Project Aquila

Today 1.6 billion people live in regions that don’t have access to a mobile broadband network. Connecting these remote parts of the world with existing technologies such as buried optical fiber or microwave links on towers is often cost-prohibitive. As part of our commitment to Internet.org, the Facebook Connectivity Lab is developing many new technologies to bring affordable internet access to more people, more quickly. One of the technologies we are building is a fleet of solar-powered aircraft called Aquila. Once they are fully operational, these high-altitude planes will stay airborne for up to 90 days at a time and beam broadband coverage to a 60-mile-wide area on the ground, helping to open the opportunities of the internet to people in underconnected regions.

After several months of flying scale models, our team has reached an important milestone: We successfully completed the first full-scale test flight. The low-altitude test flight lasted for 96 minutes — more than three times our planned mission length — and provided our aeronautics team with data on numerous aspects of Aquila’s performance, including the autopilot, motors, batteries, radios, ground station, displays, basic aerodynamic handling, structural viability, and crew training. This post details some of our early learnings from the test flight and the data we collected, and looks ahead to some of the challenges we’re working on next.