from inside her house even when the TV is on, while others have described the drones as “a loud swarm of bees.” (Amazon told the NYT that the sound is more like a window fan on low.)

FAA data cited by Axios puts Amazon’s drones at about 88 decibels from 50 feet away—roughly what a lawn mower might sound like and louder than models used by rivals Zipline and Wing. That’s also louder than what locals typically hear from the data centers popping up in their neighborhoods—though the issue there isn’t necessarily just the volume, but that the low-grade buzzing never stops—and these aircraft emit a high-pitched whining that might be unusually grating.

Watch your head (and your backyard): The noise is far from the only gripe. Sometimes the drones make ill-advised drops that can damage products—with one Amazon drone delivering a package straight into a pool last month. And others worry about the navigation cameras these drones are equipped with—capturing footage that Amazon says it may store and use to improve its drone delivery service.

Bottom line: Amazon expects to expand Prime Air to 500 US cities by the end of the year. As one HOA president told the NYT: “What’s happening in Richardson is about to happen all over the country.” Residents, start ordering your earplugs now. —WK