Facebook has revealed a few more details surrounding its pie-in-the-sky plans to beam internet access to the developing world using drone planes, claiming the first of which could be in the skies as soon as next year.
One of the project’s leaders, Facebook Connectivity Lab’s Yael Maguire, revealed some pretty interesting stuff while speaking to Mashable at the site’s Social Good Summit.
According to Maguire, the solar-powered Unmanned Aerial vehicles will fly well above commercial airspace and perhaps stay up in the air for years at a time.
Startlingly, he also said the drones should really be considered planes as they will be “roughly the size of a commercial aircraft, like a 747” and around the length of “six or seven Toyota Priuses.” Despite their impressive size, the drones will only weight of four car tires.
Maguire said: “In order for us to fly these planes – unmanned planes that have to fly for months, or perhaps years at a time – we actually have to fly above the weather, above all airspace.”
Facebook aims to begin testing the planes in the United States as soon as 2015, joining Google’s like-minded, balloon-centric initiative Project Loon a run for its money.
Maguire added: “We have to push the edge of battery technology, of solar technology, of composite technology. There are a whole bunch of challenges that our team is super excited to work on.”
Read more: Facebook sorry for turning users in to psych guinea pigs
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
