The gods really have it in for Amazon’s Prime Air ambitions, don’t they? The e-commerce behemoth really cannot seem to catch a break.

We mean; picture this: it was only around the fourth of December last year that Amazon launched its drone-based Prime Air service in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in North Texas, USA.

The people in the area are used to parcel-carrying drones buzzing about in the lower atmosphere above their homes, having been introduced to Wing and Zipline delivery drones moving packages for Walmart customers since 2019.

So the Amazon drone thing, while unique in the strange shape of the drone itself, was not new.

So when Cesarina Johnson of Richardson, Texas looked out her window on February 4 and noticed Amazon’s giant MK30 hovering above buildings, she just thought it was a perfect to capture an Amazon drone in action, since she had never seen one in their air before, and she and her family had been talking about them a lot.

She took out her phone, clicked record… and suddenly became a witness to a dramatic scene where she heard a noise from above and though; that’s not good – before her phone captured pieces of the drone she was recording falling from the sky.

Then the whole drone dropped like a stone onto the parking lot adjacent to where she lives in Richardson.

Cessy says the drone crashed near a maintenance worker who was in their vicinity at the time, and it was the worker who called the Richardson fire department.

The drone’s rotors were still spinning when the fire people arrived, and in the video one can clearly see the drone itself was starting to smoke.

The footage shows the MK30 hexacopter hovering perilously close to the multi-story complex on Routh Creek Parkway before its propellers struck the facade, sending debris raining down onto a public pavement.

While the Richardson Fire Department confirmed that no one was injured, the crash has reignited a fierce debate over the “systemic fragility” of autonomous logistics in densely populated urban environments.

And this is exactly what will have industry stakeholders biting their nails and giving the death stare at Amazon because – while this might have been a new experience for Cessy – crashes like this have been happening far too often for Amazon, thirteen years after the company made a grandiose statement about drone deliveries in 2013.

In October last year, two MK30 drones collided with a construction crane in Tolleson, Arizona, resulting in battery fires. Only a month later, a drone in Waco, Texas, severed an internet cable during its post-delivery ascent, prompting a federal probe.

Technical analysts suggest the root of these failures may lie in the MK30’s design. Unlike its predecessor, the MK27, which utilised physical “squat switches” to confirm ground contact, the MK30 relies almost entirely on an optoelectronic sensor suite comprising LiDAR and computer vision.

This shift was intended to reduce weight and complexity, but critics argue it has introduced a “single point of failure”.

But whatever the cause of these crashes might be, it is worrying that Amazon’s troubles seem to be dragging the rest of the industry down, as constant crashes will erode the trust people have of drones flying over them.

We are living in a timeline where other delivery drone logistics companies have excelled in serving their clients in the same areas Amazon’s drones are operating in. Wing, Zipline, Wingcopter are just three of the drone logistics companies that have been offering delivery services by drone with almost zero incidents of crashes at all.

While it may be understandable that Amazon might want to provide an all-round in-house service to its customers, maybe this lates crash is a sign that the company is just not good at making drones? Walmart has stuck to its retail co-business and outsourced the drone delivery side to the experts at Wing and Zipline; and that side of the business seem to be thriving so far.

Perhaps it is time Amazon realised that they cannot be good at everything. Right now they are the one entity giving ninety-nine percent of the industry a bad name.