Facebook’s Internet-Beaming Drone Completes Maiden Flight

Facebook’s Internet-Beaming Drone Completes Maiden Flight
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Aquila is Facebook’s aerial unmanned drone. A marvel of carbon fiber engineering, Aquila is a high-altitude solar-powered plane designed to beam Internet access into remote parts of the world using millimeter wave and laser communications technology.

When it becomes fully operational, Aquila will be able to circle a region 60 miles in diameter and stay aloft for up to 3 months at a time while consuming a mere 5,000 watts of power at cruising speed.

Despite its relatively light 900 pound frame, Aquila the Internet Drone is also a hulking behemoth. With the wingspan of a commercial jetliner, Aquila’s knife-like wings easily jut out past the asphalt and overshadow the Arizona desert creeping up against the runway from which it took off on its maiden flight on Friday.

The full-scale test flight, which it passed with flying colors, lasted a little over 90 minutes. While Aquila only flew at low altitudes, Facebook plans to continue pushing Aquila to the brink of its capabilities in successive tests until technicians are confident that the drone is fully operational.

Facebook hopes to eventually operate a whole fleet of such drones flying at lofty altitudes of 60,000 feet to connect hundreds of millions of people to the cloud. As Mark Zuckerberg is wont to note, more than 4 billion people (60% of the world’s population) still lack access to the mobile broadband networks crucial to economic development in the 21st century. This disparity is referred to as the digital divide and remedying it has been one of the avowed goals of Facebook’s Connectivity Lab, a Google X-type R&D lab.And, as it were, Aquila is one of a suite of technologies, including satellites, miniature wireless platforms, and laser beams, that Facebook has developed to make Internet connectivity ubiquitous.

Not that these efforts are purely altruistic. It’s not hard to imagine how the addition of billions of new Facebook friends could catalyze exponential growth in content creation, buzz, and social activity on the platform, driving a deluge of ad revenue into its warchest and enriching the hoard of personal data that Facebook continues to accumulate.

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