Amazon delivery drone strikes North Texas apartment, causing minor damage

What goes up, must come down. Not always in a good way.

Or as we pilots say it, takeoff is optional, landing is mandatory.

I'm glad we don't permit this stuff where I live. And do we really need orders in 60 minutes? Next day in the pickup machine around the corner is good enough.

There needs to be a legal means for property owners to keep drones off their property -- maybe some kind of "no trespassing" beacon that acts a machine readable "no trespassing" sign? -- and recourse to deal with unwelcome drones.

I was watching a YouTube bodycam video showing police interaction with a guy who got upset that a Walmart delivery drone test was being performed on his property without permission. He shot the drone with a shotgun. I forget if he was arrested on the spot, but I think he got in huge legal trouble -- apparently in the US, shooting at a drone is treated the same as shooting at a manned aircraft, and he might have ended up getting multiple years in prison.

Shooting a human trespasser has a pretty high legal bar, and rightfully so. Shooting a robotic trespasser seems like it shouldn't carry prison time, even if unjustified it should only carry financial penalties. Especially if the law doesn't specify any peaceful recourse to get rid of unwanted robots trespassing on your property.

Other news sources:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/07/delive...

https://www.theverge.com/tech/875475/amazon-delivery-drone-c...

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/08/us/video/amazon-drone-deliver...

As far as I can tell, Zipline are way out ahead in this space right now.

Sustained winds in Dallas on Wednesday, Feb 4, were around 10–15 mph, with occasional gusts approaching ~30 mph. I wonder how well delivery drone station keeping works when the wind suddenly gusts by 20 mph.

This is the latest in a string of accidents with these drones crashing into things. Not good.

The earlier ones hit a crane which one could argue was an edge case as a temporary structure. This just hit a building which suggests something much more fundamentally wrong with the tech.

"Another clip shows the drone on the ground with smoke coming from it."

if true, its a matter of repetition, and probability, until the time one of these crashes starts something on fire.

“That’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.”

Anyone else too news-aware and parsed "drone strike" as a verb the first time?

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Last paragraph:

> The Federal Aviation Administration opened an investigation into Amazon’s drone delivery program in November after one of its drone struck an Internet cable line in Waco.

Looks like the rest of that sentence has been cut off: "... but the company doesn't expect to be punished, since it spent $75 million dollars bribing President Trump in the form of the Melania movie.".