Two Amazon Delivery Drones Crash Into Crane in Commercial Area of Tolleson, Az

Edit: The Internet tells me that delivery drones fly at 40-60mp/h which is much faster than I assumed and makes the 3-4 hour window even more surprising to me.

Was working for a construction guy I overall respected, and he had us going up on a 3-story barn roof without any kind of roped-in protection. Although I was a fairly experienced rock climber (or perhaps because of it), I quit at lunch.

I was very lucky to have had the opportunity to have the backup finances to be able to afford to quit.

Certainly harnesses and other safety gear are much more common in many situations.

Even with all the gear, an unpredictable 80 lb object hurtling towards you is a major problem. Not to mention becoming a problem for any standing below.

It does seem best when using lag bolts to secure such an anchor to the roof but even when not screwed to the roof should provide some level of fall safety.

When I was a roofer, I think we might have used safety lines and harnesses twice, when the pitch was too steep.

With the appropriate amount of sarcasm: the Mayflower included several variations of "stock" and countless untold mistakes in the wake! We surely beat those Soviets and Socialism, gosh darn it. Just don't pay attention to the social fabric or what the CIA has done. Nevermind the particularly Aryan scientists, where we found them, or what might happen when they get fat/bored/lazy and procreate. We need The Bomb.

Long way to say the absurdity is the joke/point.

I don't know that amazon engineers should be expected to see e.g. a moving small steel cable under tension.

That and customers are required to select safe delivery drop zones.

I would like to see better "oh shit we're crashing let's try not to kill anyone" protection, e.g. research on improving controlled landings on damaged drones. Maybe refusal to deliver if there are any detected humans in the drop zone (which may well already exist).

Sounds like the anamoly here was a very unsafe landing zone (which is outside the customer agreement as it happens).

small steel cables take out human pilots too..

Would be really curious how they might guard against adversarial drone deliveries. Kinda weird to have end users basically piloting your $100K (I'm guessing) vehicles.

Are there any commercial drones that do it "right", with LIDAR?

With tens of thousands of guyed towers in the United States, that's a bad omission.

Both of these allow healthy margins of error, whether that error is from a human pilot or ATC, or from computer systems - either in the vehicle or the ground.

I'd argue these would be a great place to start for drone aviation.

If such limits make drone burrito or toilet paper delivery expensive, that seems fine.

For concrete numbers, I would say stay 50 yards away from construction equipment, and always laterally or above, not below. Honestly these drones are enormous so I think "don't go under" can just be a blanket rule. They can't be going under trees or bridges or overpasses either, they're too big.

Edit: Also, the drones themselves should be far enough apart that if one crashes the other has time to react and stop or change course. I don't have a concrete number there, it depends on their speed and acceleration, but they shouldn't be flying so close that if one crashes they all will.