The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash of a drone built by Facebook Inc. to provide Internet access to remote areas.

Facebook’s solar-powered Aquila drone has a wingspan roughly equivalent to a Boeing 737, coming in at 141 feet. It is designed to be able to fly at altitudes of around 60,000 to 90,000 feet for up to 90 days without landing.

The drone first took to the air on its maiden test flight back in June and was described by Facebook at the time as having been successful, which is true if you ignore the fact it crashed on landing. According to the NTSB, the drone suffered from a “structural failure” before it landed on June 28 and has classified the failure as an accident, according to Bloomberg, meaning that the damage was substantial. No one was injured as a result of the failure, and there was no damage to the ground.

Although the crash itself was missed by press reports at the time, perhaps partly because Facebook painted the maiden flight as a success, the company actually did mention the crash in passing. The eighth paragraph of its engineering blog in a post dated July 21, noting that “we are still analyzing the results of the extended test, including a structural failure we experienced just before landing. We hope to share more details on this and other structural tests in the future.”

Facebook has so far declined to comment, and there were no further details into the accident available for the NTSB. A report incident is expected to be released early in the new year.

While it would be easy to criticize Facebook for its failure, accidents do happen with experimental technology and the project itself has noble goal. The company is talking to the Indonesian Government this week about how it could be used to bring Internet access to remote parts of the 18,307 islands that make up the archipelago.

Image credit: Facebook