Amazon’s Prime Air delivery drone service is still in the early stages of rolling out across the United States, but residents of one test community have already had enough.
The New York Times reported on residents of Richardson, Texas, a suburb of Dallas where Amazon has been testing drone deliveries throughout 2026. According to several Richardson residents interviewed by the Times, Amazon’s Prime Air drones can fly as low as 150 feet above houses and backyards, creating bothersome amounts of noise. One resident even said the drones can be heard inside, even with the TV turned on.
An Amazon spokesperson told the Times that “fewer than 1 percent” of complaints so far this year have had to do with noise. The same spokesperson also compared the noise of a drone to that of a window fan on a low setting. That may be true of just one drone, but one of the residents interviewed, Stephanie Puri, counted the number of drones flying over her house one Friday, and the final tally came out to 52. According to Puri, that was a slow day.
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There’s also the issue of privacy. These drones have cameras for navigational purposes, and the Richardson residents interviewed for the story noted their discomfort with the possibility that their backyard activities could be recorded. Amazon says the images are stored on encrypted drives and are only used to improve customer service, but the company has previously used human reviewers to listen to recordings captured by Alexa devices, for example.
And that’s to say nothing of the various videos and photos showing Prime Air drones dropping packages in hot tubs and other places where they shouldn’t go. As a reminder, Prime Air is in the process of expanding to 500 towns and cities across America as we speak.
