As news broke that the market town of Darlington would be the first town in the UK to receive Amazon parcels by air, we positioned Emile Naus, Partner at BearingPoint as a retail supply chain expert, with a deep knowledge of the issues around drone deliveries.

Emile was swiftly interviewed by the Daily Mail, providing comments as the only industry expert in the feature. His comments included the view that:

“The typical drone is about 80 decibels which is not insignificant, and when the drones are low, during take-off or landing that does make it louder. The places which are worst affected will be houses close to the distribution centre, where the drones are still flying low to the ground.”

Emile added: “If there are any areas which have a large quantity of deliveries that could make the noise worse. It is a volume game; it will come down to how many are flying. The range is quite small. If you think about how many delivery vans drive around, these drones will only take one at a time.

I’m guessing a van would make 200 deliveries, so replacing one van would be a lot of drones and a lot of noise.”

The feature also pointed out that the Darlington scheme may be doomed to the fate of one Texas city where issues over noise caused by the constant deliveries became so prevalent that the mayor was forced to write a letter of complaint to Amazon.