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Facebook has been aiming to bring the internet to the rest of the world for some time now, and some of the ways they plan to do this are through indestructible cellular access points and drones. While the former is still in the works, a recent test flight has been successful in showcasing the capabilities of Facebook’s drone project. The social media network isn’t done yet, however, as the most ambitious aspects of the initiative is still proving to be a challenge.
The Verge made a feature article about this test run, which was written by Casey Newton who spoke to Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the project himself. In the piece, Zuckerberg personally flew to a test facility located in Yuma, AZ where the drone called “Aquila” was about to undergo a test flight.
The “Aquila” is one of the first generation of drones that is intended to test the limits of Zuckerberg’s ambitions as well as to push boundaries in the technology by challenging the laws of physics itself. In the flight test, the drone successfully flew for over 90 minutes, surpassing the expectations of the engineers who were aiming for a flight time of only half an hour.
The engineering team was elated and Zuckerberg was encouraged. However, the end goal of Facebook is to have a fleet of drones that would be solar-powered, could stay in the air for 90 days at a time and could be cheap enough for mass production. The “Aquila” was only powered by a battery and was expensive to build.
As Fortune notes, the “Aquila” was only able to fly at an altitude of 2,150 feet. This is a far cry from the 60,000 to 90,000 feet that Facebook is aiming for. This presents the next set of problems that the social media site will need to solve.
When the project does reach its goals, it will be able to provide fast internet connection at 10Gbps in areas where clusters of civilization exist. The drones will also be able to concentrate bandwidth during emergencies situations in order to boost internet speeds in hospitals or government buildings.
