Amazon faces FAA probe after delivery drone snaps internet cable in Texas

I used to work in perception for autonomous aerial vehicles and horizontal wires were the hardest common object to avoid. Traditional stereo won't help you localize them -- wires are thin so even mere detection can be hard, and one portion of a wire looks much like another so feature matching fails resulting in bad or no depth estimates -- and LIDAR sacrifices resolution for weight and power consumption (which both have to be optimizied for drones). It's been years since I've worked in this field, and Amazon has many smart people thinking about it but I'm not surprised it's still a difficult problem.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/089CBuGTkcY (it's also in the article; my ad blocker must have gotten me on this one). Amazon are not having a good run with these lately.

The double crane cable incident ( https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/02/us/arizona-amazon-drones-cras... ) and the LIDAR failsafe issue ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-16/amazon-re... ) were both rather surprising from a process and management standpoint. This issue seems more like a run of the mill "problem with drone delivery conceptually" that Amazon will have to deal with.

This comes after the incident where multiple drones crashed into a crane.

Given that prior incident and now this the FAA will likely not be too kind to Amazon. The permission on drone tech is predicated on very strong “see and avoid” technology. Given two pretty bad screw-ups now in as many months the FAA won’t be amused at the failures in the tech on these drones.

A commenter here notes that detecting power lines is a really hard problem. However surely there is a set of simpler solutions to the problem than actually trying to spot power lines.

This sort of thing is a largely solved problem for bigger aircraft and a similar approach with quite a lot of international regulation and agreement seems to be needed.

Drones could be given a cross section of airspace to work within that is say a horizontal slice about 50m to 100m above ground level, with various rules on resolution (ie what constitutes ground level at any point on the planet). The minimum height should clear most obstacles that are hard to spot. There would be flight corridors defined between take off and landing zones. There would be exclusion zones around areas such as air fields and military locations etc.

Drones could even be allowed to use commercial airspace provided they follow the existing rules and are detectable and contactable etc.

The tricky bit is working out take off and landing zones and rules for them. At the moment, aircraft try to avoid flying over habitation zones. I live near to a helicopter factory and used to work there so I have some idea of the issues involved.

There are lots more rules that could be added for safety. For example, requiring height when flying in a non corridor depend on direction. However, I'm only allowing a 50m zone here but then a drone is only about 1m "tall". Even something as simple as divide the compass up into say 16 zones for wind Beaufort 0-2, eight zones for 3-4, four zones for 5-6 and ban flight at 7+. Those wind designations might depend on gust speeds or constant and could be transmitted. The idea is that things get a bit random as the wind speed increases. Divide the allowable height by the number of zones and set your height accordingly. So flying directly north will be at say 50m and directly south at 100m. The wind speed should also indicate the density of drones allowed per horizontal area. That will need some experimentation and legislation to determine what is "acceptable".

It's an ethernet cable, looks like? That's pretty cool that a drone has enough power to break an ethernet cable. It just got tangled in a single cable, looks like it was run across someone's back yard. That's not a bad failure mode, imo - gives them a little exercise in problem solving, figuring out how to prevent ethernet/cable collisions and snags, and maybe results in sensor upgrades, or they figure out good detangling maneuvers or something.

One cable getting damaged is inconvenient, but I'd have to laugh it off if it were my service. 5G would be a good enough backup in the meantime, and how often are you going to get to see these types of accidents (hopefully almost never) so it'd be cool to have a story.

"I ordered some flaming hot cheetos from a drone, and it broke my internet cable!"

It will definitely be used for surveillance as well if the doorbells are anything to go by.

Show me the line lmao. You see these rural cowboys stringing 1 - 2 cores over a long distance, I have seen them just going right through or even resting on trees.

The solution is probably a dial before you dig style registry that corresponds to an altitude floor, but I honestly doubt the ability of rural telco to meet that requirement.

Looking at the video, the cable looks ... fragile. Would a large bird landing on it do the same amount of damage?

Shouldn't it be thick, armoured cable, attached to a strong wire or something?

Am I the only one who doesn’t want drones flying all around the neighborhood delivering stuff? I really don’t want this.

Deliveries should only be executed by humans.

Fucking, learn it from the self driving car companies. fly your drones for at least 6 months in the city, make high resolution 3d maps of the area, identify the no fly zones, train models on these. I can't believe their drones are crashing into stationary cranes.

Ah yes, expending 100x the energy to deliver 1/10th of the payload. Bring on the drone infested future!

I'm generally pretty gung ho about tech adoption. Nuclear? Yes! LLMs everywhere? Let's try it! Crypto? OK... give it a go! Self driving cars? Heck yeah!

But I really, really don't want drones flying over my house, polluting the already noisy soundscape, etc. This just strikes me as a terrible idea.

Maybe we should consider this a chaos monkey test rather than castigating Amazon.

If Amazon can accidentally take down internet in a large area with a cheap commercial drone... what can a genuine bad actor do with a few thousand of these. If this is any indicator, half the country is going to be blind and deaf in the first day of a Taiwan war, it's going to be be over before we even get back online.

FAA is now investigating toys that hit trivial cables?

What a joke!

If Mikey's RC car hits someone's foot in the park, will the DOT investigate?

User error. Who calls a drone in where there are overhead cables?

I'm sure this will sound a bit whack to some of the sorts on here but honestly, who cares?

I was at the principal engineers offsite summit in scenic Cle Ellum when they supposedly announced prime Air.

I know, I know, what the f** ever, but there was something very ominous and significant at this unveiling. If this were my demo and my unveiling, I would have had a drone pick up a package at one side of the auditorium and drop it off at the other side of the auditorium.

What we got was a mock package and a mock drone and lots of talky talk from a guy who didn't last long at Amazon. This set the tone for everything going forward. And the engineers of tech, the real engineers of tech, not the toxic empathy talkers who can't do anything (tm), need to put these people in their place or the enshittification will continue unopposed.

I'm mostly out of f**s here having made what I needed to make but it's fun to post here in a position of not caring what people think of me anymore. Make of that what you will.

Edit: Come on PE snowflakes! You want to talk about that thread on the principal engineering list about how long it had been since any of you had actually written a line of code? I do. It explains a lot about you guys.

And don't get me started about that urgent missive about only hiring fungible people. Because fungible equals generalist and that's why both you and Google have the horrible retention rates you have. I can tell I'm not the only one that was in the room for that ridiculous presentation from the downvotes. Keep going and no worries, Amazon will have more than enough money to acquihire the people that actually solve these problems.

Why would Amazon be in trouble for not knowing the customer has an Ethernet cable stretched across their yard? Even AT&T (Southwestern Bell) buried drops from the pedestal to the house.