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Technology

Broadband From On High But Not In Orbit 130

Posted by timothy from the and-lo-there-will-be-bits dept.
jw writes: "The NY Times has a story about Angel Technologies, a St. Louis company that plans to provide high- speed Internet access in an unusual way: using solar-powered, high-altitude manned aircraft built to cruise at 51,000 feet... In addition to the expense of building or acquiring three planes for each metropolitan area, Angel's complicated plan involves using huge quantities of jet fuel, hiring two pilots for each plane and making three takeoffs and landings every day for each city where its service is available..." Piloting one of these sounds like a pretty high-stress job; if this should come to pass I hope they get every other week off like Houston channel pilots do. Zeppelins, satellites, solar-powered planes ... what about kites?
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Broadband From On High But Not In Orbit

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  • *whine* oh, it costs too much

    *whack* What did it cost Iridum to put up it's satellites? $2 billion +?

    --

    *whine* Where will they get pilots?

    *whack* A lot of pilots have to get a lot of hours in jets before they can fly commercial airlines. Most wind up joining the air nat'l guard or air force so they can get the hours. This is a great way to get highly experienced pilots. Takeoffs and landings are the two places where most accidents happen, and most pilots spend a lot of hime working on those. Three flights a day will give a lot of experience.

    --

    *whine* It will use too much fuel

    *whack* Probably not as much as you think. They'll be very high up, so be rather effieient. They're not hauling people or too much equipment, so those jets will be very efficient.
  • Posted by blerki:

    Hell of a way to beat latency!

    The latency to low earth orbit is around 30 ms, similar to ISDN. High earth orbit is like 200 ms. I can see wanting to do something like this, but exploring dirigibles or even GLIDERS first would have made a lot of sense!

  • Posted by blerki:

    It might look like a hoax at first glance, but the latency to low earth orbit is around 30 ms, similar to ISDN. High earth orbit is like 200 ms. That makes for pretty bad lag when you're used to 3 to 5 ms on a DSL or cablemodem link.

    I can see wanting to do something like this, but exploring dirigibles first, or even gliders, would have made sense!

  • Posted by blerki:

    Very interesting. I'd have to bet that these ("Angel") guys are rushing in an attempt to beat the SkyStation folks to the market. Let's hope they don't, since the Skystation stuff looks much cleaner and better planned...
  • Posted by Kotukunui:

    Maybe it does sound a bit far-fetched, but I have personally seen the actual aircraft flying and downlinking data to a ground station.

    At the EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh in 1999 they had the Rutan Proteus aircraft circling the airfield at high altitude and sending near-live video images to a laptop in the NASA exhibit. It wasn't quite high enough resolution to see yourself waving up at the plane, but you could see the larger display aircraft moving around on the ground.

    The secret to making it work is the genius of airplane designer Burt Rutan. The Proteus is a bizarre, ungainly looking beast built optimally for long endurance at high altitude. It uses a couple of small, super efficient jet engines from Williams International to power it. Compared to something like a 747, fuel consumption is miniscule.

    The mission time is expected to be anywhere from 10 to 14 hours. Two pilots take turns to fly and sleep during the mission. I guess they'll will need some smart software to execute the transmission handover when an aircraft is replaced on station by the next mission. I think they are proposing 6 aircraft per station to maintain continuous coverage.

    I'm not sure about the electronics/radio side of things but I guess that the frequency band will need to be one where directional antennas are not required. Having to track a moving aircraft to maintain a connection would be impractical. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't.
    But I certainly do not think it is a hoax.

    Check It Out! [scaled.com]

  • I can see wanting to do something like this, but exploring dirigibles first, or even gliders, would have made sense!

    I think both have serious problems with high winds; I think crashes did more damage to the dirigible business than the Hindenberg did. Airplanes have been known to fly into hurricanes, in comparison. And at the given altitude, the jetstream is, what, 100 mph?

    However, I have read plans for unmanned flights to do this. I suppose the problem is that you need a powerful aircraft to survive a high percentage of weather and thus keep your service almost always available.
  • This won't help the signals in urban centers because the aircraft will not be allowed to orbit directly overhead in tight circles.

    The FAA won't allow it in the US.
  • Maybe, maybe not. Sats cost a lot and cost a lot more to get to orbit. Then, you have the latency issue.

    IIRC, the ping to GEO and back is around half a second. The ping 102,000 feet (51,000 up and back) is somewhat less noticable.

    If the service can turn a gross revenue of $50 per subscriber, and they can get 10,000 subscribers per market, then they can probably turn a operating profit after they amortize the cost of the aircraft over a few years.

    Don Negro

  • Lessee, you'll need a whole bunch of computational power to figure out where to split the moon. No problem! Put up a bunch of these planes and have a Boeingwolf!


    :)


    hawk

  • In the late '80s, the US Navy followed soviet subs by sending out P3's to follow each one. THe standard tour was 12 hours (they brought 3 pilots, one of whom was supposed to be asleep at any moment), with a maximum time on station of 16 hours.


    This is expensive. THey were moving forward with a new line of blimps (though they might have been zepplins (sp), as they could put these on station for a week at a time. A beautiful solution, but then the Soviets folded and there was no point . . .


    It also would have provided a use for the Strategic Helium Reserve. We keep it for the navy's blimps, even though they haven't had them for over 50 years . . .


    hawk

  • Ok, now I'm confused. The NY Times article mentions solar powered aircraft *and* jet fuel, but the company web page doesn't mention solar power at all.

    If slashdot had a "Cancel" function, I would cancel my previous post.
  • Read the article again. Which part of "solar-powered" didn't you understand?

    I'm suprised the article mentions manned aircraft. The original proposal I read for "aerosats" was aircraft that would take off under remote control, get to cruising altitude then go autonomous until they needed to descend in a few weeks at which point they'd be taken over by remote control again.

  • Maybe you don't care, but I bet your not married and don't have kids either? Considering the hours of time in the are, and being able to be home for dinner every night... It's not that bad.

    I WISH my job was boring enough that I could just sit and read or play with a laptop all day long.....

    Hmm.. Maybe for some people, coming home to a wife and kids every night might not be ideal... But... I don't know, I just don't believe they will have a very hard time finding pilots for this, not at all...

  • Did someone leak out this april fools joke a bit early?

    This has GOT to be a joke.
  • What is the quote? "Flying is three hours of absolute boredom followed by ten minuts of sheer terror," or something along those lines. And that guy was in the military. Having flown a little bit myself, I can say that most flying is boring anyways. Me personally, I stick to hang-gliding :) Much more intense.

    --
  • Ok, I have _no_ basis for saying this, but it really sounds like a hoax. That's just crazy-expensive... After a year or so of flying hundreds of jets around every day, wouldn't a satellite be a bit cheaper?

    ---

  • A similar proposal from SkyStation (Score:3)

    by XNormal ( 8617 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2001 @11:39AM (#351487) Homepage
    Check out SkyStation [skystation.com]. Their proposed system uses a statospheric platform held aloft by helium. Electric motors powered by photovoltaic cells (and betteries for the night) are used for stationkeeping. Sort of like a satellite in very low geostationary orbit.

    -

  • Re:Hmm... (Score:2)

    by PD ( 9577 )
    Pyrotechnics
  • I can see it now... this become popular and competing ISPs will send fighter planes to take down the flying net connections in the sky.


    AOL fighter pilots gunning down Angel Internet ISP planes...

    or... if you will..

    "our server went down, and we lost 2 men."

    ---

  • And what happens during a storm?

    Yes its possible. Highly unlikely. Another vaporware product from another vaporware company looking for attention.
  • This looks like a job for the Centurion! [cnn.com]
  • The distance will only add about .1 ms to your ping.

    I can live with an extra 1/10 millisecond ping.

    51K feet = 9.66 miles
    9.66mi/c = 5.19e-5 seconds
    2way = 1.02 x10^-4



  • The reason you can't uplink fast is transmitter power.

    Geosynch is 22,500 miles away
    This will be 10 miles away.

    At 1/2500 the distance, you can get faster speeds because you require a LOT less power per bit. Basically, we're talking about a flying wireless transciver.

    Your connection speed will be fine.

  • Looking at it from a cost perspective, they must have figured that it would cost less than putting up some 'birds', or hooking up to a wireless network on the ground. Satellites really can't provide high speed Internet access to something as low-powered as a handheld device.. to get your signal 50,000 feet you will need more juice than a GSM phone, though. I guess if you really really need wireless broadband access, you could pay for this.

    Not that I would subscribe to this kind of thing. With the rate that unique services like this are abandoned, I wouldn't want to be stuck with a $1,000 "cone-shaped antenna" that's only good for a paper weight. Just look at Iridium. Keeping a bunch of planes in the sky 24 hours a day isn't exactly low-maintenance service..

    --

  • Have you ever used a cell phone in New York? There are lots of big buildings with thick walls. Radio signals don't penetrate them too well. Even if your broadcasting tower is on the top of the Empire State Building, unless there's a line of sight, or an almost-line-of-sight that only passes through a few buildings,
    you're not going to get signal*

    Basically, you're walking down Broadway talking happily, you turn onto 52nd, and your connection is dropped.

    The signal really has to rain down from above for coverage to be decent (after all, not much of Manhattan has a direct line of sight to the top of the ESB, but all of it has a direct line of sight to, say, the sun)

    *no matter how many times you shout, "Main screen turn on!"

    --

  • Planes fly right over Manhattan all the time.

    --

  • The pilots can surf the Net while the autopilot does the work!
  • Lasers are a bit faster than radio, not by much, but shrugs.
  • Formatting got fried.. but you get the point (I tried to do it as plain old text, but it kept telling me it had junk characters in it)
  • In comment to your sig. Postulate 1: Knowledge is Power. Postulate 2: Time is Money. As every engineer knows... Work/Time = Power Since Knowledge = Power, and Time = Money, we have: Work/Money = Knowledge Solving for Money, we get: Work/Knowledge = Money Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero, Money approaches infinity regardless of the Work done. Conclusion: The Less you Know, the more you Make
  • for everytime someone proposed flying a plane or using a baloon for a communications repeater. It just isn't going to happen. I would love to have a list of names of the investors on this cuz I've got a bridge for sale.

    Reality: You either put a bunch of stations high up on mountains or buildings or you put one expensive station in orbit. Either way your cost for coverage is going to be less than some manned aircraft system and far more reliable.

  • And the pilots will have the best ping time of everyone to the onboard FPS servers.
  • Just contract with those guys that are supposedly flying grid patterns across the USA making contrails [tripod.com] with assorted chemicals.

    (Actually, in addition to high-altitude contrails are an indicator of not spraying the Earth [lindamoultonhowe.com], any concerted contrail activity would be visible in satellite photos [wisc.edu] and impossible to hide.)

  • Well you got conclusion right but your facts wrong.

    >Planes can use cheaper components for the solar power supply.

    The planes will us generators running off of the jet engines just like airlines. It will take less fuel than lifting lots of heavy high drag solarcells.

    >Planes can use standard issue servers.

    Most likely not. They will use have aviation speced computers on board. Still cheaper then space speced computers. But not standard issue.

    >Planes don't require nuclear backup for when it gets dark.

    Very few sattilites do. If they have nuclear power they do not need solar cells. I am pretty sure all modern earth orbiting sattilties use batterys.

    >Planes don't crash into earth once every 5 years and need to be releaunched.

    GEO orbit stattilites take thousands of years to fall to earth. LEO Sattilites take much less. The GEOs then to break, have there Batteries get fried, or run out of fuel long before then.
  • Actually for someone that is trying to move up to the airlines this would be a great job. You could build your jet time 8 hours a day. In one year figureing a 40 hour work week you would have 2000 hours. Lots of young pilots will love this.
    And the cost of running it will not be to bad. The only real question is will they get enough customers.
  • 1. Actually the engines on the plane are super efficent. It burns jetfuel which is a byproduct of gasoline production and is actually cheaper than gasoline. At 51,000 ft it will be in such thin air that it will probably have a lower fuel burn rate than a semitruck.
    2. At 51k there is little weather or air traffic. That is above where most fighters can operate much less airliners.
    3. The pilots will be low paid by airline standards. Mostlikly they will be low time pilots that want to work for the airlines and will be in it to build their hours.
    4. It would not be a bad gig for someone that loves to fly. Bring a book and you and the co trade off. Plus you would have a spectacular view.
    It could work and work well. It could also be used to supply emergence communications in event of a natural disaster and mobile networks. The only thing is there enought users to payfor it.
  • I can only imagine how much you'd have to pay for access to support this kind of infrastructure.
  • The is another company Platforms Wireless [plfm.net] that has a better system: they tether a lighter-than-air craft at 15,000 feet. It covers a 70-mile radius. Sounds a lot cheaper than paying for 24/7 pilots.

    Also, I thought there was a slashdot story awhile back about an unmanned airplane that would use solar power to generate hydrogen during the daytime, and then run on fuel cells during the night. It could stay up indefinitely.
  • My roommate who is a Hamm told me about how Hamm radio operators are using large delta wing kites to take up antennas super high up. If the antennae was high enough and powerful enough it could provide packet radio access to a fairly wide range of people, and hence, internet service. Too bad it's slow 9600 baud max I believe, and you can't use encryption.

  • Re:This just in... (Score:5)

    by ASCIIMan ( 47627 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2001 @11:50AM (#351510)
    Los Angeles (AP) -- AOL Time-Warner announced today that it would aquire the Los Angeles ISP startup CrazyFarm, which began service to customers over its moonbounce-laser high speed data connection last week. Steve Case had this to say about the recent aquisition: "All your base are belong to us. Ha ha ha ha."
  • Problem is your conclusion is wrong. The origional equation says, for a given amount of work, the less time you have to do it in, the more power it takes. So you revised equation means that for a given amount of work, the less knowledge you have(the dumber you are) the more money it takes to finish the work. This almost sounds true, perhaps this is a grand unifying theroy between physics and economics?
  • This sounds like a terribly bad idea.

    Agreed. But not for the reasons just listed.

    Pilots being productive? Come on. To a pilot, as long as you're flying, all else is irrelevant. Noise pollution? Not from 50,000 feet. Occupies air traffic lanes? There is no law that saws you must fly on and only on the Victor airways. With an Air Traffic Control clearance, you can orbit in one spot, out of everybody else's way, all day long.

    Nope, this won't work out because of simple technical issues like getting a set of frequencies that can blanket one or more areas without trashing out existing services. Like you can't use low-power transmitters and high-gain antennas when your high-station is in motion. Your ground station will have to use omni-directional antennas (little discones, maybe) and then higher power transmitters to punch a signal up to the airborne receiver. And how to deal with the "cone of silence"; that area of non-radiation that every antenna has. If the airborne set is orbiting, at some point in the orbit, some part of the service area will be in the "shadow" of the antenna.

    Or, the project (as described) could get clobbered by the idea that the high-station will be above 50,000 ft. That altitude rules out most of the smaller (and most economical) business jets and moves us up into the used airliner class. With bigger cost-per-hour to operate due to older, non-fuel-efficient engines. Oh, and just for kicks, tune into rec.aviation.military for a recent thread about flight above 50,000 feet. It's not the same up there.

    So let's all resume a state of low alert and wait for the same scheme to resurface using dirigibles.

  • He's referring to the latency in the moon-based ISP. Look up a couple levels in the thread to the funny post.

  • Wow (Score:1)

    by adjensen ( 58676 )
    That is the stupidest thing that I've ever seen, and I've read through MFC :-)

    I can't see any way that a labour intensive, energy consuming and inherently dangerous technology can possibly compete against the other options available.

    Best of luck to this guy...I think I'd sink my money into the paper cell phone project before something as "pie in the sky" (no pun intended) as this.

  • This just in... (Score:5)

    by dimator ( 71399 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2001 @11:33AM (#351515) Homepage Journal
    Los Angeles, CA - In what seems like another completely ludicrous way to get the 'net' into homes, Los Angeles based CrazyFarm has announced that it will install a laser-based internet service, where each connection will have a laser pointed at... the moon! The moon will house a large facility that will communicate via lasers, providing 1.5MB/s of service, to users on the Earth's surface. "The major problem we haven't solved yet," said the CTO, "is that the moon is only visible to half the earth at once, and since we need a direct line of site for our service, we are planning to blow up the moon into 2, possibly 3, fragments, each of which will host our ISP moon bases."


    --
  • ...those old cartoons where in order to make a single toothpick a factory must process a huge redwood.

    -----

  • This sounds like a job for super heroes in their downtime. If superman can fly fast enough to reverse the spin of the earth, he surely can cover this type of broadband service. Jason
  • I can see it now.. You get fragged, and you blame it on your ISP-jet which mosied its way over to the south side of your city, increasing your ping by a few ms.
  • CMGI owns the patent on that.
  • plenty of broadband and high speed options?


    I live within the city limits of the 16th largest city in America, Baltimore, and the best I can do is 144k/144k IDSL. Its this or my old 56k modem.
    I think....therefore I am

  • They don't stay up forever...

    -----------------------

  • This sounds like a terribly bad idea. Not only does it use up a large number of pilots who could be doing other, more productive activities, but it generates great heaping loads of pollution (air and noise), consumes mass quantities of jet fuel, and occupies air traffic lanes. I can't see how this can be more economically viable than low earth orbit or geosynchronous satellites.
  • I'm not convinced about fuel efficiency. Once your satellite is in orbit it requires only nominal fuel to correct its orbit for the life of the satellite. The airplane has to spend fuel continuously to maintain airspeed or crash. The energy requires to orbit a plane in atmosphere at 20,000 feet has to be magnitudes more than the energy required to orbit an object at 20,000 feet -- or 100,000 feet --- in the absence of an atmosphere, after all. Sounds like a comparison between fruits and vegetables.

    I don't offhand know what the fuel consumption to boost a satellite to orbit vs. orbiting a plane for three years, but I'd really be surprised if it takes more for the satellite.

  • Let's look at this from the optimistic side of things: most people thought that the age of VC's tossing mega-$$$ after every crazy scheme with a .com in it were over...

    The market must be ready for a rally!!!

  • It's like we turned the clock back a year+... I thought crazy ideas were out, in favor of profitable ideas?

    Oh well, the crazy ideas were a lot of fun.

    It does sound like it would be economical to replace all those cell phone towers with one high-flying antenna... but a baloon sounds more efficient than a plane.

    The article said "Solar powered" -- I don't read any mention of Solar Powered on their web page.

  • Gives a whole new meaning to uptime too...
  • If they're solar-powered, what do you need jet fuel for?
  • If you're getting 3-5 ms latency on DSL or cablemodem, I want to know who your supplier is.

    BTW, is that ADSL or SDSL?

    Or are you just pulling numbers out of your back belt-loop?

  • They need jet fuel to take off. The solar power is to glide.
  • Speaking of getting data around,you ever heard that theory about there being only one electron? The idea is that this universal electron moves both ways in time so the singular appears multiple. So my idea is this: can we put a signal on the "universal electron" that could be recieved by anyone observing the electron *anywhere*? (and is it wiggling with strange vibes (spin?) already? I mean, is it in use?) Our universe may already have a "universal bus" built right in.
  • Hmmm I'm sure this will do just as well as say police planes wielding radar guns. In most cases the cost was just way to prohibitive for the concept to fly. But if they're willing to try more power to 'em.
  • I believe that some at least did have guns, but it doesn't really matter. The point was the cost of of fuel, mantainence, a pilot ect.
  • Ummm.. anyone notice this? http://www.angelhalo.com/banner.htm [angelhalo.com]
    The Broadband.com Company doesn't own the domain name Broadband.com.
    It's for sale.
    Hrmphp
  • This is absolutely stupid. What a waste of fuel. Having internet access is not THAT important....
    --
  • oh please...........thats just plain sad
    --
  • or...if your ISP crashes, it takes out more than just the net: like your house, your kid's school, your place of work, the local hospital...this almost makes me think April Fool's day came early this year.

    Check this [hal-9000.net] out....Calvin and Hobbes have all their base owned by her.

    and on another offtopic note...what is the max number of comments a /. story ever garnered? Has the Cof$ story won that honor yet?

    Going on means going far
    Going far means returning
  • ..."my ISP just went down".

    Unfortunately, when most ISPs crash, they don't take a city block with them.

    --SC

  • Yes, but notice this is A. The New York Times and B. Wired also did a thing on this too. It mentions the company (and what it planned to do) as far back as Aug 1998
  • Supposedly the ancient Egyptians used kites to pick up those massive blocks and build the pyramids... I'd say broadband would be easier with them than with massive planes...

    Does this plan seem overly complicated to you instead of kiss? Does it remind you of Iridium?
    --
    Peace,
    Lord Omlette
    ICQ# 77863057

  • Sorry (Score:4)

    by SpanishInquisition ( 127269 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2001 @11:22AM (#351540) Homepage Journal
    But if your ISP crashes, it really crashes.
    --
  • As if wireless services weren't plagued enough by weather. Not only will there be weak signal on shitty days, but the planes could (should) be grounded.

  • Speaking of waste...

    Isn't this service going into already flooded markets? Cities typically already have plenty of broadband and high speed options. Is that really what the net needs? There are several more rural areas that can hardly get dial-up, let alone broadband.

    Having said that, let's wait for 'em to crash and burn!


  • Not if you could connect to the 'net... E2 [everything2.com] from a few miles up... YES

    -------

  • Burt Rutan, aerodynamics god, of Scaled Composites [scaled.com] was talking about this back in 1998. Apparently, Angel Technologies will be using his Proteus reconfigurable aircraft, which apparently designed with the telecomm purpose in mind long before Angel came along.

    Sorry about no direct line to Proteus. The site's all gussied up with frames.


    ----------------------------------------
    Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
  • Teledesic, this "high altitude aircraft, and the "giant high altitude stationary blimp" internet access scheme have appeared in dozens of publications for nearly two years now. For God's sake people, let's drop it until one of these is actually lifting off, and bouncing packets back to people in a usable manner.
  • Sure the customer has no problem talking to the plane, but where does the plane send/get the data? A base station of some sort that it has to be able to see at all times? This just doesn't make much sense.

  • I thought about this. I don't care how much you want to build flight time or pad your log book, this would be a good deal for someone who was extremely dedicated or almost dead and likes reading cereal boxes for days at a time.

    Would be a good deal for a young pilot, but I'd bet they don't fly 3,001 hours as they will find someone else at three thousand.

    DanH
    Cavalry Pilot's Reference Page [cavalrypilot.com]
  • and this looks like the most god-awful BORING thing on Earth. Sounds like Guard Rail flights. Eight hours of mind numbing boredom.

    I would like to see the turn over rate of their pilots. Bet it's higher than the dot coms at the height of the stock market boom.

    DanH
    Cavalry Pilot's Reference Page [cavalrypilot.com]
  • You know nothing of the proteus aircraft that is used for this operation. It is built by Burt Rutan's company Scaled Composites. This is the guy who built the voyager airplane that flew around the world non stop. And it did it with small prop engines. The Proteus uses similar design with high efficiency turbofan jet engines. The thing can lift 15 tons of cargo and stay in the air for over 10 hours. But the down side is it only travels at about 150 to 175 mph. Slow is ok for this application though.

    lizard

  • Not much weather at 51k feet.
  • Dude, have you ever flown in a military jet? Hangliding pales by comparison -
    You can't pull 8 g's in a hanglider, nor do many other things. Though the view must rock.

    I won a ride in a f-18 at the abbotsford air show a few years back. Kick ass (I'm a lucky bastard)

    Or done a loop in a cessna 172. Zero g is fun too. Dunno why ground controllers shit when you do stuff like that tho (they never found out about the loop, I'm sure I'd lose my license if they did)

    Flying is like driving - boring until you do something cool.

    Yeah, but this would suck, unless you needed to rack up hours, but it would beat flying shit to alaska, at least you could turn the autopilot on and sleep through it - hell commercial airline pilots do it all the time.

    Oh well....

    I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.

  • sit and read or play with a laptop all day long.....

    Fly long flight commercial or work for the government. 'nuff said.

    Dunno about the wife and kids part, but hey, you heard about the guy who had 5 wives in 5 cities, and went through them once each week?

    I bet he was in good physical condition :)

    I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.

  • Sounds extraordinary expensive, and not very reliable. Would you seriously use a service that won't work in heavy winds and rain?

    It's just another dumb idea that got press because all those tech journalists are desperate for anything new to write about.

  • I didn't realize we were discriminating against glider pilots....
  • Man, ping times are gonna SUCK on that network. I'll take my Q3 elsewhere....
  • I ain' that dumb :p
  • But planes don't circle over Gotham constantly. That would, of course, be a national security threat. And don't even think of trying this scheme in DC, where they break out the heat-seeking missles for shadows that cross Casa del Shrubbery. All you flight path are belong to the man.
  • Would you seriously use a service that won't work in heavy winds and rain?
    At that height (50K+ feet), it doesn't rain, I can assure you.
    They should use the AeroVironment UAV [aerovironment.com] instead of pilotted aircraft?
  • Is it me or is this just an obviously bad idea? What's happens when the plan has to land? You service dies? I can just imagine being in the middle of a D/L. "ERROR 408 Plane has crashed. Page cannot be found" Speaking of which are they going to host web servers on the plane?

    The story did say they would have 3 planes over metropolitan areas. I would think that would be redundant enough to allow to take-offs and landing for refueling, swithcing out pilots, ect. puck

  • For some reason, this reminds me of a university professor who found it faster to store all his projects on tape and drive across state to the other university for unpacking into the 'remote' computer than trying to use FTP.

    Or maybe I'm not quite understanding this business model.

  • just think of all the OTHER things we could do with that jet fuel. . . What about donating it to the UN or Unicef? Aww, no! We need to support the high rolling lifestyle of the West!
  • if i were a pilot, i'd take the job just to crash one of the planes and end the business. what a silly silly idea.
  • So when we say high speed internet, is that the speed of the plane or the internet connection.
  • http://slashdot.org/hof.shtml [slashdot.org] lists the stories with the most comments. The #1 story seems to be mostly automated junk comments, but the Co$ story is in the top ten.
  • This does not sound like the greatest business plan ...And they are willing to burn so much fuel? What happens to your on-line tarrif's should the Arabs decide to limit supply even more, or we should run low? I'd imagine the cost of this being placed straight onto the customer within a shorter amount of notice than would otherwise be the case.

    I am sure others will find faults too...And maybe some good points, although I am hard pressed to see any.

  • It is wasteful of a lot of fuel...They need to burn fuel just to get the gliders in place, then they need to be "turned" arund every 8 hours or so with a new replacement glider and crew.

    I'd imagine you would need a skilled glider pilot to maintain the altitude, last thing we need is a "glider kiddie" flying above commercial traffic.
  • Despite the insanely high cost of jet-fuel, what I am really concerned about here is the eventual strain on the environment should this prove popular.

    Think about it. Most of the fuel in jet engines burns away. Most of the exhaust is in the form of water and CO2, but there is a small amount of hydrocarbon exhaust.

    I would think that multiple 'around the clock' flights would start putting out non-negligable amounts of greenhouse-gas and hyrdrocarbon pollution. This is not a good thing, because there are better, cheaper ways to do this.
  • Well, what I need to know is will the planes be running linux?

    please leave my karma alone... I just had to post this.


    TEN

  • Dammit! (Score:3)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 20, 2001 @11:22AM (#351581) Journal
    My internet connection just went down over Minneapolis!

    Dancin Santa

  • Highspeed Inbound connections :) (Score:3)

    by ZaneMcAuley ( 266747 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2001 @11:29AM (#351582) Homepage Journal
    What about Mir :)

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