天上掉快递：亚马逊无人机让得州小城居民受不了

Imagine a quiet Saturday morning: you're walking down the street, birds are flying overhead, and now and then a few cars go by.

Suddenly something huge flies over your head, buzzing like a whole hive of bees at once.

It's an Amazon delivery drone.

It's about one and a half metres tall and wide and weighs over thirty kilograms, nothing like the little drones people use to take photos.

The reporter said that watching it come down to deliver is like watching the moon landing.

It slowly descends, hovers about four metres above the ground, then opens its cargo door and "spits out" the box.

This is Richardson, Texas, a city in the Dallas suburbs.

Richardson is one of the first cities in the country approved to test Amazon's drone delivery service.

Every day, dozens of drones take off from a nearby distribution center, fly over the surrounding neighbourhoods and drop packages in people's yards.

At least, that's the plan.

Videos show an Amazon drone accidentally dropping a package into a swimming pool, and another crashing into an apartment building.

For Amazon, Richardson is only the beginning.

A spokeswoman said customer feedback had been "overwhelmingly positive."

The company also plans to expand the service to a hundred more towns and cities across the country in the coming months.

But some residents living under the drones' flight path say their experience should be a cautionary tale for others.

The reporter visited several neighbourhoods that residents now call a "drone highway."

One resident, who works from home at the kitchen table, can hear the drones buzzing past one after another.

Overall, the reporter's impression was that everyone hated the drones.

One resident said: it's not like someone coming to mow the grass for twenty minutes and leaving, it's all day long.

They hate the sound, and they hate the sight of it.

What they hate even more is something with cameras flying over their homes every few minutes.

Another resident said: it's just zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, and I said, it's Sunday, can't we have one day of peace?

Some residents went to city council meetings, complained to Amazon, and tried to take the issue to the Federal Aviation Administration, which controls American airspace.

But none of this has had much effect.

Now they've started writing to officials in other cities Amazon is about to enter, warning them the programme has been a "disaster."

Still, ever-faster delivery is hard for many people to resist.

And Amazon isn't the only one doing this; Walmart is trying drone delivery too.

One resident who has complained about drones flying over her backyard admitted that her daughter, in a rush to make a sandwich, once ordered a pack of ham from Walmart by drone.

If delivery took just minutes, would you be willing to hear drones over your head every day?