Facebook Expands Drone Team

Facebook is bulking up its drone team.The company has posted more than a dozen jobs for aeronautical engineers, technicians and other specialists for its drone business. It’s all part of Facebook’s plan to connect the whole world to the Internet using drones, lasers and satellites.

Facebook wants to know: Are you an avionics engineer who can create an autopilot system? How about a thermal engineer who can keep a drone cool during long flights? Or a systems engineer who can manage lasers in outer space?

They’ll all be members of Facebook’s Connectivity Lab, where the company is researching ways to bring an Internet connection to everyone on the planet. An estimated two-thirds of the world’s population doesn’t currently have access to the Internet.

Most of the positions are based in California, split between Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters and the Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills.

The rest are in London, where they’ll likely work with the engineers that Facebook brought on board from the small aviation company Ascenta earlier this year. Ascenta’s founders were behind the early versions of Zephr, which claimed the record as the longest-flying solar-powered unmanned aircraft.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook informed that the firm plans to build a satellite, drones and special lasers in order to make internet service available to everyone. The social networking service company will launch its first drone airborne in the middle of 2015.

Yael Maguire, the head of Facebook connectivity department stated that these drones would be similar to the planes in terms of size.

Zuckerberg took it as a charity instead of a step to increase revenue for its business. However, it is expected that if the company deliver the internet to the entire world then it would certainly try hard to convert them into its clients. Presently, the company has 1.35 billion users whereas the total population of Earth is 7.1 billion.

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