Amazon's Drone Delivery Program Was So Annoying That Homeowners Begged It to Stop

Amazon's delivery drones became so disruptive to locals that the tech giant is reportedly giving up on its pilot program in College Station, Texas. As Wired reports, the incredibly noisy aircraft quickly turned into a pest, with local master gardener Mark Smith describing the cacophony as if "your neighbor runs their leaf blower all day long." "It was just incessant," he told the publication. Apart from irking the locals, Amazon's experiment to make last-mile deliveries using drones has run into plenty of challenges, from regulatory hurdles to severe technical limitations. In College Station, a city 90 minutes northwest of Houston, the drones have united a dreaded foe of any local project: NIMBYs who became fed up with the racket. As Wired reports, hundreds of residents joined to oppose Amazon's proposal to more than double the number of daily drone flights. Despite the Federal Aviation Administration ultimately deciding that locals' complaints were "meritless or outside its purvi ... Read full article.