![]() Facebook also wanted to test its enormous, stratospheric Aquila drones at the Spaceport, but shelved its plans last year after fragile prototypes were damaged on landing. Its parent company, Alphabet, eventually grounded the drones in 2017 to focus on Loon, which is now an Alphabet subsidiary delivering commercial Internet service from high-altitude balloons. Google bought a company called Titan Aerospace in 2014, and carried out numerous tests of a 5G system called SkyBender at Spaceport America in 2016. Both were seeking new ways to bring Internet access to remote communities in under-developed countries around the world. These problems with HALE aircraft did not dissuade Facebook and Google from attempting to develop their own high altitude, solar-powered drones. That program also ended in a crash, the following year. Photo: NASA A 2004 report into that crash concluded that “this class of vehicle is orders of magnitude more complex than it appears but that the AeroVironment/NASA technical team had identified and solved the toughest technical problems… An adequate knowledge base now exists to design, develop, and deploy operational high altitude, long endurance (HALE) systems.”ĪeroVironment built yet another prototype HALE drone, called Global Observer, for the Pentagon in 2010, to carry communications and surveillance payloads. The Helios prototype falls toward the Pacific Ocean after an in-flight breakup. However, the Helios brought NASA’s solar drone research to a sudden end in 2003, when it broke up in high winds during a test flight in Hawaii. The Helios still holds the altitude record for horizontal flight by a winged aircraft, reaching nearly 30 kilometers back in 2001. Its final drone for NASA was the Helios Prototype, an elegant flying wing wider than a 747 but weighing less than just one of the jumbo jet’s 18 landing wheels, thanks to its composite material construction. Beginning in 1997, the company built three solar- and fuel cell-powered drones under NASA’s Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor Technology program. The initial agreement with NASA covers a series of flight tests over the next three months, up to an altitude of 3 kilometers.ĪeroVironment did not immediately reply to requests for comment.ĪeroVironment is no stranger to high altitude, lightweight aircraft. Filings with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Securities and Exchange Commission suggest the new Hawk will have 10 electric engines and an operational altitude of over 20 kilometers.Īccording to a Space Act Agreement signed with NASA in November, the prototype drone could take to the air for the first time at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California as soon as this week. The Hawk 30 will have a curved “flying wing” design similar to a series of high-altitude solar drones that AeroVironment made for NASA twenty years ago. aerospace company AeroVironment is poised to launch an experimental solar-powered drone to deliver connectivity for 5G and the Internet of Things. A secretive joint venture between SoftBank and U.S.
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