So, what are we looking at here? This is a 7,000 lb max gross takeoff weight, all electric aircraft. It's got just over 500 horsepower in the tail of an all-electric motor. That motor is right next to Steve here. It's a dual redundant motor. So, there's actually two motors inside there pushing that singular prop. There's five batteries in the belly there, and it's about four times as much energy as like a Tesla Model 3. So, it's a boatload of energy. There's 2,800 lb of batteries in that. And this class aircraft, not this particular one, everybody asks these big questions, how far does it fly? 336 nautical miles is the longest we've demonstrated in this class of aircraft for about 3 hours in the air. So, it's got some meaningful endurance. And the reason I bring that up is that what we were seeking with electric aviation is to get to the point we could cross the threshold of doing a commercially viable mission. And a commercially viable mission means that you envelope a large extent of a particular customer's missions with all the reserves at the payload and the speed that you anticipate. And we did that as an industry a couple years ago with Amazon, UPS, FedEx, all the feeder fleets that they do those flights in and a bunch of medical flights. So the aircraft was designed specifically to make that particular range, that particular payload. And that sets the scale of the aircraft. The neat thing is as they get bigger, they'll go a little faster and they'll have longer range. And it'll be compounding because batteries are continuously increasing their energy density. So naturally, we're pretty excited about the future and the prospects of electric aviation. Starting with this, this is one of two variants. This is a conventional takeoff and landing aircraft. The other variant has four lift propellers on it. That's an aircraft that takes off and lands like a helicopter, flies like an airplane. So that's a general overview of the airplane.
My name is Chris Puto. I oversee flight operations at Beta Technologies. I had the very fortunate opportunity to meet this gentleman here about six years ago when Beta had about 25 people in the company and Kyle said we should teach everybody here how to fly, all the engineers. And you know with that we've developed this culture at Team Beta where we have a much more informed engineering product. We've got a really rad R&D flight test crew. Where's Daniel Cash Dollar? He's one of the flight test engineers that leads, National Test Pilot School graduate out of Mojave. That is really getting into all the engineering and handling characteristics of this aircraft. But then we've got this other flight school that teaches people how to fly and gets people really passionate and behind what we're here at Oshkosh for just because we all love aviation and want to do it super safely and super reliably. And you know, when you bring those two together, we've got this group of aviators that just got checked out in this aircraft that are flying it not only all over the United States of America, but aircraft number two, 214 Bravo Tango literally just took off today from Hamburg, Germany, and landed up in Denmark, and it's on its way up to Norway. That aircraft's been flying all through Ireland, through England, flew every day in the Paris Air Show, made it all the way through Germany, Luxembourg, and it's been doing customer demonstrations throughout Europe. And I think what it goes back to is this guy's vision about, you know, we're not going to show up at an air show. We're not going to show up at an airport or with a customer on a demonstration without having flown the aircraft there. And we've got this group of really talented, passionate people that are collecting not only all the really informed engineering decisions that our team of engineers back home are doing to design this aircraft, but all the operational data that is being collected from having these aircraft out in the wild flying every single day. We're flying them. We're charging them on our own operational network on shore power that exists at current hangars. And I got to say, you know, having spent 30 plus years in the military flying A-10s, F-16s, a bunch of time at Delta Airlines flying 75s, 76s, you know, there's just something super satisfying and unique about this aircraft. You almost become one with the plane. It is so quiet in the cockpit. You can actually feel the air flow over the cockpit, over the wings, and it is just such a simple, artful design and the avionics inside are just very thoughtfully well laid out. It's just a joy for a pilot to fly.
Yeah, just as like a guy who flies a lot of things and I'm not a professional, I just get to jump into different aircraft. This airplane looks very unique and different, but I was super impressed with how easily it flew. And I guess it's important to know it's a fly-by-wire system. So, in the current setup is direct law, and if you know much about how that stuff works, it means you tell it to do something, it's like, okay, no help. And normal law is what will ultimately be implemented to kind of help make it easier to fly. But even in direct law where you're potentially at a risk of getting into a pilot induced oscillation scenario if you start to get behind it or over control it. I didn't really have too much trouble. I learned in the sim for I guess I had one session and then jumped into the real airplane and they let me land it. You guys are a little crazy but because the other problem is I guess the nature of the setup is that the controls aren't connected physically and what'll happen is if one pilot tries, I guess the briefing was if we have a bird in front of us and you go left and I go right the airplane will split the difference and go straight. So the briefing was you have control until I say I have control and then you have to like let go. So for landing it's all you or it's not right. So it was a little stressful. I mean, this was one of how many airframes at the time when I was flying it? So I didn't want to break it. And yeah, it was a kind of gusty day and I landed it twice and it really performed beautifully. I think the challenge that I had was that it glided too well. I'm used to flying RV-14, which is what I fly mostly. I also fly a T-6. Neither of those glide exceptionally well. So, you don't want to set yourself up tight. Is it a 16 to 1 in this configuration? So, that's like a huge glide ratio compared to what I'm used to. And you don't really, I mean, it's ultimately designed to be a V1 airframe. So, it doesn't have flaps. That you have a drag region with the engine that you can use to slow yourself down, that's kind of it for drag. So you really have to manage the energy well and it was not something I expected that an airframe that's fundamentally designed to be VTOL flies so beautifully in the C2 configuration. It does take a little bit more runway for takeoff and landing. Obviously because of the speed that you're looking at ultimately in the VTOL configuration. I think it's going to be pretty cool to see how versatile it's going to ultimately be. But as a pilot that didn't have a lot of experience with wacky stuff, I did not have a hard time transitioning into it.
The in any aviation, specifically in electric aviation, there are four primary variables that allow you to carry a lot of weight and go a long distance. That we're trying to do with airplanes. And it's you may get slippery. High lift over drag ratio. You have a low structural weight fraction. That means all the stuff that's not carrying energy or carrying stuff doesn't weigh a lot. The energy that you're carrying has a high energy density. So for every pound of energy you're carrying, you carry a lot of energy. That's the specific energy density of the battery. And the one that a lot of people forget about is the propulsive efficiency. How efficiently you can take that precious energy in your batteries and convert it to propulsion. And that's where we've really started to differentiate ourselves. The people ask all the time what is the reason for the five-bladed pusher propeller versus thrust vectoring and it comes down to propulsive efficiency. It's the way in which you can convert that energy into propulsion whether you're trying to hover and you have a high figure of merit or push the thing through the air with a high efficiency. And one of the fascinating things, you guys are all airplane nerds because you're standing here. One of the things that blows my mind every time you look at an airplane is all the energy put into that airplane moving through goes through those five blades. And if you look at that thing, it's not a lot. All the energy that you're pushing through goes on that entire airframe. So the aerodynamics of those blades is as important as the entire airframe. And proportionally, I don't know, it's a 100 to 1, 200 to 1 ratio. That means that every little airfoil and advance ratio and angle of attack is so important on that propulsion in order to make high propulsive efficiency and put the thing through the air efficiently. So those are the four primary parameters and then Steve hit on something really important. Then you have a design philosophy after understanding the physics and the divine design philosophy for us is simplicity. That's it. Just simplicity.
The design simplicity is really important. You notice all the batteries are in the belly. And as Steve was describing in direct law, the aircraft is very stable, has good stability coefficients, and that means that the aircraft's behavior like upon stall or upon correction or overcorrection, you end up coming back to neutral in general or you stall and the nose drops nicely. He doesn't depart controlled flight. We decided that even though we have a fly-by-wire system, we were going to make an inherently stable aircraft. So, it needed no augmentation on top of the fly-by-wire system, which ironically grossly simplifies the software necessary to control the plane. In fact, it goes to direct law, proportional law. You put in this much, it puts out that much.
Just one more thing about redundancy. A lot of people ask me these questions. I'm like I'm not an engineer but I understand enough about it having worked with these guys. And if you look at the control surfaces on this airplane, there's a lot of them. And essentially what we're looking at is split separate systems. So that if you lose a whole half of the airplane in terms of the electrical system running it, you still have control authority, which is pretty cool how much they thought that through. And it's the same with the engine. And you get argument with people about motors versus engines. I came into the world of like flying airplanes and people talk about the motor. It's like it's not a motor. That drives me crazy when people describe an ICE engine as a motor, right? Your starter motor is a motor, but that is actually an engine. And I learned that as I started working with them here. And it's pretty neat how it functions. It's built on multiple components, two of which are motors in each one. So, right there is a redundant aspect to it. But I think what's cool about it is that the failure mode, if you were to compare the motors in this airplane to pistons in an ICE engine, losing a piston in an ICE engine probably means you're shedding parts and you're sending metal through the system and you're probably looking at a complete engine failure imminently. Whereas something like this, if you lose a motor, it's going to just not be part of the system anymore, but it's not going to drag. So, yeah, you're going to lose power, but you're not going to lose the engine. And that's kind of been interesting. When I publish videos about this stuff, people start arguing in the comments about motors versus engines, and it's like, it's an engine. That's how it's going to get defined. That's how it's going to get certified, I guess, right? And it's important to understand the redundancy that you're looking at because of the systems involved. There's a lot more to the engine than just a couple motors in there, but it's a lot of redundancy.
You know, Flight Chops, you bring up a great point. The overall simplicity of the design of the aircraft. And we go back to start talking about flying the aircraft and why it is so much fun to fly. You know, you have all these advanced new aircraft on the market that are very technologically advanced, but they have complicated systems. They have complicated avionics. How we partnered with Garmin and the customized synoptics that are in the aircraft make it very intuitive to the pilot. Early warning crew alerting systems. Just incredible insight into the soul of the aircraft through the avionics provides really good intuition to the pilot and it makes it really enjoyable because you now you can focus on the things that matter about controlling the plane, about not missing an altitude or a radio call or turning to a heading and doing that really safely and it almost makes flying fun again. You know, if you know, for me at Delta Airlines when you were just flying from point A to point B and turning the autopilot on and not actually flying the aircraft, you know, it's you're one with the machine, it's very simple to understand. And if you start looking at the redundancy baked into the aircraft, all electric airplane, lithium ion batteries, an electric engine, and folks are really focused on that from a redundancy standpoint but you know, from a pilot perspective, what I'm most concerned about is the low voltage system and the fly-by-wire system and how to control the plane and the fact that you kind of touched on it. Not only is it electrically redundant, it's geographically redundant and it's mechanically redundant. So, the level of redundancy throughout the low voltage and the fly-by-wire system to be able to actually control the plane is really easy to understand for a pilot.
Yeah. Just to explain the engineering behind what Chris is describing, there are three times redundant bare metal computers that we actually make at Beta inside the nose of that aircraft. They're fed by three different power systems, two primary and one backup. But Steve brought up a really interesting thing. And if you look right over Ed's head there on the control surfaces, you'll notice that the outboard control surface is just a little bit shorter than the inboard control surface because the rotational moment on that is a little shorter. So you need to make up for it by a larger control surface. And that makes it so that after you do all the electrical voting and all the redundancy, you get what I call aerodynamic voting at the end where if you have one failure of those three and it's a hard over, then it's always equally outvoted by the other control surfaces. So after all of the electrical fanciness, there's 10 control surfaces on this airplane that all have equal control authority either in roll, pitch, or yaw relative to their counterparts. So there's I think a thoughtful architecture and what Puto described as this geographic redundancy. Every control line going to that server or that server or that motor or that battery takes a different path through the airframe. So there's no point in the airframe where you could put a bullet through it, a bird through it or have a fire and you would lose control of the airplane. So that geo redundancy allows you to have this total system level redundancy on any particular failure in the airplane which then gives it the path towards certification. I'm actually going to make a cool announcement which maybe you guys heard at the press conference this morning but that prop was type certified last Friday.
Yes. And it's part of our certification strategy, which is we're going to go prop, engine, airplane, VTOL, and then larger airplane. And every one of them, they're overlapped quite a bit. And the neat thing about certifying that prop is those who have gone through certification programs before is that prop collected the data on that motor to get certified. And the endurance testing, the ingestion testing, the halt testing, all that type of stuff had to be done on the motor that it intended to be certified on. So, it gives us a bunch of confidence. We know how to get through the motor and then we go through the airplane, which is already quite a ways down the road. So that was a big win for the Beta team on Friday.
Wait, I want to ask Kyle a question. You know, we not only did Kyle kind of stalk Flight Chops previous Oshkosh, but we also got introduced to Flight Chops from, where's Jerry, our videographer? That really kind of stalked Flight Chops of coming to help tell the story about this new electric aviation company and this new product on the market. And showing that, you know, there's actual substance behind this company and this machine that we're designing and building. But I want to ask you, you know, one of the new and novel pieces of this is the rudder in the hand and throughout your training with us and all the flying you've done. Can you talk to the team of aviators here of your experience with rudder in the hand?
Yeah, that's a good point. That's one of the things that immediately I kind of had a little bit of push back on just looking at it. Right. It's like, okay, as a simmer, when I had my Flight Sim equipment at home, I was less excited to get rotor pedals and take that twist joystick out of the equation to set up a Flight Sim as close to what I really fly as possible and get the best pedals that move, not just tilt. I want to really feel like an airplane. So, getting into this, I was like felt like initially before actually flying it, like that it was going back to that world of like that twisting stick that I didn't love. And I guess I was stressed about the fact that the pedals are brakes only. So, as a tail wheel pilot, my concern was I'm going to be on the roll touching down at what is this 65 or 70 when you touch down a 6,000 lb airplane. I'm going to hit the rudder and blow a tire or something, right? Like, I'm going to leave a ton of rubber behind. So, that was my concern. And I did do it in the sim on my first shot because we got put in a big crosswind and we briefed it. Feet are on the floor. But as soon as I felt like I needed it, I did do it and I was like, ah. So anyway, it was good to do it in the sim and then get in the real airplane. And then we went and flew. We did slips and stuff and I could really feel how that was working to slip it. And when I really landed it, it didn't happen. And again, I really had limited exposure. So I think yes, it's going to be a transition for pilots that want pedals, but I guess you guys can speak to the engineering reasoning why you're going that way. I think I understand it from a simplicity perspective. There's a lot that would have to happen to get rudder cables or whatever moving pedals, more complexity that we're trying to minimize for the sake of safety and redundancy. So yeah, it's a new way to fly an airplane or I guess an old way to fly for some simmers.
