Mark Zuckerberg hopes to bring internet access to world through UAS

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After two years of engineering, Facebook’s first unmanned aircraft, Aquila, made its first successful flight early on the morning of June 28 in Yuma, Arizona.




With Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in attendance to witness the event, Aquila tripled its initial flight time expectancy, staying in the air for 96 minutes instead of the originally planned 30 minutes, according to a note published on Zuckerberg’s personal Facebook page. A video package of the flight was published on Zuckerberg’s Facebook page on Thursday, July 21.




If all goes according to plan for Zuckerberg and his team, there will be many more Aquilas to come, in an effort to provide internet access to the entire world. Currently, less than half of the earth’s population has access to the world wide web, and Zuckerberg hopes to change that with the creation of Aquila. Along with that, he hopes to also provide the world with access to some of Facebook’s future services, including acritical intelligence and virtual reality.




From an in-depth article on TheVerge.com, which first reported the successful flight of Aquila, nearly two dozen people worked on the development of the UAS. TheVerge spoke to Zuckerberg after the successful flight, and he talked about his plans for Aquila and other future unmanned aircraft like it.




“I think the future is going to be thousands of solar-powered planes on the outskirts of cities and places where people live, and that’s going to make connectivity both available and cheaper,” Zuckerberg told TheVerge. “And, I think, can help play an important role in closing this gap of getting more than a billion people online. This is an early milestone, but it’s a big one.”




Here are some other interesting notes on Aquila from both the note and video posted on Zuckerberg’s Facebook page:




• Aquila has the wingspan of an airliner but weighs less than 1,000 pounds, with the hope to make it even lighter




• Currently, it flies off the power of roughly three hair dryers




• It is unmanned but still requires a ground crew to help direct and monitor its flight




• It purposely flies slow to use the least amount of energy, but the goal is for it to reach 80 mph at some point




• It will use lasers than can transfer data 10 times faster than existing systems




• Zuckerberg hopes that Aquila can one day break the world record for longest unmanned aircraft flight.





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