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Watch a balloon Instead of zig, Sal Candido often feels like Dr. John Watson is watching Sherlock Holmes. As CTO of Loon, the Alphabet company created last summer by X (born Google X), Candido is in charge of the balloons that cross the stratosphere and transmit the internet to inferior people. Flying approximately 60,000 feet above sparsely populated or mountainous areas, where traditional telecoms do not deal with building networks of cell towers, a single balloon can cover a distance of 3,000 square kilometers with happiness to be connected.
Alex Davies covers autonomous vehicles and other transport machines for WIRED.
To cover an area, Loon uses packets of five to ten balloons. Together, they can provide an air mesh network (more users need additional balloons) with emergency balloons waiting nearby, ready to jump. Loon conducts tests on western Peru, offering services to an undisclosed number of people. Balloons can only spend a very long time in altitude, and Loon usually reduces them after 150 days. Technical difficulties such as the death of batteries shorten the lives of others. But most often, the wind is responsible, just blow a ball out of his service area.
Staying on site is not a simple task for a gas bag the size of a tennis court and has no way of withstanding the wind. Loon's balloons move up and down in search of drafts that will take them where they need to be. To do this, they are not "hand-driven" or manually directed by humans. Instead, they follow complex algorithms that the Candido team has spent years perfecting, a computer-based world approach that produces flight paths that seem anything but elemental.
The problem with this type of navigation is that wind currents are unstable things. Riding them in the air is like using a road network in which streets change direction, number of lanes and speed limits, or even disappear at unpredictable times. In addition, the global wind speed and direction models built by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its European counterpart, using disposable weather balloons carrying radiosondes, leave much room for error. So, if you watched a balloon fly west while its target is in the east, you would probably think that it was broken or that the algorithm that was running it was faulty. But in the last six years, during which Loon balloons recorded a total of 1 million flying hours, Candido has learned not to judge as fast.
After taking off from Puerto Rico, a balloon headed for Peru periodically altering its direction to cope with headwinds – something that a human sailor would recognize as a tack.
plunge
Through years of measurements and the latest weather reports, including data from the fifty or so balloons that Loon has flown over at any time, the model of his team has developed its own trajectories. So, rather than baduming that a traveling balloon is broken or not working properly, Candido watches and waits. A lot of the time, hours or days later, he discovers that the ball has found an unexpected but effective path in the sky. Floats attack in headwinds, like experienced sailors. They fly over the area, where a human pilot would naturally think of going around in circles. When they are in distress, they "stroll strategically", as Candido says, seeming to hang around waiting for the wind that will bring them home. Like Sherlocks, they absorb more data than a smart human and produce results that only seem retrospectively obvious.
To capture the complexity of the task, Loon's engineers use what they call, without any imagination, Cartmap Map. It indicates the distance over time rather than miles: a dark blue shading means it will take a few minutes to reach a given destination, a dark red means you will fly for days. Below, a time span of one week, the result is an undulating blob reminiscent of a 1990s Windows screen saver, but distilling the worldview of an internet balloon: it is not the distance that counts, but the time it takes to get there.
To capture the way their balloons see the world, Loon's engineers use a dynamic map that changes with the wind. Dark blue means you will move fast, red more slowly.
The lessons learned from this philosophy are the key to Loon's long-term success, as Candido and his team can not spend their time running a global fleet of balloons. "Now we do not fly by hand," he says. Meanwhile, his colleagues are using to automate other aspects of their activities, for example by warning their balloons of FAA notifications regarding temporary flight restrictions. (Communication with authorities around the world – which includes faxing documents to the FAA and exchanging WhatsApp messages with foreign air forces – will likely retain its human quality.)
In the year since he split from X to become his own business, Loon has taken a few important steps, signaling hardware and software improvements. His balloons have now covered about 25 million miles. A balloon (exempt from the 150-day limit) recently established a stratospheric flight record for any aircraft, recording 223 days in flight. Another mastered the wind to the point where he spent nearly five months in one place.
Note the flight paths of two balloons over Puerto Rico. The white balloon went very far to the southwest to mate with a wind that would bring him back, while his fellow orange "strolled strategically" nearby and found his way faster.
The transformation of this know-how into sales is progressing more slowly. After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico – where Loon launched her balloons – in September 2017, the company used its frequent flyers to provide internet access to more than 100,000 people. But four years after Loon announced that it would provide an Internet service in Indonesia, the contract was not concluded. "These commitments continue and we have recently made encouraging progress," said spokesman Scott Coriell.
Loon has recently received approval from the Kenyan authorities to conduct tests in the airspace of that country, one year after the announcement of the agreement reached. He hopes to be able to market his services by the end of the year. In May, Loon hot air balloons served Peru (where it carries out most of its tests) after a magnitude 8.0 earthquake. The company is "in conversation" to start a regular commercial service, says Coriell.
Candido and his engineers, meanwhile, remain determined to help their balloons find their own way. They do not have their heads in the clouds, they fly well above them.
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