Facebook's Solar-Powered Drone Under Investigation After 'Accident' (theguardian.com)

Facebook has hit a hitch in its plans to use a solar-powered unmanned drone to provide internet access to developing nations, after it was revealed the American National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has opened an investigation into an accident on the drone's first test flight in June. From a report on The Guardian:At the time, Facebook described the flight as "successful": the drone, called Aquila, stayed aloft for 96 minutes, three times the planned duration. "We have a lot of work ahead of us," Jay Parikh, Facebook's head of engineering and infrastructure, wrote when Facebook revealed the test flight, in late July. "In our next tests, we will fly Aquila faster, higher and longer, eventually taking it above 60,000 feet." In a second, more technical, blogpost published that same day, Facebook's Martin Luis Gomez and Andrew Cox acknowledged the failure in passing. "Our first flight lasted three times longer than the minimum mission length, so we were able to gather data on how the structure and autopilot responded under a range of real-world conditions to help verify these predictions," they wrote.Reporter Casey Newton mentioned on The Verge that at the time, Facebook had led them believe that everything was alright, and there were no hiccups.

Comments

tons of other questions need to be answered.

[nimbius]

this device exists solely for internet.org, zuck's imperialist project to bring internet to india through facebook. Among questions still unanswered:

1. why are you continuing to insist on this if India itself has flatly refused this "branded internet" thats contingent upon your social media site
2. How will you fly drones in foreign airspace without the consent of a host country?
3. How do you justify brining internet to countries like Malawi, Zamibia, and Angola when a grain shipment or food programme would do far more to improve the lives of these people than another American drone?
4. Egypt and South Africa already have high-speed internet available to the general public. did you forget this? or are you just trying to erode public investment in open and neutral networks?