Beta Founder Reflects On Piloted eVTOL Transition Milestone

BENTONVILLE, Arkansas—Perhaps the biggest technical challenge in the development of an electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) vehicle is mastering the transition between hover and cruise.

Many players in the growing eVTOL scene have successfully transitioned with a variety of aircraft configurations–multicopter, tilt-propeller or lift-plus-cruise, for example. But most of these transitions were flown with subscale prototypes, and almost always without a pilot in the cockpit.

So far, only one company–Vermont-based Beta Technologies–has successfully transitioned a full-scale eVTOL with a pilot on board. The milestone was first hit back in April, and to date, none of the other eVTOL makers have done so–even those planning to certify in the next 12-18 months.

The fact that so few startups have achieved piloted transition reflects the challenge of designing and testing sufficient levels of redundancy to ensure the safety of a human pilot, explains Kyle Clark, Beta’s founder and CEO.

“You need to respect the fact that you’ve got a person on board,” Clark tells Aviation Week on the sidelines of the UP.Summit here. “For us, that means having three flight controllers, diverse power systems, geo-redundancy in all the control lines, parallel-redundant motors, inceptors and motors that are four-times redundant ... You don’t have to do all that for unmanned flight testing.”

Having personally flown the Alia VTOL, Clark describes the feeling of transition as “fascinating.”

“When you shut the rotors down to stow them, you lose all that centrifugal force stabilizing the rotors, and so you have to do it very precisely without disturbing the aerodynamics of the airplane,” he says. “It's the same thing on the way back. You don’t have any stabilization when you turn those rotors back on. You get these huge edgewise moments on the blades that want to shake the plane apart, and you have to solve that problem both digitally and mechanically.”

While Beta was originally focused exclusively on its Alia VTOL, the startup has pivoted to focus on bringing an electric conventional-takeoff-and-landing (eCTOL) aircraft to market first. But Clark insists the “ultimate priority” remains eVTOL, while the eCTOL program can help the company get to market quicker and establish processes related to industrialization, production and certification.

Beta continues to build smaller numbers of eVTOLs that are mainly going to military applications and internal company flight tests, while the eCTOL variants will head to customers for early-stage, precertification applications as well as certification flight testing, he explains.

“We’ve chosen to temporarily prioritize the eCTOL while a smaller team solved the physics and economics challenges of eVTOL,” Clark says. “But it’s never a binary thing; it’s just the sequence that we think makes the most sense.”

Beta is currently seeking to certify its Alia CTOL as soon as late 2025, while the eVTOL version is expected to come one or two years later.

With that target approaching, Beta is working to transition from an R&D-focused startup to a serial aircraft manufacturer with matured production processes and systems. As part of that effort, the startup is focused on design for manufacturing (DFM), Clark explains.

“DFM is a huge thing for us right now,” he says. “We’re a very strong company technologically in things like power electronics, motors and controls and multiphysics engineering, but there’s a different skill set and muscle group that we had to develop around being an FAA-conforming production company. We’re getting processes in place, getting people trained, and making sure that we document it all in a secure way. It’s not the most fun part of aerospace, but it’s really important.”

In tandem with its aircraft production efforts, Beta is pushing forward with the rollout of its multimodal, vehicle-agnostic Charge Cubes, which have already been installed at 33 airports from Vermont to Florida to Arkansas, with more than 50 additional units planned across the East, West and Gulf coasts.

Given the company’s head start on building a charging network, Clark predicts that Beta’s infrastructure business could ultimately be “as valuable” as its aircraft manufacturing.

“Most of the companies doing infrastructure are building vertiports, which is cool, but it’s not the technological leap we’re making in developing high-voltage, bidirectional certified charging systems,” he says. “We now have three certified products: 30 kW, 68 kW, and 350 kW systems. That took serious work, because not only are those products certified, but the margins are great on those, too.”

Looking ahead to 2025, Clark says that Beta is eager to prove its technology and business case in real-world operational settings, even if that means debuting in international markets outside the U.S.

“We’ll be deploying the sequence of aircraft we’re building this year, and demonstrating that we have favorable unit economics, operational economics and high reliability in a real-world environment,” Clark says. “Ultimately, no one is going to buy this aircraft unless the operational economics are way favorable to existing aircraft. We know it is–now we’ve got to prove it to the world on their turf.”