Amazon’s delivery drones are too loud for the residents where it’s testing the programme

Tests for Amazon’s drone delivery programmeme have become a regular fact of life for residents of College Station, Texas.

The town, which is home to Texas A&M University, is the testing ground for Amazon’s drone delivery programme. The programme started in 2022, and its main goal is to figure out how to use drones to fulfill some of the estimated 5.9 billion packages Amazon delivered in 2023.

The idea, in theory at least, is that these unmanned drones would pick up an order for the usual household items and tchotchkes people order on Amazon and deposit them at their house. As CEO Andy Jassy told investors in a letter last year, the Prime Air delivery drones will eventually allow Amazon to deliver packages in under an hour.

“It won’t start off being available for all sizes of packages and in all locations, but we believe it’ll be pervasive over time,” wrote Jassy in his annual shareholder letter. “Think about how the experience of ordering perishable items changes with sub-one-hour delivery?”

However, as with most matters relating to shipping logistics, the practice is much more complicated. And for the 127,000 people of College Station, the din from the drones has become a nuisance, according to CNBC.

“It sounds like a giant hive of bees,” John Case, who has lived in the town for 40 years, told CNBC. “You know it’s coming because it’s pretty loud.”

Another College Station resident, Amina Alikhan, described the noise to CNBC as “a fly coming by your ear over and over, and you can’t make it stop”.

The noise levels could get worse in the near future. In May, Amazon submitted a proposal to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to increase the number of drone flights from 200 per day to 469.

In July, in response to Amazon’s proposal, College Station Mayor John Nichols wrote a letter to the FAA.

“With the potential to increase the frequency of drone deliveries to the amount stated in Amazon Prime Air’s request, residents have continued to voice their concerns to City Council that the noise levels will only get worse and will impact the enjoyment of their property,” Nichols wrote in the letter.

During a city council meeting in June, College Station city manager Bryan C. Woods said he conducted several tests of the drones and found their noise levels were between 47 and 61 decibels. Sixty decibels is roughly the same noise level of an office, according to a chart from Yale Environmental Health and Safety. Woods added a caveat to his findings by saying they were “anecdotal”.

Amazon held a Zoom call with residents of College Station, in which an executive told them the company would not renew its lease in the Texas metro and planned to move by October 2025, according to CNBC.

Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson said the company takes local feedback under consideration “wherever possible”. Stephenson left open the possibility Amazon could move to another location. “As our programme evolves, we’re considering a variety of potential paths forward – including the possibility of alternate sites.”

In May, Amazon cleared a major regulatory hurdle with the FAA opening a path for it to expand its drone delivery programme. The FAA approved Amazon’s request to have its drones fly greater distances outside the line of sight of the person piloting it on the ground.

The FAA granted Amazon’s request after the company developed a technology that ensured the drones avoided collisions. Several other companies working on drone delivery systems, such as Alphabet and Walmart, have also developed similar capabilities for their drones.

However, even before the noise complaints, it hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing for Amazon’s Prime Air programme. First announced by Jeff Bezos in 2013 during a 60 Minutes interview, the initiative’s progress stalled for several years. Even at the time Bezos predicted the project would take years to perfect, foreseeing numerous complexities.

“The hard part is putting in all the redundancy, all the reliability, all the systems you need to say, ‘Look, this thing can’t land on somebody’s head when they’re walking around their neighbourhood’,” Bezos told 60 Minutes. “That’s not good.”

In 2023, Prime Air hit a major setback when it was caught up in an intense round of cost cutting across the company that resulted in numerous layoffs in the division. A few months later, in August 2023, two key executives left, including the one in charge of all testing operations.

College Station wasn’t the only Prime Air testing site that ran into trouble by disturbing local residents. Amazon had a similar testing facility in Lockeford, California, a town of about 4,000 people 40 miles south of Sacramento.

When news broke that Prime Air was bringing a slew of drones to town, residents reportedly contemplated shooting them down, according to the Washington Post. In April, Amazon left the town altogether, announcing it was moving drone testing to Tolleson, Arizona. – Fortune.com/The New York Times