Facebook drone failure sparks safety scare
Facebook’s drone aircraft experiment has suffered a setback after one of its unmanned aerial vehicles suffered a ‘structural failure’ mid-flight, sparking wider safety concerns about its Aquila programme.
The huge solar powered craft is designed to relay internet services to millions of people in remote areas of the globe but the crash in the summer (28 June), only now revealed by the US National Transport Safety Board, casts doubt on its timetable for implementation.
It is hoped that the initiative will one day lead to a fleet of autonomous planes circling the globe, beaming internet services to 1.6bn people in regions which are currently beyond the reach of today’s mobile networks.
An NTSB spokesman confirmed there were no injuries arising from the crash but that the drone itself is no longer airworthy. A more detailed account of the accident will be published by the NTSB within the next two months.
Commenting on the incident a Facebook spokeswoman said: “We have already learned a lot from the results of this flight test and will continue to learn from all the future flight tests we plan to run.”
The latest setback follows the destruction of a Facebook satellite after a Falcon 9 rocket owned by Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp blew up on the launchpad.