Curious about how Amazon’s drone delivery would handle fragile items, Arizona teacher and YouTuber Tamara Hancock ordered a bottle of Blue Raspberry Torani syrup and left her camera rolling in her backyard. The experiment quickly went viral, racking up hundreds of thousands of views online.
The drone hovered and let go of the bottle roughly 10 to 13 feet from the ground, a standard distance for safety. Hancock picked through the wreckage on camera, more bemused than outraged, and found the bottle had broken on impact, causing the syrup to leak all over the standard Amazon packaging box.
The bottle was thankfully plastic. The YouTuber concluded that drone delivery might work fine, depending on what you’re ordering and how much you care about it arriving intact.
Hancock wasn’t alone in capturing problems. Another customer’s footage showed a drone releasing a parcel near concrete, its rotor wash sending an already-delivered box sliding into the road. Viewers reacted with disbelief, calling the drop “crazy” and pointing out that the drones appeared to ignore guidelines about landing on grass, while the strong downdraft scattered other packages.
Amazon has been running its Prime Air drone delivery service using the MK30 since late 2024 across a handful of states. It is the tech giant’s most advanced drone delivery to date. The drone can carry packages weighing up to five pounds and is supposed to drop them onto suitable surfaces like grass, using sensors to detect obstacles and stay clear of people and animals during descent.
When asked about the customer videos, Amazon told the New York Post that such damage incidents are uncommon. The company highlighted its purpose-built packaging, designed to protect items during the flight and final drop, and said that affected customers will be taken care of.
Beyond broken bottles and packages being thrown onto unsuitable surfaces, the service itself has faced other setbacks. One drone struck the side of an apartment building in Richardson, Texas, and crashed, an event captured on bystander video. Wet weather grounded others. Amazon, however, insists that the service has been well received overall, which may be true, but the videos keep coming anyway.
Update: On April 22nd, Amazon reached out to us to share this statement from an Amazon spokesperson:
Prime Air’s goal is to provide customers with fast, reliable delivery across a broad selection of over 60,000 products. The response from customers using Prime Air has been overwhelmingly positive. We’ve invested in purpose-built packaging specifically engineered to protect items throughout the flight and during the final delivery to the customer. We apologized to the customer for the inconvenience this caused and, in the rare instances when products don’t arrive as expected, we make it right. We continuously take learnings from incidents like this to improve the delivery experience for customers and the community.
Sources: Amazon, NYP, YouTube, AOL, Fox Business