Facebook’s drones will change that, he said: “Our mission in the company is to connect everybody in the world.” The Aquila, according to Zuckerberg, has the wingspan of a Boeing 737 but weighs as much as a Toyota Prius. During the day, when they are fully charged, the planes will fly at an altitude of 90,000 feet.
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Aquila is Facebook’s high-altitude, long-endurance aircraft…
Facebook showed off details of its new Aquila plane on Thursday, an unmanned aircraft that will use lasers to help connect people to the Internet – it’s real, not science fiction.
“It’s sort of like a backbone of Internet using lasers in the sky, that’s the dream we have”, said Yael Maguire, the engineering director of Facebook’s Connectivity Lab. To reach these people, Facebook is working on drones, satellites, lasers and terrestrial Internet technology. This effort is important because 10% of the world’s population lives in areas without existing internet infrastructure.
Mike Cassidy, the leader of Google’s balloon project, has argued that balloons will be cheaper and more practical than drones for some time, due to the technical challenges of inventing and operating them.
Google, Facebook’s rival for the attention of Internet users, is pursuing its own plan, called Project Loon, to provide Internet access through a network of drifting high-altitude balloons.
The lab works with Facebook’s Internet.org, which has been criticized for only giving people access to a limited number of Internet services. Facebook engineering vice president Jay Parikh said the team created a design that uses rigid but lightweight layers of carbon fiber, capable of flying in the frosty cold temperatures found at high altitudes, for an extended period of time.
The plane, dubbed Aquila, (Latin for eagle) would be unmanned.
Facebook will start testing its huge drones later this year to see if it can really fly for the purported 90 days. At night, he said, they will settle to about 60,000 feet to conserve battery power. It could give Internet access to people located in a 50-mile radius on the ground. Though the company is claiming that its laser technology is 10 times faster than the state of the art, Maguire declines to discuss the particulars of this technology.
Facebook is designing the drones to transmit signals from one aircraft to another, so they can relay signals across a broader area on the ground, he added. The company will begin test flights of its full-size drone later this year.
Facebook hopes to share the technology with telecommunications carriers and development agencies, which it hopes will build and operate the drone networks, Parikh said.
None of this means Facebook plans to go into the ISP business, or airplane manufacturing, said Parikh. “We’re focused on finding ways to drive the industry to move faster”.
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The project was first announced in March 2014 by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
