{"id":13900,"date":"2015-04-03T15:00:10","date_gmt":"2015-04-03T22:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/?p=13900"},"modified":"2017-06-04T12:00:13","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T19:00:13","slug":"facebook-is-planning-to-test-its-747-sized-internet-drones-this-summer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/04\/facebook-is-planning-to-test-its-747-sized-internet-drones-this-summer","title":{"rendered":"Facebook is planning to test its 747-sized internet drones this summer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By <a class=\"author fn\" href=\"http:\/\/www.theverge.com\/users\/Rich%20McCormick\">Rich McCormick<\/a> \u2014 The VergeFacebook\u2019s ambitious plan to bring internet to the entire world with a fleet of broadband-beaming unmanned aerial vehicles has taken a step closer to fruition. The company\u2019s vice president of engineering, Jay Parikh, told <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/digits\/2015\/03\/26\/facebook-moving-ahead-with-drone-plans-test-this-summer\/\" target=\"_blank\"><i>The Wall Street Journal<\/i><\/a> that Facebook is planning \u201ca real test flight\u201d of its solar-powered internet drone this summer. A smaller version of the drone, one tenth the size of the planned product, was tested earlier this month.<\/p>\n<p>The scheduled test flight would be the first time the full-sized internet drone \u2014 called Aquila \u2014 will take to the skies. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2014\/9\/24\/6839225\/facebook-says-its-internet-drones-will-be-the-size-of-747s\">Facebook says<\/a> the vehicle will have the wingspan of a commercial passenger jet and the length of \u201csix or seven [Toyota] Priuses,\u201d but will only weigh as much as four car tires. The lightweight build should help the craft stay flying for weeks, months, or years at a time, using solar energy to keep itself aloft. Google, also in the process of developing its own internet-proliferation project, is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2014\/3\/7\/5473692\/facebook-drone-titan-aerospace-project-loon\">using a different approach<\/a>. The company\u2019s Project Loon uses a swarm of balloons to disseminate broadband to unconnected portions of the world.<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2015\/3\/27\/8298657\/facebook-testing-aquila-internet-drones-summer-2015\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Rich McCormick \u2014 The VergeFacebook\u2019s ambitious plan to bring internet to the entire world with a fleet of broadband-beaming unmanned aerial vehicles has taken a step closer to fruition. The company\u2019s vice president of engineering, Jay Parikh, told The Wall Street Journal that Facebook is planning \u201ca real test flight\u201d of its solar-powered internet [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1488],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13900"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64777,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13900\/revisions\/64777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}