Say Hello To Aquila, Facebook’s First Solar-Powered, Internet-Beaming Drone

The social network’s boss Mark Zuckerberg announced yesterday the company has completed the development of Aquila, a solar-powered drone Facebook hopes to use to bring internet to remote parts of the planet where people can not connect, according to a story this past Friday by ABC News.

Featuring a carbon fiber frame, the Aquila drone weighs nearly a hundred times less than an actual Boeing 737 and will be tested in the US later this year.

The brainchild of Facebook’s Connectivity Lab, Aquila will use a laser communication system to transmit Internet signals to stations located on the ground to provide access to remote areas.

According to Yael Maguire, the company’s engineering director of connectivity, the plane would operate between 60,000ft (18km) and 90,000ft (27km) – above the altitude of commercial airplanes – so it would not be affected by weather.

Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice-president of engineering, said: “Our mission is to connect everybody in the world”.

It will climb to its maximum height during the day, before gliding slowly down to its lowest limit at night, to save power when its solar panels are not receiving charge.

Facebook’s Aquila drone, which was developed by the company’s Connectivity Lab and built by its United Kingdom aerospace team, is the solution to that issue, Parikh said. Helium balloons will be attached to the plane and float it up into the air.

Because the planes must constantly move to stay aloft, they will circle a three-km (two-mile) radius, Parikh said. The drone will be lifted to its preferred path with the help of helium balloons, as it lacks wheels or any other motor to propel itself. Sri Lanka said this week that it had signed a pact to eventually bring the Loon project to that country, although Google said many details remained. The unmanned aircraft is being used to offer internet access to remote parts of the world where it is not accessible. It is another step in Facebook’s goal of connecting the entire world to the internet.

In May, Internet.org opened to outside applications following a controversy over its limited set of online services potentially defying the idea of “net neutrality” that calls for the equal treatment of online content and services.

He told the Guardian: “In the particular case of somebody who’s offering … something which is branded internet, it’s not internet, then you just say no. No it isn’t free, no it isn’t in the public domain, there are other ways of reducing the price of internet connectivity and giving something …” Internet.org customers who accessed the internet for free, would only have access to selected services like weather, job listing, Facebook and Wikipedia.