Image via AZFamily
A delivery drone owned by online retailer Amazon crashed at an apartment complex in the Phoenix, Arizona area recently. While the machine didn’t explode or suffer serious damage because it was more of a crash landing, the incident did spook people who live in the apartments.
Check out the Pope’s new Mercedes G-Wagon.
According to AZFamily, the incident happened on May 21. Nobody was hurt in the crash landing. It was reportedly the first such incident. Amazon says the drone had to crash land thanks to “factors outside of its control.”
Prime Air deliveries cost Amazon customers about $10 extra and they’re supposed to arrive in under an hour’s time. You can’t buy just anything and have it delivered by drone. The items airlifted must weigh five pounds or less.
Back in January, we reported on how Amazon grounded Prime Air deliveries in Arizona. The program was only about a month old in Phoenix and was only available in a 7-mile radius from the company’s facility in Tolleson.
The same thing was done for the drone delivery service in College Station, Texas where the program had been around for much longer.
Amazon said at the time it was updating the software for all of its drones. That was after some sort of accident at Amazon’s test facility in Pendleton, Oregon in December 2024. However, the company said that incident wasn’t “the primary reason” for grounding the service, leaving people to wonder what else was going on.
Drone deliveries are something Amazon and other companies talked about over a decade ago as people fantasized about little drones delivering all kinds of items to people’s doorsteps. However, the reality isn’t so utopian as the drones have to drop packages in yards and there are sometimes incidents like this one in Arizona.
We have no idea if this will mark another setback for Prime Air service or if this will be just a tiny blip the company uses to smooth out the program moving forward.
Originally, the plan from Amazon was to expand Prime Air to additional cities by the end of 2025. It’s unclear if that will happen or if this and other issues will keep the program from spreading.
Image via AZFamily
