The following month, a drone’s motor shut off as it switched from an upward flight path to flying straight ahead. Two safety features — one that’s supposed to land the drone in this type of situation and another that stabilizes the drone — both failed. As a result, the drone flipped upside down and dropped from 160 feet in the air, leading to a brush fire that stretched across 25 acres. It was later put out by the local fire department.
Unlike most high tech automation ideas that get hyped up by big tech, I don't think delivery drones are that bad of an idea. It's not something where "just build a train" applies, you'd at least also need pneumatic tubes sucking packages out of the trains.
But the idea that Amazon could pull it off is laughable. Yeah let's do novel safety-critical research at the company whose management strategy is abusing new college grads into working 80 hour weeks until they burn out after 1.75 years. That's gonna work.