Facebook Aquila
Facebook built a solar wing wider than a Boeing 737 to beam the internet from the stratosphere, flew it twice, and closed the aircraft factory before a network existed.
Quick facts
- Existence state
- Never Born
- Peak stage
- working prototype
- Research confidence
- high
- Last verified
What it was
An experimental high-altitude unmanned aircraft developed by Facebook's Connectivity Lab.
Aquila was designed to circle remote regions for months and relay broadband through laser and millimetre-wave links.
Existence timeline
Facebook buys the British aircraft team.
A carbon-fibre flying wing takes shape.
Aquila flies in Arizona and suffers a hard landing.
The revised aircraft completes another test.
Facebook ends internal airframe production.
Connectivity work moves to external aircraft platforms.
Why it ended
Facebook ended internal aircraft development in 2018 and shifted to partnerships with established aerospace companies.
Last confirmed trace
The full-scale prototype, flight imagery, accident investigation and communications research document the programme.
What it left behind
Aquila advanced individual technologies but showed how far a record-setting prototype remained from an economically operated communications fleet.
How we classified it
The proposed archive unit never reached ordinary public access in the form being documented.
The strongest verified milestone maps to working_prototype under Arrival Score V1.
Sources & verification
Last reviewed 2026-08-01. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the evidence directly.