Fortunately, automated systems can meet that higher threshold so long as we actually aim for it. If you aim for the lower "beats existing systems by some measures" bar then you make stupid decisions and tradeoffs like rushing to market or leaving out more capable sensors. We ought to try to make new technologies as good as possible. Sometimes the market will bet against that, but that's a tide that engineers should fight back against. Trucks kill too many people, and if drones kill half as many that's still unacceptable. We can do better.
The new system needs to be better but that doesn’t necessarily mean safer.
For delivery, that could mean cheaper and faster and more convenient.
Autonomous vehicles are a special case because those accidents tend to cause death and serious injury. As long as delivery drones can avoid killing multiple people per year, they are probably fine to compete on other metrics.
In comparison to the way their delivery drivers drive down my sidewalk, I can see the drone being a safety win.
Please be specific on what you mean by "just"? From the article:
> Amazon told CBS Texas that it’s investigating the cause of the crash that happened Wednesday afternoon.
Did it hit a bird? Did the wind blow something into it? Was it a 0.01% occurrence of some hardware failure? Who knows. Design flaw?
Extrapolating a few crashes within this new tech use case to a some fundamental flaw of drone flight isn't reasonable, at the moment.
I suppose a safe alternative would be pneumatic tubes dug to everyone's door. But, only things that are economically feasible can exist in the world. So, instead of perfection, we're left with the iteration and compromise that is engineering, regulations and enforcement to bound it, and insurance to catch the edge cases.
A large part of the FAA regulation around drones is one based on existing in reality, and it's lack of perfection, which is how much damage they can do (this is what limits the weight and speed).
I would expect them not to fly into any kind of structure. That they'd hit a crane is pretty insane considering what the results of something like that could be.
You are setting an impossible standard.
Drones are lightweight, they're not going to do much to heavy machinery. Basically the same as a brick wall.
The real fear is propellers hitting a human. The result is not good at all.
Maybe if they fly at much higher altitudes for most of the flight.
The impact would be quite serious, if they crash at speed but even falling on a car or a human would be quite serious, possibly deadly, even if the propellers don't spin.