Name: Take a Look at Facebook’s Pilotless Plane
Uploaded: 2016-04-13
Duration: 2 min 59 s
Description: It doesn’t use fuel, either.

Now we're working on a very comprehensive set of technologies here from UAV's to satellites to laser communications. Our first stop is our UAV platform. Now you've seen the video a couple times the last two days. I'm gonna tell you why it looks like a giant boomerang. So we built this aircraft And made sure that everything we've done is going to be able to accomplish the mission requirements of this aircraft. We need to be able to fly this airplane for long periods of time, for months at a time. And so we actually had to invent an entirely new aircraft to accomplish this. Why? Because most aircraft today Aren't designed to fly for months at a time and to beam lasers across the sky and to bring Internet connectivity to rural communities. So one of the most important things in designing a plane that's going to be airborne for long period of time is the mass of the aircraft. We have to care about every kilogram, every component on this plane. So what did we do? We took a look at everything that goes into this plane. First we did, we tossed off the tail. We took off the tail. There's no tail to this plane, which saved a lot of mass, and a lot of drag on the plane. But guess what, makes it really hard to steer. So we have to do a ton of work in the steering components of the plane. The second thing we did is we removed the pilot, removed the cockpit, removed the bathroom. We don't need any of that. But, because this plane has no pilot, we need to develop a very sophisticated flight control system so that this plane can fly over an area and deliver connectivity for months at a time continually, without interruption. Last thing we did is we took the fuel tanks and we threw them out too. It's too expensive to power this plane off of fossil fuels and to think about the complexities of refueling this plane. So we're powering it off the sun. Now, we took what's left, which is essentially this wing, We built it out of carbon fiber to make it extremely lightweight and to make it look cool. All right, so how is this gonna look when it gets deployed? Well, here's a map. Here's a city that has internet connectivity. We imagine that Aquila will be able to be deployed tens or hundreds kilometers away from the city. These green line signify laser lengths from the city where there's internet connectivity to our plane, and that's an extensible platform because as we will connect more rural communities, these planes with talk to each other via free space optics or laser lengths, and they'll be able to deliver tens of gigabits per second of data and internet connectivity to these rural communities. As we connect more you can see how this continues to scale out. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] All right, so we're really excited about it. There's a ton of work left here. Were gonna be continuing to build it, to test it and stay tune. We'll have more updates as we make progress