Amazon Wants Drone Delivery in 500 Cities, But One Just Dropped Package in a Pool

Lindsey Austen had never watched an Amazon drone make a delivery before. On Monday, she heard one buzzing over her backyard in Richmond, Texas, grabbed her phone and went outside. The drone hovered over her swimming pool, opened its cargo compartment and dropped her package straight into the water.

Inside were dry cat food and shoe insoles. “When it went into the pool, I was shocked,” Austen said. “I don’t think I’ll be wanting any more drone deliveries.”

The timing made the video particularly awkward for Amazon. Two days later, the company announced plans to expand Prime Air to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026, a roughly sixfold increase in coverage that Amazon says will reach tens of millions of additional customers.

Why the Drone Dropped It There

Amazon’s Prime Air drones don’t land in customers’ yards. The MK30, the company’s current delivery aircraft, weighs up to about 83 pounds and carries packages weighing up to five pounds.

“Once the drone arrives at the delivery location, it hovers approximately 13 feet above the ground and releases the package,” Amazon says in its Prime Air documentation, describing the MK30’s delivery procedure.

The approach is designed to keep the aircraft’s spinning rotors away from people and pets. But it creates an unusual problem: a calm swimming pool can look exactly like the kind of open, unobstructed surface the system wants.

There is no person standing there. No tree or parked car is blocking the drop zone. Nothing obviously tells the drone that the surface below is water. The result is a delivery system making the correct visual judgment according to its rules and the completely wrong judgment for the customer.

This Isn’t the First Water Landing

Austen’s video isn’t the only recent example of a Prime Air package ending up in water. Coverage has documented another pool incident in Arizona this year, along with other operational problems involving Amazon’s MK30 drones.

Those incidents include two drones colliding with a construction crane in Tolleson, Arizona, in October 2025, a drone striking a residential internet cable in November and another hitting an apartment building in Richardson, Texas, in February.

“The FAA has authorized Amazon Prime Air to operate its MK27-2 and MK30 delivery drones beyond the operator’s visual line of sight,” the FAA says, following Amazon’s Part 135 certification and subsequent approvals for expanded operations.

500 Cities Means a Lot More Edge Cases

“Prime Air has delivered hundreds of thousands of packages to customers,” Amazon says in its latest Prime Air expansion announcement, describing the milestone as part of its move toward broader commercial deployment.

Expanding to nearly 500 cities means those drones will encounter far more of the messy variables found in ordinary backyards: pools, trampolines, patio furniture, pets, parked cars and changing weather.

A single drone dropping a package into a pool is a viral video. At hundreds of thousands or millions of deliveries, even a very low failure rate can produce a steady stream of unusual incidents.

And autonomous systems don’t get to ask a homeowner whether a seemingly perfect patch of ground is actually a swimming pool.

What Happens When a Delivery Goes Wrong?

Austen said she retrieved the package quickly. The cat food and insoles were soaked but not ruined. “Customers must select an eligible delivery location and confirm that location before they can receive drone deliveries,” Amazon says in its Prime Air customer guidance.

Austen said she doesn’t specifically remember selecting drone delivery and said the order initially appeared to be a normal Amazon purchase before she was notified that some items would arrive by drone.

Amazon has said it reviews failed deliveries but has not publicly detailed case-by-case compensation for incidents like this beyond its existing customer protections.

That leaves a practical question for customers as Prime Air expands: who bears the inconvenience when an autonomous system decides the wrong place is safe to drop a package?

Bigger Problem Is the Scale

The swimming pool isn’t really the story. It’s the clearest example of a broader problem with autonomous delivery: the system has to make rapid judgments about environments that aren’t always as predictable as its training data suggests.

Amazon’s safety systems may work correctly most of the time. But moving from a limited number of markets to nearly 500 cities dramatically increases the number of real-world situations the system has to handle.

A pool is simply an unusually visible failure. As Prime Air expands, Amazon will have to prove that its drones can distinguish not just between obstacles and open space, but between open space that is safe for a package and open space that very much isn’t.