Amazon's Drones Will Soon Deliver to Nearly 500 US Cities and Towns | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's Drones Will Soon Deliver to Nearly 500 US Cities and Towns

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My city currently has Amazon drone delivery. The drone going by sounds like a swarm of angry bees. Just today I heard something and was looking all over what was making all the noise, then I saw the drone fly overhead. I see them almost every time I leave my house now.

I got an offer once for a drone delivery. I would have to print something out, put it in my backyard, then go fetch the package from the backyard once delivered. From what I’ve seen, the drones also have a tendency to blow the package around when leaving. So instead of picking an item off my front porch, not really even leaving the house, I would need to go to the backyard and fetch the package (where ever it blew) and fetch the paper target to throw away.

This feels like a worse customer experience, moving from a porch to backyard delivery, and a worse experience for everyone in the flight path due to the noise. This is technology for the sake of technology.

I hope after the novelty wears off no one opts for drone delivery a second time. They are very annoying and create unnecessary noise pollution.

I've always wondered if deliveries could be handled in a "hybrid" manner.

A delivery truck with an open top just drives down the street, drones peel off and deliver to the porch/backyard and return for another package from the truck.

You could deliver a truckload of packages to a neighborhood quickly, with lots less overall drone traffic.

I suspect people will complain about the noise if an incident doesn't ground it first. I certainly do not want the propeller whining around

two things

- garbage trucks make lots of noise when they un-deliver your trash, and people put up with it

- couldn't commercial drones pay more attention to noise than run-of-the-mill consumer drones? like the fenestron, with asymmetrical blades

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenestron

The main noise savings I can see are likely to come from "use a much larger drone and lower the package down on a crane". Larger blades help, but the biggest effect is simply not having it nearby.

Garbage truck noise is only for a minute once a week

sanitation services are very different from convenient consumerism, so I won't take it as a reason to accept drones

Do you really think Amazon, of all companies, will spend more money to make quieter drones? (that will likely still be quite loud, as there is only so much you can do about physics, small blades and motors whine while big ones thump)

I could see amazon using slightly modified rotors. why would it cost that much more. Don't know about ducted rotors.

The fenestron is ducted with "variable angular spacing"[1]/"modulated blade spacing" like more stealthy helicopters[2]

I kind of doubt amazon helicopters would get up to the "thumps" from passenger helicopter main rotors. But I could see bigger rotors turning slower, or maybe more rotors, each turning slower. Sort of like replacing fast but noisy 80mm case fans in your computer with slower and quieter 140mm or 200mm case fans.

I think the PR of quieter drones would be good, not that costly. You can see other companies like waymo getting a lot of bad PR with noise (remember the honking problems?)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenestron "Fenestrons have between seven and eighteen blades; these may have variable angular spacing so that the noise is distributed over different frequencies."

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_noise_reduction#Met...

I don’t know how they can account for a drone randomly failing and dropping out of the sky? It’s not a matter if it’s going to happen, but a matter of when it happens. What happens if it landing on a car while someone is driving? What happens if it lands on person just going about their day? I don’t see any of this being worth the risk.

I see the targeted locations are considered the type to be open land regions, but that doesn’t eliminate obvious risk.

People get killed crossing the street every day. File an insurance claim and move on.

Source: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-prime... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363101)

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