The bizarre patents of Amazon’s drone programme keep on coming. Hot on the heels of the company’s proposal for a floating airship warehouse, it has now filed a patent for parachute-aided delivery of packages.

In the future, if the patent is implemented, Amazon’s delivery drones may not even need to land on your enormous lawn to deliver your parcels. Instead, the drone will simply release parcels from on high, deploying parachutes to slow their descent and ensure the valuables inside remain intact.

Of course, normal parachutes would bring their own problems – a strong gust of wind, and your Blu-Ray box set ends up on the roof – so a second aspect of the patent contains the real innovation. The drone will carry on hovering nearby, monitoring the package as it falls: if it moves off course, the drone can instruct it to deploy one of a number of methods to correct its descent, from bursts of compressed air to sticking out flaps.

Similarly, the patent focuses a lot of attention on how to ensure that the package can be dropped in motion without continuing the same trajectory as the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). “A package delivery system can be implemented to forcefully propel a package from a UAV, while the UAV is in motion,” the patent explains. “The package delivery system can apply the force on to the package in a number of different ways. For example, pneumatic actuators, electromagnets, spring coils and parachutes can generate the force that establishes the vertical descent path of the package.”

The patent shows Amazon is continuing to refine its drone delivery system, marketed as Prime Air, even as it claims to be conducting real-world trials in Cambridgeshire, England. When Amazon last spoke publicly about the trials, they were only open to customers with huge gardens, who live close to the delivery depot, and want items weighing less than 2.6kg, and only two customers were actually members of the trial. The company said it hoped to expand that to “dozens” in the following months.