Kyle, it is such a pleasure to be speaking live at the Farnborough Air Show. A lot of companies talk about building the future aircraft. What is distinct about Beta's approach?
Well, first off, it's great to be here. It's good to see you again. There's a thematic kind of overlay of Beta's approach which is simplicity, and we have really driven in an engineering, in a business construct, and a stepwise approach to market a philosophy that aviation has no sense of humor for off-point designs that has no sense of humor for complex systems.
I don't think aviation has a sense of humor to stop.
Every once in a while there's a sense of humor like with the flying cowboys and stuff, but no, look, it's serious business to high-quality, safety-driven engineering operations and of course piloting. Simplicity is the overarching umbrella that makes, and it sounds so wild to say, that's a differentiator but it fundamentally is. And every time we come to an impasse technologically or regulatory or even in business structure, we say what is the simplest system, because it reduces the points of failure. It reduces interdependency. It reduces the need for interface controls and it has driven everything about our designs and our structure. Even our equity fundraising is dead simple and it's how we comp people within the business. We have very very simple equity ownership of our business which allows people to get the maximum value for working with Beta. It's pervasive across the business and it's a strategic differentiator.
I remember the last time we spoke you told me about Beta team members, how everyone is a team member, how everyone at Beta gets to learn to fly. And is that something you're still seeing a huge uptake despite getting listed and you know?
One of the beautiful things is we went public in the fall. We decided we're going to go public in a very special way. We were going to not meet the independence requirements of the stock exchange and be a controlled company. And that wasn't because I thought that the decisions that I make are any better than decisions that I could make with an independent board. It's that we have consistency and we have the ability to maintain the culture of the business through the IPO. So the flying, the compensation, the healthcare, the pharmacy, the food, and the design philosophy to not get sucked into the short-term sugar high of trying to push the stock in a particular direction over a short period of time. That takes long-term thinking and discipline and that's what Beta wanted to be and that's what it continued to be because we went public in our own way. At first, we were told that may leave some money on the table or defease your existing investors of a bump at the IPO. Couldn't have been more wrong. It turns out that investors were really looking for a high quality stock that had a long-term view. So yeah, we went public, but all of those things that you said, including the flying, are alive and well and even accelerated.
I love it. Sometimes they remind me of another favorite company of mine, which is Ben and Jerry's. You know how they are holistic thinking about everything and not just about profits and pushing profits.
That's right. I mean look, in aviation you got to play the long game. Any regulated environment you have to play a reasonably moderate to long game. Aviation hard tech, it has all the elements to say you can't think about this week or this day as your endgame. You have to think about this year and decade.
Wow. I love it. While you we're thinking about decades and thinking about future decades in the last one to two years, what have been a couple of the biggest milestones Beta has achieved that you're proud of?
Yeah, I mean we have a ton of really interesting milestones, but the ones that really mean a lot to me, just last week we moved our first organ. I would say for a long time people like congratulations team, you guys are doing great. I'm like hold on we've done nothing good for the world yet. We really haven't. We've spent a lot of people's money. We've developed some neat technologies. Had a lot of fun. We've proven that electric aviation work, but we've never saved somebody's life. Last week, we got one step closer to that. And this was a pig's heart. This was a heart that was genetically modified from a pig to be transplanted into a human really, because it was a test organ. It didn't get transplanted. But it had to prove that the timing, the environment, the vibration, everything about the flight was good for the organ. And so they measured it extensively when they explanted it. And then before the simulated transplant, they measured all the elements again. So that's one step closer to doing something good with aviation for humanity.
We did it in an all-electric airplane on the route that they need to fly.
It was from Blacksburg, Virginia up to University of Maryland Medical Center. And so it went right across Virginia up into Maryland.
Wow. I've also noticed that in the past year or so since we spoke, you've done pilots and demonstrations from Norway to New Zealand. I remember seeing the first electric flight in Canada take off and that same aircraft was going to go down to New Zealand.
What have been some of the lessons learned from these?
Yeah, it's been great. I mean, Norway, New Zealand, up in Sweden. We've been to, I think, 13 or 14 countries now. Hawaii, we're flying in Hawaii right now. All the way through the US, as you said, up in Canada. We've learned a ton of lessons. One is that the majority of the world is really ready for a new form of aviation and they love electric aviation. The turnout in these places is extremely positive. We've proven that the energy storage, the batteries degradation is significantly lower than the naysayers said it is. So with all this flying hundreds of thousands of miles, the degradation of the battery is really low. It turns out we're much harsher on the batteries in the laboratory than they are in the real world, which is great information because now we start to really balance out the economics.
So, we're proving it's economic. We're proving it's reliable.
One thing that's interesting and maybe we talk about this a little bit in the context of sustainability is that here in Europe, and we've been doing a lot of, I flew from Dublin over here two days ago and I flew up here at the Farnborough Air Show in the trials yesterday. The airspace is much more complex, which means there's a lot more holding and a lot more inefficient routing. And that requires reserves and that's a big concern for those of us that are operating with aircraft that just don't have as much energy on them. Energy may be 100% renewable and may be very low cost, but the inefficiency of the routing system starts to become a major factor.
Mhm. Wow. There's so many lessons coming through, right? What is a decision which when you took it you didn't think is going to have a huge impact but proved to be very very significant going forward?
I'm going to say two of them and they're kind of interdependently related to each other technologically. So I knew that we wanted to do the propulsion system. We wanted to do the batteries. We knew we wanted to do the configuration of the airframe because integrating electric propulsion to an airframe doesn't need to aspirate, has much lower cooling and it could be placed differently on the airframe not only for efficiency but also for vertical takeoff and landing and distributed. The thing that we decided to do partway down the road was to do our own flight controllers and the harnesses that are the nervous system of, let's say, they're equivalent to the nerves that extend through your body.
Harness is the control low voltage and control lines that talk to every actuator you know in the airplane.
And you're building these on your own?
Exactly. They harvest every sensor. They send commands to the motors. In our case there are 12 independent CAN buses all independently synchronous, we call it. They have very very high rejection of any type of noise. Super reliable. But the reason that was so powerful is that it gave us the ability through the flight controller to interface not only with like autonomy boxes, any flight control inputs from the pilots, change the way the airplane flies for the better, but also do this very very quickly.
Is this a self-learning system?
Um, well, it needs to be deterministic. So, and that's a safety critical system. It's a design assurance level a safety critical system. So it can't be self-learning in a way that is non-deterministic.
Is it learning in the way that we digest that data and then change something about the system?
Absolutely. We'll do that real time in flight sometimes. But doing the harnessing so that the nerves that connect every part of the airplane together allows us to iterate quickly and develop quickly. But doing the flight controllers allowed us to collect all that information digitally, put it through Starlink, through S-band radios, put it through LTE, manipulate that data in a way that we can have real time like on a half second type cycle awareness of the aircraft, on a hour-long cycle awareness of the mission, on a month-long cycle awareness of the design, and on a multi-year cycle, like we're getting into multi years of flying, we can influence the regulations with data. I love it. That has been I would say one of the most powerful underestimated things that we did was doing our own flight controls.
Well, given the depths you're talking to me about this not from a CEO or a founder perspective, you must fly the Alia yourself quite a bit.
I do. I fly it every chance I can get. Like I said, I was flying it yesterday and it is a dream come true to do that.
