A Texas woman ran outside to witness the future of delivery services. There, hovering above her property, was a large Amazon Prime Air drone that had just descended from the heavens to dispense her package.
But in a video she recorded of this encounter recently shared by ABC7 News, all did not go as planned. The advanced flying machine took its time, lined up its shot, and plunked her parcel straight into her swimming pool — which landed with all the ceremony of a giant turd hitting the bottom of a toilet bowl.
“Oh my god, oh my god,” she said in anticipation. Then, after splashdown: “oh s***!”
The timing couldn’t be any funnier. Earlier this week, Amazon announced that its drone delivery service will expand to 500 more cities across the US, up from the 11 it operates in right now. Call that news a heads up, in light of the drone’s proven aerial bombardment capabilities.
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, either. A video taken in May showed one of Amazon’s drones dropping a package on the edge of a pond, before it tumbled into the water floated away. Another video taken last year showed a similar accident, except the package rolled into a customer’s pool.
Water isn’t the only terrain that the drones are carelessly dropping packages onto. Suspicious of how the delivery bots would handle fragile items, one person filmed a drone dropping their order of syrup straight onto concrete, which ended up breaking the plastic bottle.
The drone in the video is Amazon’s MK-30 model, which is large compared to consumer drones and weigh around 80 lbs. Residents have complained about their noise, comparing them to helicopters. Some of them have also crashed. Two operating in the West Valley area near Phoenix collided into a construction crane last year and burst into flames, causing Amazon to temporarily suspend deliveries in the area.
An Amazon spokesperson addressed the recent pool pratfall in a statement, insisting that the drones are performing swimmingly.
“Incidents are extremely rare, and when a delivery doesn’t go as planned, we learn from it to improve the experience and take steps to prevent it from happening in the future,” they told Mashable.
More on drones: Volunteers Tracking Lost Dog Baffled When Locals Trash Thermal Imaging Drone
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