The New York Times went to the backyard pools of Richardson, Texas, and published the result Monday under the headline “It’s Raining Boxes.” One resident’s drone tracker logged 52 Amazon Prime Air drones overhead on Friday, three of them between 150 and 170 feet up, and she called it a slow day. Amazon told the paper that fewer than 1% of inquiries about the program this year concern noise.
DroneXL has covered Richardson’s Prime Air hub since an MK30 hit an apartment building there in February, through Amazon’s March altitude change and the city’s April conclusion that it has no legal handle on the flights. The Times account adds what those stories could not: named families, a pool, and a homeowners’ association president who says the Federal Aviation Administration has failed the city. The FAA answered the noise question for the whole country on July 28, and the answer was that it does not count as a “significant impact.”
Richardson Residents Are Counting The Drones Themselves
Stephanie Puri, a video game industry researcher in Richardson, set up a drone tracker and recorded 52 overflights on Friday, September 18, the Times reported. Amazon told the Richardson City Council in March the hub filled about 150 orders a day. Its FAA approval allows 1,000.
The hub sits less than a mile from the Anderson family’s pool, and every package it flies can go anywhere inside a 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) radius, so the neighborhoods closest to it sit under every departure. Residents there call the corridor a drone highway. Scott Bratcher, who runs the homeowners’ association in one of them, told the paper: “The government and the F.A.A. have failed us.” City rules allow deliveries from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Nikki Anderson said she asked the city to trim the hours or the days and got nowhere…