Items tagged with aquila
Although the world is increasingly connected through the internet, there are still four billion people or 60% of the world’s population who do not have such access. 1.6 billion of those people live in remote locations and do not have access to mobile broadband networks. Facebook Connectivity Lab just announced the first full-scale test flight of Aquila, a solar-powered airplane that can be used to bring affordable internet to isolated areas. Aquila is a high-altitude, long-endurance, unmanned solar-powered airplane. It has a wingspan bigger than a Boeing 737 airplane but weighs hundreds of times less due to its carbon fiber frame. Many of the team members who contributed to the craft had...
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Facebook’s efforts to spread Internet connectivity to nearly every person on the globe will get off the ground this summer. A new report from The Wall Street Journal indicates that Facebook’s prototype drone, dubbed Aquila, will be much larger than the one-tenth-scale drone that the company tested in early March. The full-size model will have the wingspan of a Boeing 737 (117 feet), but will only weigh as much as a small car (we’re assuming something that weighs less than 3,000 pounds). “Depending on how this test flight goes, we’ll see what happens,” says Jay Parikh, Facebook’s VP of Engineering. “This is a big plane, this is a big project and it’s never been done before.” The drones are capable...
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