Facebook’s Aquila Internet Drone has Second Flight, This Time with No Crash (Jun 29, 2017)
One of Facebook’s numerous connectivity efforts is its Aquila unmanned aircraft for delivering Internet access in remote or unconnected areas. The first test flight earlier this year ended in a crash, something Facebook wasn’t entirely forthcoming about before an NTSB investigation revealed the details. The second flight happened about a month ago, but Facebook seems to have waited until now to talk about it for some reason, and it seems to have gone rather better. It was still short – under two hours, relative to the months Facebook expects Aquila to stay in the air eventually – and the landing is still a little awkward given that the aircraft has no landing gear, but Facebook seems to be making progress. At F8 in April, Facebook talked about its various internet connectivity efforts, and put Aquila firmly in the long-term bucket, saying it would take up to 10 years to get the project up and running, so that’s useful context for these efforts and the PR around them, which is mostly feel-good stuff and has little bearing on anything the company might do commercially in the near term. The other connectivity efforts including millimeter wave wireless technology for cities, and tethered antennas for emergency sites or rural areas seem to have nearer-term launch prospects, but it’s hard to see any of them delivering a meaningful boost to the addressable market for Facebook, which is arguably the whole point of these initiatives. But expanding the addressable market is going to be critical as Facebook pushes from 2 billion to 3 billion users, as I wrote in my blog post earlier this week.
via Business Insider (see also Facebook’s own post)
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