Facebook wants solar drone to bring Internet far and wide
That boomerang-shaped aircraft you see -- eventually -- will be flying high to bring the Web down to earth where Internet access is hard to come by. It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...a giant Internet router? That could be the reaction later this year when Facebook gets its high-flying, wide-wingspan drone off the ground. At its F8 conference on Thursday, Facebook revealed that it had made a first test flight of an unmanned aerial vehicle. That drone, though, was a small-scale model -- used to test out the aerodynamics -- of a much larger, and solar-powered, one that the company aims to send aloft as it works to bring the Internet to millions more people around the world. The big Facebook drone, called Aquila, will hold its first test flight this summer, Facebook vice president of engineering Jay Parikh told. "The idea of this," Facebook's chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, told an audience at F8, "is to loiter across an area at very high altitude -- 60,000 to 90,000 feet in the air -- stand on station for months at a time and beam down backbone Internet access."
That boomerang-shaped aircraft you see -- eventually -- will be flying high to bring the Web down to earth where Internet access is hard to come by. It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...a giant Internet router? That could be the reaction later this year when Facebook gets its high-flying, wide-wingspan drone off the ground. At its F8 conference on Thursday, Facebook revealed that it had made a first test flight of an unmanned aerial vehicle. That drone, though, was a small-scale model -- used to test out the aerodynamics -- of a much larger, and solar-powered, one that the company aims to send aloft as it works to bring the Internet to millions more people around the world. The big Facebook drone, called Aquila, will hold its first test flight this summer, Facebook vice president of engineering Jay Parikh told. "The idea of this," Facebook's chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, told an audience at F8, "is to loiter across an area at very high altitude -- 60,000 to 90,000 feet in the air -- stand on station for months at a time and beam down backbone Internet access."