Beta flies first electric plane from South Burlington

This story of Liberty Darr first published On November 27 at The Other Paper

If you were in South Burlington on November 13, you probably didn’t see a bird flying in the sky or any regular old plane; but you may have seen the first electric plane produced at Beta Technologies’ South Burlington manufacturing facility.

A little more than a year after the company opened its doors to community, state and federal leaders celebrating the opening of the 188,000-square-foot facility located off Airport Parkway, the team successfully completed the first flight of its production aircraft, the Alia CTOL. Kyle Clark, the company’s CEO and test pilot, sailed to 7,000 feet.

“Looking back, it’s been a pretty remarkable year,” says Blain Newton, the company’s chief information officer. in question. “Obviously seeing the plane come off the line was incredibly inspiring.”

The large production area now looks much different than it did last October. During this time, the company built aerospace-grade tooling for aircraft assembly and ground support equipment and began production of propulsion, batteries and other systems. Not to mention that the production environment is currently lively, with around 100 people at a time tinkering and perfecting aircraft design and manufacturing.

This year alone, the company hired more than 250 people, bringing its total number of employees to 800, mostly in Vermont.

While the takeoff of the fixed-wing aircraft was a turning point for Beta, the company also focused on “how to build the machine to build the machines.”

The target is to produce approximately 300 electric aircraft per year. An even bigger goal is to have the Federal Aviation Administration certify fixed-wing aircraft by the end of next year.

“In fact, maybe there’s a greater level of discipline, care and engineering involved because of the number of dimensions,” Newton said. “First, let’s learn, together with our partners at the FAA, how to build airplanes with high quality and safety to ensure that these airplanes are as safe as all the airplanes coming off commercial airline production lines today. Then the rest was spent really learning how these planes fit together in an optimized way.”

While Newton says there are hundreds of companies working in the electric aircraft space, Beta’s mission is broader than the common concept of “urban air mobility” or simply moving passengers through city traffic.

For example, the company announced in September that it had received $20 million to partner with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to deploy 20 battery charging stations as a means of providing energy along the Gulf Coast and in rural places like Mississippi and Arkansas. public health preparedness.

“Well, this isn’t actually an urban air mobility mission, is it? “What you’re doing is opening up and changing the paradigm of rural health access. You’re allowing more services to be provided because you’re significantly reducing the cost of flying helicopters, and you’re also making preparations for disaster response by building the infrastructure to support that,” Newton said. ”

While the company can certainly handle urban air transportation (imagine flying from Rutland to New York City), he noted that it’s not the primary mission.

“So to me, this mission highlights why we are different,” he continued.

The company also recently signed a deal with Air New Zealand to use its fixed-wing aircraft to deliver mail to rural communities.

“The reason they are doing this is to get people in these communities accustomed to electric aviation that is safe, reliable, quiet and affordable,” he said. “Then they want to move into passenger movements so people who are isolated in these rural communities can now start accessing the rest of the country.”

He said the company chose to produce the fixed-wing model first because that model was likely first in the FAA certification program and would likely be the first to be delivered to customers. But the company always set out to build an aircraft that could take off and land vertically like a helicopter.

“What we saw as we did our flight testing, and we’ve now flown at more than 90 airports in the U.S. and Canada, is that people still have a desire for a low-cost, quiet, reliable, safe, conventional aircraft,” he said.

There is about 80 percent similarity in the design of the two aircraft models, which means the team can produce them from the same production line, he said.

“We learned a lot from this initial production build,” said company founder Kyle Clark. “We weren’t just building an aircraft company, we were building and developing a system to efficiently produce high-quality aircraft. This initial build allowed the team to gather data and insights on production labor, tooling design, processes, yields and sequences, all of which were used to improve our production systems.”