It aims to lift the industry with its aircraft, motors, batteries, and charging network
Beta Technologies, one of the top three U.S. electric aircraft makers, is aiming first at regional cargo and medical transport, before pursuing the passenger market. Shown here is Beta’s Alia A250, for vertical takeoffs and landings.
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.
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“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.
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.
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.
Kyle Clark , a native of Vermont, founded Beta in 2017 to realize his long-held dream of building a hybrid-electric aircraft. (For his bachelor’s thesis at Harvard University, he designed a flight-control system for such an aircraft.) Martine Rothblatt , CEO of the biotech company United Therapeutics and cofounder of SiriusXM satellite radio, invested $48 million in Beta to fund its first prototype, with the eventual goal of using the aircraft to transport organs for transplantation.
The company has kept much of its design and manufacturing in-house, partly because the pieces are closely coupled and partly because suitable aviation components didn’t exist when development began. Vertical integration gives Beta’s engineers control over the interfaces and any failure data. But it also means the company must be competent at several businesses simultaneously: airframes, electric motors, inverters, batteries, software, chargers, and aircraft production.
The production line can build both the fixed-wing CX300 and the vertical-lift A250, which share the same fuselage, wings, pusher motor (for horizontal propulsion), batteries, avionics, and much of the tooling. This results in some one-size-fits-all decisions: The CX300’s twin booms, which connect the wing to the tail surfaces, look superfluous until you see the A250’s four lift propellers mounted on similar structures.
On the CX300, those booms add weight and drag even though they serve no lift function. But the trade-off—a simpler overall design—is part of Beta’s central strategy: Rather than applying for FAA certification for the more novel and complex eVTOL A250, with its multiple lift systems and transitions between hover and wing-borne flight, the company is bringing the runway version forward first. It’s certifying the motor, batteries, fly-by-wire controls, and much of the airframe in the simpler aircraft; it will then reuse evidence and manufacturing experience when it certifies the A250.
The other big reason to start with the CX300 is logistical: The United States has more than 5,000 public-use airports, so the CX300 can operate from infrastructure that already exists. The cargo and medical flights that the aircraft will initially tackle offer tightly defined missions in which lower energy and maintenance costs matter more than cabin amenities. Hence the company’s decision to leave cabin air-conditioning off the CX300, at least for now. “Things that don’t exist on an airplane don’t weigh anything,” Clark says. “They can’t break. You don’t have to service them…. You don’t have to certify them.”
“This strategy, at the beginning, was seen as a failure of their VTOL,” says analyst Sergio Cecutta , a managing partner at SMG Consulting. “But I think a lot of people were very myopic. It was a way for [Beta] to break up the certification in two pieces, and so they have retired a lot of the risk. [A majority] of the [CX300’s] parts are shared with the VTOL, and that means that a lot of the documentation for certification can be easily reused on the VTOL side when that certification starts.”
A decade and a half after electric cars began making significant inroads into the automotive market, electric airplane technology is advancing rapidly. In some ways, an electric car has more complicated power-engineering r