A Richmond, Texas woman got quite the surprise this week when the Amazon package she ordered came splashing down not on her porch, but in her backyard pool. Lindsey Austen recorded video on August 17 showing an Amazon Prime Air drone releasing a box containing cat food, light bulbs, and shoe insoles that landed directly in her pool and hot tub, after she had placed a routine order without realizing drone delivery had been selected.
Austen retrieved the soggy box right away and found that while the outer packaging was drenched, everything inside had survived the unplanned dip, according to Business Insider. Austen also spoke with FOX 26 Houston about the incident, sharing the video that first brought the splashdown to local attention. The clip, just 11 seconds long, shows the drone dropping the box directly into the in-ground hot tub, and it has since circulated widely across social media.
Amazon Calls The Mishap Rare, Points To Its Guarantee
Amazon sent a statement in response to the incident, and spokesperson Lindsay Hamilton told Mashable that drone delivery mishaps are “extremely rare,” adding that the company uses failed drops to refine its navigation protocols. Hamilton pointed to Amazon's A-to-z Guarantee as the mechanism customers can use for refunds or replacements when deliveries go wrong, per the same account.
The drone involved in the Richmond splashdown flew out of Amazon's 3.7-million-square-foot HOU6 fulfillment center in the city, where state licensing records and FAA filings from May showed Amazon building dedicated drone launchpads and operational offices, as Hoodline previously reported. That facility was designated as Amazon's primary logistics hub for launching Prime Air across the southwestern Houston suburbs.
A National Expansion Push Just One Day Earlier
The timing is notable. Just a day before the Richmond pool video began circulating, Amazon announced plans to expand Prime Air drone deliveries to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of the year, a sixfold jump from its 11 active operational locations, according to FreightWaves. Amazon Prime Air Vice President David Carbon said the company had already delivered hundreds of thousands of packages by drone so far this year.
Amazon's drone deliveries are limited to packages weighing 5 pounds or less that fit inside a shoebox-sized container, and the service is free for Prime members on orders over $50 or priced at $4.99 for non-Prime customers, according to LiveNOW from FOX. Drones fly only during daylight hours, within roughly 7 to 7.5 miles of a fulfillment station.
Not The First Texas Stumble For Prime Air
This isn't the first time Amazon's drone program has run into trouble in Texas. In February, an 80-pound Prime Air MK30 drone crashed into an apartment building in Richardson, striking the outer wall during vertical flight before falling to the sidewalk with smoking components, WFAA reported. Amazon attributed that crash to building-induced GPS signal interference and subsequently pulled multi-family residential complexes out of its local drone flight paths.
After Richardson homeowners petitioned the city council over constant low-altitude buzzing above their yards, Amazon told local officials in March that it had raised the minimum flight altitude of its delivery drones to an average of 225 feet and rerouted flights over commercial corridors instead of residential neighborhoods, per Dronelife. Whether similar altitude or routing adjustments will follow the Richmond pool incident has not been addressed in Amazon's statement.
A Crowded Sky Over Houston's Suburbs
Amazon's ambitions for Prime Air are considerable. In his April shareholder letter, CEO Andy Jassy set a target of reaching communities representing 30 million customers by the end of 2026 and delivering 500 million packages annually by 2030 in under 30 minutes, a goal that traces back to trials Amazon first ran in Lockeford, California, and College Station, Texas, in late 2022.
But Amazon isn't the only company chasing that vision in the Houston area. Walmart partnered with Wing in January to launch drone deliveries across 13 regional hubs serving more than 1 million residents, and Zipline launched a grocery delivery pilot in Cypress in April, according to ABC News. Walmart and Wing plan to expand that network to 150 additional stores nationwide over the coming year, putting Amazon in direct competition for suburban rooftops and backyards across the region.
Underpinning all of this is a 2024 Federal Aviation Administration approval allowing Amazon Prime Air to operate Beyond Visual Line of Sight using onboard detect-and-avoid technology, letting drones fly extended distances without a human observer watching every flight. The MK30 aircraft used in these deliveries includes enhanced sensors and noise-reduction technology compared to earlier drone generations. Whether that same detect-and-avoid software can reliably tell a backyard pool apart from an open lawn remains an open question as delivery volumes climb.
