Photo credit: JESHOOTS.com
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
The complete headline of this New York Post article is: “Amazon’s delivery drones become scourge of Texas town: It sounds like a giant hive of bees.” The article reports on Amazon’s use of delivery drones in the college town of College Station, Texas, home of Texas A&M University. Amazon’s drone delivery arm, Prime Air, is testing drone delivery there. Amazon wants to increase the number of flights per day from 200 to 470, and to expand the delivery area from 174 square miles from its drone port. The total number of flight operations, landings and takeoffs, would be 940 per day. Amazon also wants to extend operating hours to start at 7 a.m. and end at 10 p.m.
Residents complain that the drones sound like a giant hive of bees. The noise is loud enough to wake night shift workers who have to sleep during the day. City workers measured the drone noise between 47 and 61 decibels, although details of the measurements were not provided in the article.
Regardless of how loud the drones are, if they make enough noise to bother people, that’s a health issue. Unwanted noise is harmful. Noise causes stress, and stress is bad for human health. As far as I know, there are no published studies of the effect of drone noise on humans, but research shows that humans can’t habituate to aircraft noise and that nighttime aircraft noise can cause heart attacks and death. The same may be true for delivery drone noise.
Unless the drones can be made quieter, we think that they should be banned. People should have the right to be free from unwanted noise intruding on their homes. And a quieter world will be a better and healthier world for all.
