[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 91 (Wednesday, May 25, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2700-S2702]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
BETA TECHNOLOGIES
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, a person wandering up Church Street or
jogging down on the shores of Lake Champlain on a crisp, snowy day in
Burlington, VT, this past winter could have glanced up at the sky and
seen an angular, white aircraft gliding through the air. It is called
the Alia and is an electric aircraft modeled after an Artic tern that
has been designed and manufactured by Beta Technologies.
At their headquarters, located beside the Burlington International
Airport in South Burlington, Beta Technologies has been ``quietly''
revolutionizing the aviation industry by designing an environmentally
friendly, rechargeable, and, yes, quiet, electric aircraft that can
vertically take off and land without a runway. It is incredible
technology that has game-changing applications for the domestic
shipping industry, private transportation, and the military. Their
research, production, and testing has been supported by dozens of
private investors, several public companies, and funding appropriated
by the Appropriations Committee to the Air Force's AFWERX Agility Prime
program. The Agility Prime program was launched in 2020 in an effort to
encourage private commercial development of the electric vertical
takeoff and landing--eVTOL--aircraft industry.
I am proud of the innovative work that Beta Technologies does in
Vermont. The company employs a workforce of over 350 employees and is
growing, employing veterans, pilots, engineers, and technicians. The
company is enriching the engineering and technology community of
Vermont. I am excited about the potential for Beta's aircrafts and look
forward to supporting their work in the future.
On April 16, 2022, The New York Times published an article on the
innovative work of Beta Technologies, and I ask unanimous consent that
it be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the New York Times, Apr. 16, 2022]
The Battery That Flies
(By Ben Ryder Howe)
Kitty Hawk.--The invention of the jet engine. And on a
frozen Vermont morning, circling above Lake Champlain, the
Alia.
In the mind of Christopher Caputo, a pilot, each moment
signals a paradigm shift in aviation. ``You're looking at
history,'' Mr. Caputo said recently, speaking from the
cockpit of a plane trailing the Alia at close distance. It
had an exotic, almost whimsical shape, like an Alexander
Calder sculpture, and it banked and climbed in near silence.
It is, essentially, a flying battery. And it represented a
long-held aviation goal: an aircraft with no need for jet
fuel and therefore no carbon emissions, a plane that could
take off and land without a runway and quietly hop from
recharging station to recharging station, like a large drone.
The Alia was made by Beta Technologies, where Mr. Caputo is
a flight instructor. A five-year-old start-up that is unusual
in many respects, the company is the brainchild of Martine
Rothblatt, the founder of Sirius XM and pharmaceutical
company United Therapeutics, and Kyle Clark, a Harvard-
trained engineer and former professional hockey player. It
has a unique mission, focused on cargo rather than
passengers. And despite raising a formidable treasure chest
in capital, it is based in Burlington, Vt., population
45,000, roughly 2,500 miles from Silicon Valley.
A battery-powered aircraft with no internal combustion has
been a goal of engineers ever since the Wright brothers.
Larry Page, the Google co-founder, has been funding electric
plane start-ups for over a decade. Electric motors have the
virtue of being smaller, allowing more of them to be fitted
on a plane and making it easier to design systems with
vertical lift. However, batteries are heavy, planes need to
be light, and for most of the last century, the e-plane was
thought to be beyond reach.
That changed with the extraordinary gains in aviation
technology realized since the 1990s. Late last year, curious
about the potential of so-called green aviation, I flew in a
Pipistrel Alpha Electro, a sleek new Slovenian two-seater
designed for flight training. The Electro looks and flies
like an ordinary light aircraft, but absent the roar of
internal combustion, its single propeller makes a sound like
beating wings. ``Whoa!'' I exclaimed when its high-torque
engine caused it to practically leap off the runway.
However, the Electro's power supply lasts only about an
hour. After ours nearly ran out, I wondered how many people
would enjoy flying in an electric plane. That take off is
fun. But then you do start to worry about the landing.
Despite the excitement about e-planes, the Federal Aviation
Administration has never certified electric propulsion as
safe for commercial use. Companies expect that to change in
the coming years, but only gradually, as safety concerns are
worked out. As that process occurs, new forms of aviation are
likely to appear, planes never seen before outside of testing
grounds. Those planes will have limitations as to how far and
fast they can fly, but they will do things other planes
can't, like hover and take off from ``runways in the sky.''
They will also, perhaps most importantly for an industry
dependent on fossil fuels, cut down on commercial aviation's
enormous contribution to climate change, currently calculated
as 3 to 4 percent of greenhouse gases globally.
``It's gross,'' Mr. Clark said. ``If we don't, the
consequences are that we'll destroy the planet.''
[[Page S2701]]
In 2013, Ms. Rothblatt became interested in battery-powered
aircraft. United Therapeutics makes human organs, including a
kidney grown inside a pig that was attached to a person last
fall, the first time such a procedure has been done. Ms.
Rothblatt wanted an electric heli-plane ``to deliver the
organs we are manufacturing in a green way,'' she said, and
fly them a considerable distance--say, between two mid-
Atlantic cities.
At the time, though, batteries were still too heavy. The
longest an electric helicopter had flown was 15 minutes. One
group of engineers told her it would take three years of
design and development, too long, in her mind, to wait.
``Every single person told me it was impossible,'' Ms.
Rothblatt said.
A Grand Vision
Kyle Clark flew alone for the first time in 1997 on a plane
from Burlington to Erie, Pa. Mr. Clark, then 16, had just
been selected by the U.S.A. Hockey national team. ``I was the
worst player on the ice,'' he said, ``so I decided to fight
all the opposing players.'' As a result, ``the team named me
captain.''
At 6 feet 7 inches, a self-described physical ``freak,''
Mr. Clark would go on to a brief professional hockey career
as an extremely low-scoring right wing and enforcer. (His
Linkedin page shows him brawling, helmetless, as a member of
the Washington Capitals organization.)
After a stint in Finland's professional hockey league, he
left the sport and received an undergraduate degree in
materials science at Harvard, where he wrote a thesis on a
plane piloted like a motorcycle and fueled by alternative
energy. It was named the engineering department's paper of
the year.
He then found himself considering a career on Wall Street,
doing something he didn't want to do away from where he
wanted to be: back in Vermont.
``There's a brain drain'' among engineers from his home
state, he said. ``People go away to college and come back
when they're 40, because they realize San Francisco or Boston
isn't the cat's meow.'' Returning to Burlington in his mid-
20s, Mr. Clark became director of engineering at a company
that designed power converters for Tesla.
In 2017 he attended a conference where Ms. Rothblatt made
her pitch for an e-helicopter. ``There were like 30 people in
the room, none of whom excited me,'' Ms. Rothblatt recalled.
``Then Kyle stood up and said, `I'm an electronics and power
systems person, and I'm confident we can achieve your
specification with a demonstration flight within one to two
years.' Other people were shaking their head. He was probably
the youngest guy in the room. So I came up to him during
break and said, `Where's your company located?' And he said,
`I live in Vermont.' ''
A few weeks later, after a second meeting, Mr. Clark drew a
watercolor of his design and sent it to Ms. Rothblatt. Within
hours, $1.5 million in seed capital for Beta Technologies had
been wired to his bank account.
``He drew a nice design,'' Ms. Rothblatt said.
A prototype with four tilting propellers was assembled in
eight months, with Mr. Clark piloting the vehicle himself.
Built in Burlington, the plane had to be flown over Lake
Champlain, away from population centers.
``It was so fun to fly it that we found an excuse to every
chance we could,'' Mr. Clark told an audience at M.I.T. in
2019. Ultimately, though, it turned out to have too complex a
design and Mr. Clark threw it out. He created a streamlined
prototype modeled after the Arctic tern, a small, slow bird
capable of flying uncanny distances without landing.
Since then, Beta's work force has grown to over 350 from
30. The company's headquarters have expanded to several
buildings wrapping around the runway at Burlington
International Airport, with plans for an additional 40-acre
campus.
The board is stocked with players in finance and tech,
including Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, and John
Abele, founder of Boston Scientific. It has $400 million of
funding from the government and institutions, including
Amazon. But it is not alone in trying to bring something like
this--what's known as a vehicle with ``electric vertical
takeoff and landing'' or eVTOL--to market.
Propelled by advances in batteries, control systems and
high performance motors, more than a dozen well-financed
competitors have their own prototypes, nearly all focused on
what the industry calls ``urban air mobility,'' or flying
taxis or privately owned flying vehicles. That no major
breakthrough has reached consumers in significant numbers yet
gives skeptics ammunition, but does not tamp down the
optimism within the industry, especially not at Beta. Beta is
alone in focusing on cargo, and is hoping to win F.A.A.
approval in 2024. If it succeeds, it believes it will do more
than make aviation history.
In the company's grand vision, electric cargo planes
replace fleets of exhaust-spewing short-haul box trucks
currently congesting America's roads.
With a limit of 250 nautical miles per battery charge, the
vehicles would land atop solar-powered charging stations made
out of shipping containers, some equipped with showers, bunks
and kitchenettes. (The cabinetry is Vermont maple.) Beta also
makes a stand-alone charger that ``our group is placing at
airports all over the country,'' said Mr. Clark.
A plane like Beta's could be a catalyst for
``decentralizing'' the hub and spoke system, the company
hopes, taking dependence on shipping centers like Louisville
and Memphis out of the equation and rebuilding the supply
chain.
``If you think about a path between two cities where
there's no direct air service,'' Blain Newton, Beta's chief
operations officer said, ``the only way is by taking one
connection, two connections.'' Alia can change that--
especially by increasing access to less populated parts of
the country, such as northern Vermont.
The ambitions are lofty. Bolstering Mr. Newton's claims,
however, UPS has already bought 10 Alias to be delivered in
2024 and signaled its intent to buy 140 more, which it plans
to use as ``micro-feeders'' for time-sensitive deliveries
such as medicine.
Amazon has invested heavily in Beta through its Climate
Pledge Fund. Both the Air Force and the Army have signed
contracts with the company worth a combined $43 million. And
Blade, the commuter helicopter service, perhaps sensing that
urban air mobility is not so far off, has reserved the right
to buy five Alias, at a price of $4 million to $5 million
apiece.
`The DNA of Vermont'
Beta's headquarters at the Burlington Airport--close enough
to be seen from the Terminal B waiting area--still has the
youthful informality of a start-up. On a December morning in
the hangar, Naughty by Nature's ``Feel Me Flow'' somehow
penetrated the din of whirring propellers and industrial
tools. The heavily tattooed Mr. Clark, whose idea of formal
wear seems to be rotating his baseball cap forward, pinballed
around the hangar, grabbing stray machinery and vaulting up
staircases with the agility of a professional athlete.
Before he joined Beta, Mr. Newton worked in health care. At
his job interview, Mr. Clark took him for a helicopter ride.
``He gave me the controls and said: `Your aircraft. Figure
it out,' '' Mr. Newton recalled, chuckling. ``I'd never flown
before. I ended up taking a 65 percent pay cut to work for
him.''
On their way back, with Mr. Clark back at the controls, the
helicopter flew over Burlington, a city built largely around
the University of Vermont and companies known for their
progressive bona fides, like Seventh Generation and Ben &
Jerry's. The city is famously left-leaning: Senator Bernie
Sanders served four terms as its mayor. It also hosts a
number of renewable energy startups.
``Clean energy is built into the DNA of Vermont,'' said
Russ Scully, a Burlington entrepreneur who raised capital for
Beta. Burlington is closer to becoming net zero than almost
any municipality in the country; in the Beta parking lot,
many cars have charging cables inserted.
Another local resource: One hundred miles north, near
Montreal, is one of the largest aerospace clusters outside
Toulouse and Seattle, led by Bombardier, the Canadian
business jet-maker, and CAE, the world's premier manufacturer
of flight simulators.
For Blake Opsahl, a network planner who left Amazon to join
Beta, doing so was a no-brainer. ``My husband grew up here
and we've always wanted to to come back,'' said Mr. Opsahl,
who described an affinity between Beta engineers and
Vermonters as ``passionate tinkerers.''
Mr. Newton said: ``I don't want to throw any of our
competitors under the bus, but some folks out West are paying
huge salaries to attract people, and we're capturing a lot of
high-end aerospace talent for the lifestyle. They said, No, I
want to be part of this thing here.''
Mr. Clark said he was offered opportunities to move the
company elsewhere but declined. It has now become one of
Burlington's marquee employers, contributing to a population
swelling with high-earning remote workers who left larger
cities and brought with them a worsening housing crisis.
Burlington may be the kind of small city that Beta aims to
serve, but as its success has shown, it is also the kind of
city where sudden growth can bring challenges to livability.
In high school, Mr. Clark began building planes with spare
parts from the machine shop his father ran at the University
of Vermont. His mother, an artist, burned one in the backyard
to prevent him from flying it.
Like Mr. Newton, many recruits were treated to hair-raising
airplane rides. The company has a fleet of aircraft that the
communications director, Jake Goldman, calls an ``amusement
park for aviation fanatics,'' including a World War II
biplane and the experimental Pipistrel. (``I did not puke,''
Mr. Goldman said of his inaugural ride in an aerobatic plane,
``but it was touch and go for a while.'')
The company offers free flying lessons to all its 350
employees, and has more than 20 flight instructors on staff,
including Nick Warren, formerly a Marine One pilot for
President Barack Obama. The idea is that in order to promote
``critical thinking in aviation'' it helps to be airborne.
``It's very Vermont--instead of just analyzing things on a
computer, you actually try them out,'' said Lan Vu, a Beta
electrical engineer who attended public high school with Mr.
Clark.
Like many of her colleagues, Ms. Vu had worked previously
for Mr. Clark, who recruited her. (``You know how good of a
talker he is,'' she said.)
[[Page S2702]]
She had no prior interest in flying, she said, but ``that
was one of the things Kyle made sure to talk about when he
was pitching me.''
``And I was like: `Yeah, I don't have that kind of time. I
have three kids,' '' she said.
After changing her mind and getting her pilot's license
through the employee program, however, Ms. Vu began competing
in aerial acrobatic competitions. As an engineer, she said,
flying helps her address safety concerns. ``If I'm building
this, would I fly it?'' said Ms. Vu, who said she considered
herself a conservative pilot, although, she admits, ``I was
kind of surprised how much I enjoyed flying upside down.''
The futurist and the test pilot
Is the world ready for wingless hovercraft levitating over
cities and hotrodding through congested air corridors?
The consensus within the industry is that the F.A.A., which
regulates half the world's aviation activity, is several
years from certifying urban air mobility.
``It's a big burden of proof to bring new technology to the
F.A.A.--appropriately so,'' Mr. Clark said. Currently the
certification process for a new plane or helicopter takes two
to three years on average. For an entirely new type of
vehicle, it could be considerably longer. (One conventionally
powered aircraft that can take off and land without a runway
had its first flight in 2003. It remains uncertified.)
Ms. Rothblatt has built a career out of the long view. She
is a celebrated futurist who has argued passionately for
transhumanism, or the belief that human beings will
eventually merge with machines and upload consciousness to a
digital realm. And she has taken positions on issues such as
xenotransplantation--the interchange of organs between
species, including humans--considered audacious not long ago,
though no longer.
Yet in certain ways she and Mr. Clark make for unlikely
partners. Mr. Clark has a familiar demeanor for a test pilot:
exuberant, risk-taking, hyper-confident.
Ms. Rothblatt, on the other hand, calls herself an
exceedingly cautious person, both as a pilot and in general.
``I'm an adventurous thinker, but I'm cautious in
everything,'' she said. She brought up her life experience as
an example. Aside from her accomplishments in medicine and
aerospace, Ms. Rothblatt is known as a transgender pioneer;
when she started Sirius XM and rose to prominence, she hadn't
yet transitioned. ``When I changed my sex, it was only after
watching presentations by a dozen top surgeons and I was
absolutely confident that it would be safe,'' she said.
The dichotomy between the futurist and the test pilot gets
to a real issue facing any plane with a battery: Who will fly
them?
According to Dan Patt, a technology analyst, vehicles like
the one Beta is building are ``very unlikely to make money
unless they go unmanned.'' Aviation in general faces a pilot
shortage, and labor comprises up to a third of operating
costs at legacy airlines.
The question for Beta as a business, said Mr. Patt, who led
the development of drones for the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, is: ``What does it take for their model to
be competitive with ground transportation?''
Beta says its vehicles are designed to be ``optionally
manned'' in the future. Yet analysts such as Mr. Patt see
unpiloted commercial aviation as even farther from winning
F.A.A. approval than the electric plane itself, raising a
dilemma:
``What's more important, going unmanned first, or do you
build the vehicle first? Beta is clearly in the latter
camp.''
Nathan Diller, an Air Force colonel, is not a futurist, but
his job is to find and support companies doing forward-
thinking, futuristic things.
The military applications of a vehicle like the Alia--
especially logistics--have gotten attention at the highest
levels of the Air Force, which has backed Beta and some of
its peers through an accelerator called Agility Prime.
Last month, for the first time, uniformed Air Force pilots
flew an Alia, soaring above Lake Champlain in a plane powered
only by a battery.
Colonel Diller sees this kind of transport as a national
security issue, in part because of its potential to reduce
fuel consumption, but what seems to intrigue him most is
``the democratization of air travel.''
He grew up flying experimental planes on an organic farm in
West Texas, aware of the limits on where a plane can land and
who can fly. Looking at a floating sculpture twirling above a
lake, he sees a different future for aviation: ``Everyone a
pilot, everywhere a runway.''
____________________