Amazon gives drone delivery presentation, residents split on response

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KBTX) – The College Station City Hall chambers were packed Thursday night for Amazon’s update to the council and the community.

Matt McCardle, with Amazon Prime Air, spoke to the council to discuss what it’s been able to accomplish since it started operations in December of 2022. College Station is only one of two locations in the nation that has the service and last fall Amazon began using drones to deliver prescriptions.

According to Amazon, the drones have already delivered thousands of orders to hundreds of customers throughout the area. McCardle added that feedback had been positive and that 2023 was an exciting year. However, some residents had a major complaint with the service: the noise that the drones make.

“When my family moved into our current home on Brookwater Circle it was located in a quiet residential area, today because of Amazon Prime Air’s drones, it is effectively an industrial zone,” resident Brad Marquardt said. “Every day of the week the noise equivalent of a flying chainsaw rises above the treeline of my backyard and flies over our house.”

That sentiment was shared by many residents who took to the podium to speak about what they were experiencing with the drone facility located at 400 Technology Parkway, not far from their homes.

One resident who lives in the Woodcreek neighborhood said “We’ve been very disturbed by quite large, and this is like seven feet in diameter, drones. These Drones make a very annoying sound and they are very frequent. About every five to 10 minutes a drone is coming and going. Personally, I don’t want to live in a place that has drones flying this low over my house, they’re just about 30 feet maybe above the trees.”

During the presentation, McCardle said they are working on a new drone called the Mark 30 which he says should be more durable and 40 percent quieter.

“College Station will be the first location anywhere in the world to see this new drone in service,” McCardle said. “When it enters service this summer it will replace the current drone that is flying today.”

Despite a new drone being in the works some residents said making it quieter wouldn’t be enough and that the location should be moved.

“There is not one positive aspect of having a drone airport 500 feet from residential dwellings. The drone airport should be relocated to a commercial setting where the airport cannot erode homeowners’ property values and invade the quality of life,” another resident added.

Around 20 people signed up to speak at the city council meeting, but not everyone was opposed to the drones. Those speaking were split. Nonprofits such as Brazos Valley Gives, United Way of the Brazos Valley and Wreaths Across America were there to tell the council how Amazon has supported the community.

“Just here to validate the support we’ve received from Amazon Prime Air, specifically since 2022 they’ve supported our early literacy program, they provided books in 2022 for one of our schools in College Station, and they also have provided blankets for our programs last year and this year they committed to giving us books again for children in the Brazos Valley,” United Way of the Brazos Valley President Peggi Goss said. “We also noticed they are sponsoring and supporting some of our other nonprofit partners in the Brazos Valley.”

McCardle said that he wants “to be clear” that Amazon is listening to residents and it takes their feedback very seriously.

“We do make changes in the services as we can to ensure our operations continue to comply with all location and federal noise regulations, that our commitment and that’s the commitment we made when we came in a year ago,” McCardle said. “Well we can’t accommodate every single specific request often the times we can’t do that is because of either safety, regulator or operational considerations.”

Another concern that was brought up by residents is privacy and how Amazon drones use the data.

“Like many people, I have a privacy fence but that does not stop the Amazon drones which fly over our house in our neighborhood each day,” Marquardt said. “What are the cameras seeing as they fly over our city and what are they doing with that information.”

When addressing privacy during the presentation McCardle said the drones do have cameras for safety and navigation purposes and they’re either looking forward during flight and when it’s delivering a package it’s looking down.

“We use the data to make deliveries and to ensure safe operations and to improve the overall safety of the system. That’s the only way we use that data and we do not use that data for any other purpose,” McCardle said.

The next drone, the Mark 30, will go through an environmental assessment process, which includes noise, to make sure it meets FAA requirements.

”We will be continuing to have community events, there will probably be an opportunity for the public to participate as well. It is something that we have gone through for a number of aviation projects including this one, where a lot of the noise data that was used in it comes from and the same will be used for the next drone,” McCardle said.