Technological Advancement AND Electric Flight with CEO of BETA Kyle Clark

My pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Yeah, it's a great question. I can't remember a time that I wasn't enamored with airplanes. And there was a small airport a little bit north of here in Vermont of a gentleman who was bringing Eastern Bloc European fighter trainers here. And I would go up and try to help him work on them just so I could jump in a plane and take a flight. And I was as interested in the technology and the pieces and the parts that made up the airplane as I was in flying. And his name was George Koy and he was leading the Experimental Aviation Association up here in Vermont. And he and some of his mechanics took me up early. And the moment, you know, I went upside down, right side up, straight up and down in an airplane, I realized that it was a whole other dimension of our world that you could explore and the physicality of it and the science of it were just so fascinating that I was hooked.

Well, it's a great question. We've actually brought five different aircraft to the air for the first time. And the one you're talking about was a very special one just about a year ago where we brought our first production fixed-wing, we call it CX300, airplane, which is a 7,000-pound six-passenger aircraft. And what was so special about doing the first flight in that aircraft is it was an aircraft that I got to fly that the people in this building built every single piece of. You know, everything from the computers that control it to the motors that propel it to the energy storage and the batteries all the way up through the structure and everything was built by the people on the ground and it was just amazing to lift off the ground in something that was a sketch on a whiteboard a couple years before.

Well, if we kind of take the different elements of electric flight, electric flight has been possible for a long time, but it was really driven by the energy density of batteries. That allowed all the pieces to come together. And so Beta was actually my senior thesis in college more than 20 years ago, but at the time it was a hybrid electric aircraft. And as I explored and calculated and worked through all the different permutations of the design, what myself and many other people, by the way, converged, there's a lot of great people doing electric airplanes in this world. They realized that the battery energy density was at a point that we could carry sufficient energy for a mission, that the power electronics and semiconductors could convert that precious energy into propulsion efficiently. That the computational fluid dynamics could make an aerodynamic shape and that the material science, specifically the stuff that you guys make, allowed us to make an empty weight fraction of an airplane that converged on a closing design.

But there's a couple nuances in there. One of them is that when we went to vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, which is something you can do with distributed electric propulsion, like the structure of the design and the composite structure became stiffness driven. So we had to really rely on the material systems to make a stiff aircraft so that we don't have modes or places where the aircraft vibrates uncontrollably. And we had to do that while maintaining a very, very strict aerodynamic conforming shape. So it was not just a singular realization like oh, electric works. It's like you have these four converging technologies that came together and you know the Air Force and UPS and Amazon and us and Joby and Archer and Vertical and Eve, we all realized it at the same time because turns out mother nature is like wildly consistent in her application of physics. And so we said, okay, now the question isn't whether it can be done, it's what's the best way to do it. And that's what we all kind of chose our paths and there's been a lot of attrition in this world, in industry, and now we're down to the point where, you know, mother nature is going to have the final vote in the say.

Yeah, for sure. I mean the pace is awesome. It's part of my everyday life and hundreds of people that we've flown with recently. I know we met at the Paris Air Show where we had the honor of opening the Paris Air Show with one of our electric aircraft and there was a headline in the paper, you know, Beta Technologies opens the 2025 Paris Air Show with a silent aerial ballet, and it was like a really special way to note how the aircraft flies. So, it's interesting. Exactly a year ago, I first flew our first production CX300 fixed-wing airplane. Just yesterday we crossed 100,000 miles. I mean that's a lot of flying. 300 plus airports. A whole bunch of people have flown, I mean 20 plus Beta pilots and hundreds of people have flown in the aircraft. But what the reaction that I get when we put people in it is not like the novelty of flying electric. It's the visceral difference between a turbine or a propeller piston plane and flying with a quiet electric motor.

Of course, the engine doesn't make any noise. The engine in our plane is actually at the tail of the airplane, so it's 22 feet behind you when you're flying. So, it doesn't make any noise. It's way behind you. And the conversion efficiency is very, very high, which of course equates to a very, very low noise. So, what people notice is instantaneous torque. It's like you turn the throttle and you're immediately moving and it's very responsive. And then the climb is like really nice, but it's the visibility, the lack of vibration and the quietness takes away all that kind of claustrophobic feeling in a traditional airplane. And if you look at our aircraft, I mean, there's 6.5-foot windows in front of you and you're just kind of out there like a bird and you can hear the wind. Like when you change the angle of attack of the airplane, which means you pull the nose up or down, you hear a difference in the wind. You never hear that in a regular airplane. And it's like you're more connected with the nature around you because you can feel and see and hear and your senses are alive.

Yes, so we've taken a very different track for both the technology development and the entry into service. Our calling to the technical solutions has been simplicity. We take things off the aircraft. We eliminate every requirement that's not necessary and we end up with an aircraft that doesn't have all of the things you think you need to achieve the task. So it becomes a very, very simple aircraft and then we break that simplicity down into a couple of discrete steps. Like we're in a regulated environment. Safety and reliability in aviation is paramount. That's why we have to get the best materials and the best electronics. Put those together, make a super reliable airplane. But what we do is we certify these aircraft through EASA or ANAC or the FAA in our case. And so we've decided to do the step-wise approach to certification where we first certified the propeller and we got that done in concert with Hartzell, and then we were in the certification of the propulsion which is almost done.

And then the airplane and then the VTOL. So it gives us this step-wise certification path into the market and allows us to certify things that the FAA knows how to certify before we get to the things that they don't know how to certify. And it's really a one step at a time program. And that's mirrored by our entry into service where we start with medical applications, moving organs, blood products, you know, patients. And then we move to cargo and logistics like UPS and DHL and FedEx and Amazon where the risks and the routes and the variables are lower because you don't have people in the plane. And then we move to passenger. And that's exactly what we did in our test flying. And I'm proud to say that we became the first company to actually fly with passengers into New York City. We put five people in the plane and I went and flew into JFK, the busiest airspace in the world, and showed that electric aviation worked in that environment. But this is all part of that progressive entry into service, progressive technology development, all built on that fundamental. And you ask what is the differentiator? It's the fact that we really focus on simplicity and we focus on a simple, simple design because my philosophy is if it doesn't exist in the airplane, it doesn't weigh anything, you don't have to stock it, you never have to certify it, you certainly don't have to conform it, and it doesn't cost anything. And that's a goodness.

Yeah, it's a great, great question. Look, I think one of the key points is that you can't solely tie electrification to battery electrification. Electrification can take many, many different forms. You can get the benefits of electric distributed propulsion motors, whether you store that energy in batteries, hydrogen, or a hybrid system or any other means of energy storage. So when I say we're building electric airplanes, it doesn't exclusively mean battery electric airplanes. In fact, we've built and flown hybrid electric aircraft that way outperform diesel or turbine aircraft because you get the benefits of very high efficiency conversion running these engines at their lowest specific fuel consumption continuously while modulating the power through a small amount of energy storage. So you get substantial performance increases by electrifying a turbine or a reciprocating engine. And you get all the other benefits around electrification which we can get into on a self-aware aircraft and just the pure efficiency and the weight. That aside, I think to answer your question is that absolutely the world is going to be electric. Electric is going to have a major part of the next generation of jet engines. They're going to be hybrid engines in ways that you may not imagine. Safran and others and we have this wonderful partner GE that's been talking about this publicly. It is a big part of the engine development in the future. Now, that inherently has some form of energy storage that may not be traditional batteries. That said, let me just kind of quantify a couple things. The longest range that we've flown our airplane is 336 nautical miles. That's sitting in the plane for almost 3 hours.

I don't know about you, but like that's about as long as I want to sit in a six-person plane. The point is that you can do a lot of missions. In fact, I think about 20% of missions are under 300 miles. 20%. And if we can take the carbon out of 20% of the missions that fly with the technology that exists today, I feel like we're on our way to our mission. And if in another 10 years we've doubled the energy density and remember the number of city pairs goes by the square of the radius that you can fly, right, because area is the square of the radius, you can really start to imagine a future where pure electrification takes a big part of flying all these short missions for cargo and medical and logistics and then regional passenger air mobility and then we stop nipping at the heels of the flights that go from New York to Washington to Florida and those folks have to get better and better and more efficient. So, do I think, I mean, look, I'm an evangelist. I get it all. I love this stuff but we will push the technology right up to the limits of physics and we'll bump against it over and over again, but the rules will keep moving because the technology and the physics allow for it and we want to be right at the forefront of it.

Right. Right. Obviously along with altitude has bigger net emissions, but it's still a meaningful amount.