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Comment by achow | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered why people were not thinking of noise when they think of package delivery drones. Even the garden variety light weight drones makes quite an amount of noise.

This is the same reason that 'flying cars', which in many sense are big drones, is very unlikely to be an everyday thing.

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Mark Rober covered the “Zipline” drones which are near silent, unlike almost any other drone you hear. There’s a demo in the video.

Done by varying the propeller design so that the noise is spread out over many frequencies instead of concentrated in the buzzy band.

I also remember Apple talking about doing the same in their MacBook pro fans at one point. Varying the blade pitch from blade to blade to do the same.

https://youtu.be/DOWDNBu9DkU?si=jW6Iaeobg7j5yAzW

They don't care about you, the quality of the experience, the quality of the delivery. They just want to save money on labor. Everything else seems to be a secondary consideration to them.

Sure, but to be fair it's not like UPS trucks are silent.

The UPS truck engine doesn't need to come up to nearly full power to park in my driveway. The driver doesn't ever need to "floor it."

All the delivery drivers on my street seem to drive at full power while flooring it.

When they merely tap on the gas the truck belches a “GLLLRRFGGGGG” and when they reverse it goes “ding ding ding ding ding ding ding”

They don’t need to, but often do from my experience. Electric delivery and garbage trucks can’t soon enough to my neighborhood.

I'm starting to see electric delivery trucks.

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