How Beta Technologies Is Clearing the Runway for Electric Flight

In the cockpit of Beta Technologies’ Alia CX300, pilot Chris Caputo steers onto Runway 33 at Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport in Vermont. Cleared for takeoff, he releases the brakes and nudges the throttle forward. At the back of the aircraft, the five-blade pusher propeller snaps awake, and the Alia bolts forward. There’s no shriek of a turbofan spooling up, no shudder of a piston engine, and no wait for thrust. Just the low hum of an electric motor and a shove of instant acceleration. Within a few seconds, we’re at 85 knots (almost 160 kilometers per hour), and Caputo rotates the nose upward. The runway drops abruptly away as we climb. Gaining speed and altitude, we head northwest over Lake Champlain. Through the wraparound canopy, I watch the hunched shoulders of Vermont’s Green Mountains shrink under the right wing, with New York’s taller Adirondacks to the left. Caputo, a former Air Force fighter pilot, flicks the control stick hard left, then right. Despite its 15-meter wingspan, the Alia feels snappy, its fly-by-wire system automatically coordinating aileron and rudder inputs. The machine, he says, is much simpler to manage than the Cessna 182 I flew around Australia in my student-pilot days. What’s more, our half-hour flight in the Alia will consume only about US $9 worth of electricity. The same flight in a comparable Cessna 208 Caravan would burn roughly 25 to 30 gallons of Jet A fuel, costing about $210 to $255 at press time. “Even at full throttle, we’re not burning any fuel up here,” says Caputo, as he takes the Alia into a sweeping left turn and heads south over the lake. “We’re not polluting the environment. [There’s] no noise pollution.” At Beta’s South Burlington, Vt., facility, workers assemble the body of an Alia A250. The company says it has an order and option-to-buy backlog of nearly 1,000 aircraft.Beta Technologies This ride is happening during an unusually lively time for electric aviation. The promise of lower operating costs and cleaner flight has pushed electric aircraft from a fringe experiment to one of the aviation industry’s most closely watched frontiers. After years of renderings, prototypes, and overly optimistic timetables, companies are now flying full-size aircraft, submitting hardware to regulators for certification, building factories, and testing routes with prospective customers. Among the top three U.S. developers of electric planes, Archer Aviation and Joby Aviation are concentrating on piloted vertical-takeoff-and-landing air taxis, otherwise known as eVTOLs. Beta Technologies is taking a broader—and in some ways more innovative—path into the market. Rather than betting first on air taxis, Beta is looking to enter electric aviation through short-haul freight planes that use conventional runways, fed by an open charging network that’s designed to make electric aircraft—both Beta’s and its competitors’—part of a working transportation system. To that end, the company is developing two variants of its Alia airframe: the runway-based CX300 I’m flying in and the A250, which adds four lift propellers for vertical takeoff and landing. Beta says its test pilots have flown the Alia family more than 300,000 kilometers, including doing multiple U.S. crossings and overseas demonstrations. The company claims an order and option-to-buy backlog of 991 aircraft. RELATED: From Hockey Enforcer to High-Flying eVTOL CEO “We’re taking a pragmatic stepwise approach for both certification and market entry,” says Beta’s CEO and founder Kyle Clark. “We’re ready to go today with medical and cargo aircraft that fly from airport to airport.” Next up, he says, will be passenger aircraft with conventional takeoff and landing, followed by cargo eVTOLs, and finally passenger eVTOLs. Reducing the Risk of FAA Certification Beta’s 17,500-square-meter production facility sits beside the Burlington airport and looks more like a giant sunlit workshop than a conventional airplane factory. Geothermal heat pumps help heat and cool the structure. The roof will eventually hold a megawatt of solar panels. On the floor, technicians make composite structures and join aircraft sections beneath American and Pride flags. 3 Competing Paths to Electric Aviation The top three U.S. electric-aircraft makers are taking different approaches to the same challenge: how to make short-hop flight cleaner, quieter, and commercially useful. aspect_ratio Chris Philpot Joby Aviation’s piloted, four-passenger S4 aircraft has six tilting propellers to provide both vertical lift and cruise propulsion. It’s optimized for fast, quiet air-taxi service. The company is also working on hydrogen fuel cells for longer-range transport. Joby says the S4 is in the final stage of the Federal Aviation Administration’s certification process and has flown trials in Dubai, New York, and Texas. Chris Philpot Archer Aviation’s piloted, four-passenger Midnight has 12 propellers—six tilting rotors and six stationary rotor