Keywords: solar-powered drone, Aquila “After two years of engineering, I’m proud to announce the successful first flight of Aquila — the solar-powered plane we designed to beam internet to remote parts of the world,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post. Facebook’s original mission was to fly Aquila for 30 minutes, but things went quite well for the company and it decided to keep the plane up for 96 minutes. Full-scale test of solar-powered drone that’s set to beam free internet for billions in remote parts of the worldAfter revealing that it wants to use unmanned drone airships to beam the internet down to the estimated four billion people worldwide without it two years ago, social media giant Facebook on Thursday announced the first full-scale test flight of its solar-powered craft Aquila. Zuckerberg added, “On June 28th, we completed the first successful flight of Aquila — our solar-powered plane that will beam internet to remote parts of the world and eventually break the record for longest unmanned aircraft flight.”According to the post, the flight took place before dawn in Yuma, Arizona.

Source: The Hindu July 23, 2016 00:33 UTC