[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.''

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