BETA Technologies, an electric aerospace company based in Vermont, has successfully completed the first flight of an electric aircraft built on its new rate production line. This marks another significant step in the company’s accelerating production efforts and path toward customer deliveries. The aircraft, an ALIA CTOL, was manufactured at BETA’s 200,000 sq ft production facility in South Burlington. Following the completion of final assembly, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) inspected the aircraft for safety and compliance, granting BETA a Multipurpose Special Airworthiness Certificate for Experimental Research & Development, Market Survey, and Crew Training for the ALIA CTOL — signifying the agency’s sign-off for flight. On November 13th, BETA’s CEO, Founder, and Test Pilot, Kyle Clark, conducted the first flight of the production aircraft. The flight, which lasted nearly an hour, included a takeoff, climb to 7000 ft, handling qualities evaluation, stability and control test points and initial airspeed expansion prior to flying several approaches and a normal landing. “This start of our production CX300 flight test campaign is a result of years of hard work and focus on studying customer requirements, hard engineering, manufacturing, production, quality and test. It represents a significant milestone for BETA, and is the beginning of an exciting new phase for the business. With this, we’re one step closer to putting this technology into the hands of our customers.” This aircraft build, and subsequent flight, comes approximately one year after BETA opened the doors to its production facility. In that time, the company has installed aerospace-grade tooling for aircraft assembly and ground support equipment, and stood up and started production of propulsion, batteries and other systems. “We learned a lot from this first production build,” said Clark. “We weren’t just building an aircraft company, we were building and refining a system to build high quality aircraft efficiently. This first build allowed the team to collect data and insight on manufacturing labor, tooling design, processes, yields and sequences, all of which are being used to refine our production systems.” Following this launch of its production test flight campaign, BETA will continue testing the aircraft for the standard 50 hours, at which point it is certificated to transition to Market Survey and/or Crew Training certificate, allowing the company to fly outside of Burlington and Plattsburgh and to continue training additional pilots on the aircraft. The company will also continue production of additional aircraft, including ALIA CTOL and ALIA VTOL configurations. The news follows the close of BETA’s Series C last month, which added $318M in equity financing to the company’s balance sheet. The funds are being directed toward the continued acceleration of certification and production activities such as this.
