Project Aquila: Facebook has abandoned plans to build a fleet of planes for internet distribution in areas they do not have.
About four billion people do not have access to the internet worldwide and since 2014 Facebook has been developing the Aquila project. The ambitious spacecraft would use giant solar motors to distribute internet connections around the world.
Facebook has set up a team in Bridgewater, UK for the work plannings, development and testing of an aircraft, which would use the HAPS system (from the high altitude platform station).
The Aquila drone was designed to be able to stay in the air for months and establish a communication zone of 50 kilometers in space up to 90 days, transmitting a signal that would be converted to Wi-Fi or LTE via small ground towers.
The project as well as the scale of Aquila was very ambitious: The airplane it had wings the size of a Boeing 737 but weighed a third of an electric car. It was designed to fly between 60.000 and 90.000 feet during the day, above commercial flight altitude.
Facebook said the team was able to prove that such aircraft were viable as it managed to conduct two flight tests. However, problems arose. The company itself announced that the first test flight ended in "structural failure" just a few seconds before landing. Of course he did not specify the term.
The company said that during the project it also made progress on some other key points of the system. Like for example its integration technology millimeter wave (MMW) for air-to-ground and point-to-point communication. However, it said it will stop with the project as other aerospace companies have started investing in the technology. So he closed the unit he had in Bridgwater.
"Going forward, we will continue to work with others such as Airbus on HAPS technology and generally on all of them technologies required to operate the system, such as flight control computers and high-density batteries," said Yael Maguire.
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