ON THE GROUND, FACEBOOK’S EMPLOYEES WERE ELATED; SOME WIPED AWAY TEARS<\/q><\/p><\/blockquote>\nA remote control operator activated the dolly, and Aquila began rumbling down the runway. The plane is attached to the dolly with four straps. When it reached sufficient speed, pyrotechnic cable cutters known as \u201csquibs\u201d cut through the straps, and Aquila lifted into the air, where it floated up its test altitude of 2,150 feet and stabilized. On the ground, Facebook\u2019s employees were elated; some wiped away tears. \u201cIt was this incredibly emotional moment for everyone on the team who\u2019s poured their lives into this for two years,\u201d Zuckerberg said.<\/p>\n
Watching from below, Zuckerberg was struck by Aquila\u2019s deliberate, unhurried pace. \u201cIt flies really slowly,\u201d he said two weeks later, at Facebook\u2019s headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. \u201cMost times when people are designing planes, they\u2019re designing them to get people or things from place to place, so there\u2019s no real advantage to moving slowly. But if your goal is to stay in the air for a long period of time, then you want to use as little energy as possible \u2014 which means going as slowly as you physically can, while not falling out of the air.\u201d<\/p>\n
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At 2AM, in the dark morning hours of June 28th, Mark Zuckerberg woke up and got on a plane. He was traveling to an aviation testing facility in Yuma, AZ, where a small Facebook team had been working on a secret project. Their mission: to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5404,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"video","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[5],"tags":[49,48,38],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/demo.wpzoom.com\/videobox\/files\/2016\/07\/x240-fHn.jpg?fit=427%2C240&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7Lnfq-1p9","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.wpzoom.com\/videobox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5403"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.wpzoom.com\/videobox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.wpzoom.com\/videobox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.wpzoom.com\/videobox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.wpzoom.com\/videobox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5403"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/demo.wpzoom.com\/videobox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5542,"href":"https:\/\/demo.wpzoom.com\/videobox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5403\/revisions\/5542"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.wpzoom.com\/videobox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.wpzoom.com\/videobox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.wpzoom.com\/videobox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.wpzoom.com\/videobox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}