Facebook drone completes test flight

As the summer sun rose over the Arizona desert, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and his team watched the Aquila lift off the runway at a military installation near the California border, the first time the unmanned solar-powered aircraft had taken to the skies.

Aquila, with the wingspan of a Boeing 737, remained aloft at low altitudes for 96 minutes, more than three times longer than Facebook originally planned. Facebook had been testing a much smaller scale version of Aquila for several months, but this flight a month ago was the first true test of the aircraft, USA Today reported.

Hoots and high fives accompanied the successful launch, a milestone in Facebook's mission to beam the Internet to people who don't have it.

The concept: Circling a region, the aircraft will use new laser-beam technology to deliver fast Internet to people in a 60-mile radius. Aquila will transmit a signal that can be received by the antennas of small towers and dishes on the ground. The antennas will convert the signal into Wi-Fi or 4G networks.

Facebook will have to solve some tough engineering problems — collecting enough energy during daylight hours to operate around the clock and designing high-energy, dense batteries that can efficiently store enough energy — before Aquila can complete its mission: to fly miles above the earth — 60,000 feet or more — for up to three months at a time. The current record for solar-powered unmanned flight is two weeks.

"We have a lot of work ahead of us," says Facebook's vice president of engineering Jay Parikh.