Aquila: Facebook’s Internet In The Sky

Aquila: Facebook’s Internet In The Sky

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Facebook has a major ambition: connecting everyone on the planet. To achieve this goal, the company is working on new approaches to ground-based communications systems. But the most interesting work they do is not on the ground, but up in the skies. Facebook is working on a drone-based communications system called Aquila.

Jay Parikh, vice president of engineering at Facebook, explained some of the thinking behind the system at the company’s recent F8 developer conference. Aquila, turns out, will be using laser links to bring the internet to the most rural areas in developing countries.

As Parikh explains it, Facebook’s drone system is akin to a giant boomerang: “We need to fly it for months at a time,” he said, “so we had to invent a new aircraft to accomplish this; most aircraft aren’t designed to fly for months and beam lasers across the sky to bring Internet to rural communities.”

And the new aircraft is vastly different to what you might expect. For starters, it’s nothing but wing.

“We took off the tail,” Parikh said, “that saves mass and drag, but makes it hard to steer, so we had to do a ton of work in steering components.”

The cockpit is also gone, replaced by an advanced flight control system. The fuel tanks are history, and solar energy will be powering the drone. With all the traditional trappings gone, all that’s left is the wing.

“We built that out of carbon fiber,” Parikh said, “to make it light—and to look cool.”

Parikh said the drone will connect by laser to an internet access point in a city, and relay the connection to rural communities. Eventually, with enough drones in the air, they could extend the connection among them, too.