Two Amazon delivery drones crash into crane in commercial area of Tolleson, AZ

https://www.abc15.com/news/region-west-valley/tolleson/two-amazon-delivery-drones-crash-into-crane-in-commercial-area-of-tolleson

85•bookofjoe•1h ago

Comments

neom•1h ago

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.

oofbey•1h ago

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.

testplzignore•50m ago

They should learn to shield their sensors with their hand and squint. Humans perfected this millions of years ago :)

JCM9•48m 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.

jampa•37m ago

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.

ooterness•21m ago

Who could have predicted that drones flying outside during the day might have to deal with direct sunlight?

ge96•1h ago

The crash site is intriguing, want to see what tech they're using

prein•1h ago

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?

deadbabe•1h ago

Been using them for years, I got a package by drone the other day.

Insanity•54m ago

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.

catlifeonmars•1h ago

I was thinking maybe they used the same route planning system, so their routes were identical.

dylan604•1h ago

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

skygazer•1h ago

Without knowing anything about their routing, I think grandparent is saying they likely were on the same vector, perhaps same destination.

dylan604•1h ago

wow, your interpretation is much better than whatever went through my head. i'm going with too early in the morning. not enough coffee.

ceejayoz•53m ago

I'd laugh pretty hard if the second one was an automatic redelivery attempt.

"Something went wrong with the drone. Send another!"

dylan604•1h ago

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/

nuggetzs•1h ago

Oh man that Amazon paycheck gonna be huge.

zenmac•1h ago

Well thanks to tort reform likely not:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(film)

tamimio•1h ago

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.

ge96•1h ago

I thought this is a thing for autonomous vehicles carrying people at least I remembering seeing something with Honda

tamimio•1h ago

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.

SketchySeaBeast•1h ago

Why is 4 hours a limit?

tamimio•1h ago

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.

jon-wood•1h ago

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.

oofbey•1h ago

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.

xnx•1h ago

That guy is frantically working on the personal injury angle hoping to get some of that Bezos money.

pixel_popping•1h ago

Alternative working link: https://www.theverge.com/news/790636/amazon-prime-mk30-drone...

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mothballed•1h ago

"Crane" is a highly optimistic word for what looks like a telescoping boom lift.

Edit: per below was actually a crane

mikeyouse•58m ago

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...

mothballed•56m ago

Thanks! I took a quick look at the image in the article, and wrongly assumed they pictured the thing that it hit.

stronglikedan•58m ago

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.

jfengel•52m ago

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.

bilekas•1h ago

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.

mattas•1h ago

Interesting to me that _two_ managed to hit a boom lift.

antonvs•59m ago

Begun, the drone wars have

jollyllama•57m ago

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.

potato3732842•51m ago

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).

jollyllama•17m ago

laughs in independent subcontractor

infecto•13m ago

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.

SAI_Peregrinus•12m ago

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.

Timshel•46m ago

And the not much here is an 80 pounds drone (Mk30).

jollyllama•18m ago

Thank you, I stand corrected!

JCM9•55m ago

Flying in uncontrolled airspace in VMC is a “see and avoid” environment, meaning absent some additional details 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.

arbll•6m ago

well at least it's consistent

promoterr•52m ago

WRT Amazon.. try to contact someone there when they block account 'temporarily' just for 2 days... So.. what would you expect from such company? Bunch of loosers - however it's even weird they succeed to even start with some drone. The whole Drone thing - look at UA war - if you want to succeed - you need to give more than just sponsorship https://dronechampionsleague.com/1m-global-prize-pool/

behringer•43m ago

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.

jacobgkau•40m ago

> 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?

OJFord•47m ago

> 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.

sejje•42m ago

I think they're just trying to get ahead of the question everyone wants answered, and they're saying they don't know yet.

slashdave•41m ago

How about "there are no reports of injuries"?

rtkwe•9m ago

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.

energy123•41m ago

Virtually all journalism is this bad though.

sigmoid10•41m ago

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.

OJFord•13m ago

The sentence I quoted is not in the headline.

drcongo•6m ago

It's actually the second to last paragraph of the "article" so proves that you made it at least most of the way through.

amelius•43m ago

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.

Etheryte•42m ago

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.

amelius•41m ago

I mean on Hacker News in general.

Etheryte•37m ago

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.

amelius•35m ago

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.

le-mark•33m ago

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.

slashdave•36m ago

Amazon engineer this morning to colleague: "Hey! Maybe we should include some cranes in our training data."

johntb86•17m ago

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

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Two Amazon delivery drones crash into crane in commercial area of Tolleson, AZ

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