---
title: "Sceye Airship Flies From New Mexico to Japan to Test a Cell Tower in the Sky"
description: "SoftBank switched off coverage on Shikoku, and the helium craft filled in from about 54,000 feet with calls, texts and video."
author: "rews desk"
published: 2026-10-19T11:05:49Z
modified: 2026-10-19T15:58:18Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/sceye-airship-flies-from-new-mexico-to-japan-to-test-a-cell--5fc007
language: en
tags: ["ai", "infrastructure", "drones", "space", "telecoms", "tech"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Sceye Airship Flies From New Mexico to Japan to Test a Cell Tower in the Sky

*SoftBank switched off coverage on Shikoku, and the helium craft filled in from about 54,000 feet with calls, texts and video.*

By rews desk · October 19, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/sceye-airship-flies-from-new-mexico-to-japan-to-test-a-cell--5fc007

## In brief

- An uncrewed Sceye airship acted as a stratospheric cell tower over Shikoku, Japan, in tests with SoftBank Corp
- SoftBank turned off local coverage and the craft carried calls, texts and video from about 54,000 feet
- The airship left New Mexico on Aug. 9 and took 13 days to cover more than 15,000 kilometers to Japan
- An onboard server gave a 68-millisecond average response time, a latency cut the companies put at more than 40%
- SoftBank is aiming to start commercial service with the high-altitude platforms in 2027

An uncrewed airship built by Sceye, a company based near Albuquerque, flew across the Pacific this summer and stood in for cell towers over Japan’s Shikoku island, the company’s executives said in interviews published on Monday.

For the test, SoftBank Corp., the Japanese carrier and a Sceye investor, turned off its own coverage in part of Shikoku. The airship then took over from about 54,000 feet, carrying the equivalent of a 4G LTE base station, and SoftBank engineers used it for voice calls, texts, web browsing, YouTube streams and video calls, [Jeremy Hsu reported in Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/trans-pacific-journey-tested-stratospheric-cell-tower-concept-in-japan/). The setup was meant to mimic backup service after an earthquake or a similar disaster.

“It’s not the first time we flew a telco payload, but this is the first time where we actually flew into an area where we provide a live service,” Johnny Truong, Sceye’s chief technology officer, told Ars. “What SoftBank did was, they disabled the cellular coverage area, and then we came in and we basically backfilled it.”

The craft, filled with helium and driven by an electric propeller, left New Mexico on Aug. 9 and took 13 days to cover more than 9,320 miles, or 15,000 kilometers, to Japan. Once there it spent more than seven days in Japanese managed airspace and held its position within a radius as small as five kilometers, [according to the companies’ joint announcement](https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/sceye-and-softbank-corp-complete-stratospheric-connectivity-demonstration-in-japan-advancing-towards-haps-commercialization-302866949.html) on Sept. 2. SoftBank [said in its own release](https://www.softbank.jp/corp/news/press/sbkk/2026/20260902_01/) that it was the first such trial service in Japan. The whole trip, out and back, took about a month.

![A vintage-style airship casts an orange scanning beam over a forested coastal village, with mountains, islands, and clouds beyond.](https://rews.cc/img/341d8b77bc5463a1029a89bee6787c50f08cd63f.webp)

The flight came during typhoon season. An autopilot steers between waypoints and adjusts for wind, while human operators watch forecasts and plan routes. When the weather turned, Mr. Truong said, the airship would “just park itself at a safe, quiet place in the weather and just station-keep a while until it moved on.”

SoftBank also checked that the link could carry earthquake and tsunami alerts and calls to a maritime emergency number. It fitted drones with LTE cards, flew them over the connection and pulled video back from them. Throughput tests ran on an open beach, in a forest under tree cover and inside a building. All three passed, though Mr. Truong said he hadn’t been sure about the indoor one, because the team kept the antenna below full power to limit interference and stay on good terms with local regulators.

A server on board handled data without sending it back down to the internet, giving an average round-trip response time of 68 milliseconds. The companies put the latency cut at more than 40 percent compared with internet-based cloud processing. That figure is the companies’ own and has not been independently checked.

In a separate test, a laser ranging system on the ground fired pulses at the moving airship, which bounced them back with a corner cube reflector. Sceye [called that a world first](https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/sceye-supports-softbank-corp-in-world-first-demonstration-of-laser-ranging-by-tracking-a-haps-from-the-ground-302886840.html). Mr. Truong said the platform might one day relay laser signals from low-orbit satellites, boosting them or switching to radio to get through cloud cover.

![A vintage-style illustration shows a tripod-mounted device projecting pink laser beams toward a prism suspended beneath a zeppelin in a cloudy sky.](https://rews.cc/img/2bf3c9af500f2408eb034b562173bf18b249c863.webp)

Sceye began flying small prototypes in 2016 and reached the stratosphere in 2021 with a 215-foot craft. The current model is 270 feet long. It has carried payloads of more than 220 pounds and supplies up to one kilowatt of power, and the company says the design could grow to lift 551 pounds. Helena, a nonprofit with an investment arm that has backed Sceye, says that would be 25 to 50 times the payload of rival platforms such as high-altitude drones.

“We’re twice as high as air traffic and we’re above the jet stream, and yet 30 times closer than low-Earth orbit satellites,” Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, Sceye’s founder and chief executive, told Ars. He said the craft runs on battery power overnight until the sun recharges it the next morning.

The pitch is that one airship, at full scale, could cover as much ground as 500 cell towers. Earlier this year Sceye flew a craft for 12 days from New Mexico to the coast of Brazil, but the Japan mission, called Service Test 1, was its longest yet.

SoftBank bought into Sceye in 2025. Junichi Miyakawa, its president and chief executive, said in the joint statement that the flight was “an important step toward the commercialization of HAPS,” short for high-altitude platform systems. The carrier is aiming to start commercial service in 2027, [TelecomsTechNews reported](https://www.telecomstechnews.com/news/softbank-haps-trial-japan-edge-computing/).