Amazon's Delivery Drones Are Grounded. The Birds and Dogs of This Texas Town Are Grateful

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Paresh Dave * Business * Mar 3, 2025 7:00 AM

Amazon’s Delivery Drones Are Grounded. The Birds and Dogs of This Texas Town Are Grateful
Amazon’s drones met more resistance in College Station, Texas, than in any other city in the US. Now they’re gone—and a sense of peace and privacy has been restored.

As the spring planting season arrives in College Station, Texas, certified master gardener Mark Smith is thrilled that peace is in the air. This time last year, a loud buzzing noise began disrupting Smith’s morning routine of checking on the peppers, tomatoes, herbs, and shrubs growing in his backyard. Several times an hour, an Amazon Prime Air delivery drone would noisily emerge about 800 feet away, just past a line of trees behind Smith’s home. His neighbors began calling the fleet flying chainsaws. Smith, a retired civil engineer, preferred a different comparison: “It was like your neighbor runs their leaf blower all day long,” he says. “It was just incessant.”

Amid technical and regulatory challenges, Amazon’s decade-plus quest to fly small items such as toothpaste and batteries to people’s yards in under an hour has yielded just thousands of deliveries. The experience in College Station has highlighted another challenge: NIMBYs—or people who push for developments to be “not in my backyard”—potentially curtailing where Amazon operates.

Over the past few years, drone delivery companies have started operating in several towns and cities across the US without much fuss. The Federal Aviation Administration conducted environmental reviews of 21 planned drone rollouts over the past four years, none of which received more than three critical public comments or any organized opposition—except for one location.

In College Station, a university town of about 125,000 people, hundreds of ordinary residents along with the mayor and other officials banded together last year to oppose Amazon’s proposal to more than double the number of daily local drone flights. The FAA received about 150 comments opposing the plans, including from homeowners’ associations and other groups.

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