Facebook says its solar-powered Aquila drone completed its second test flight successfully, flying for 1 hour and 46 minutes before landing perfectly
Just after dawn on May 22, Facebook reached another exciting and important milestone for the Aquila program — completing the successful second full-scale test flight of the aircraft.
Context & Ripple Effects
Aquila's arc has been stop-start: Facebook unveiled the Boeing-737-wingspan solar drone in 2015, completed the full-scale prototype with a 10-gigabit-per-second data laser that same year, then flew it once in July 2016 — a flight that ended in a crash the NTSB later attributed to an autopilot that failed to compensate for high winds on landing.
This second flight, kept quiet from May 22 until Facebook's own announcement, is the program's answer to that finding: 1 hour 46 minutes aloft and a clean landing, which is exactly the phase of flight that broke the aircraft last time.
First-order effects
- The intact landing gives Facebook direct evidence its post-crash landing-control changes work, clearing the specific failure mode the NTSB identified and unblocking further test flights of the same airframe.
- With 'does it land' answered, Facebook's engineering attention shifts to the harder goals set when the full-scale prototype and its 10-gigabit laser were completed — solar endurance and aircraft-to-aircraft data relay.
Second-order effects
- Every successful flight de-risks the laser link that has to function before Aquila can pass internet traffic between planes, moving the program's critical path and spending toward that subsystem rather than basic airworthiness.
- A credible flight-test cadence also strengthens Facebook's hand with the airspace authorities it will need to clear for higher, longer flights — the regulatory counterpart to the NTSB scrutiny the first crash drew.
Third-order effects
- If flights keep extending toward the multi-month endurance a solar design implies, the end state is platforms owning their own connectivity infrastructure instead of renting reach from telecom operators — though no carrier or regulator partnership appears in the record yet, making that the program's next structural hurdle.
The trend: Consumer internet platforms are building their own physical delivery layers — solar aircraft, lasers, drones — to reach users directly rather than depending on telecom networks.