[F]or the first time in nearly 100 years, there’s a design revolution underway in air travel. Kyle Clark, an entrepreneur who has created an electric aircraft with a top speed of about 170 miles an hour, would like to lead the charge from his company in Burlington.
Clark’s company, Beta Technologies, has created a working prototype of a piloted electric aircraft that rises into the air like a helicopter and then flies like a passenger plane. Clark intends to be the first aerospace engineer in the world to produce such a craft for commercial use.
Using homemade flight simulators, an array of 3D printers, a machine shop, and a team of nearly 40 staff and contracted engineers, Clark has big plans for his self-funded company, which occupies a hangar and other buildings at the Burlington airport. He intends to stand out for creating an aircraft with a power system that enables it to achieve the longest flight range amongst its peers.
“We’re going to develop the world’s longest-range, best-performing aircraft,” he said.
Beta’s just one player in the crowded and dynamic field known as eVTOL, the shorthand for aircraft such as Beta’s that can switch to alternative flight modes. Many eVTOL developers are racing to claim a piece of the potentially huge business from the ride-sharing company Uber, which has stated it intends to deploy large numbers of the craft for short-term trips as soon as they are approved.
It’s an industry with high barriers to entry, said Mike Hirschberg, director of the Vertical Flight Society in Fairfax, Virginia. Hirschberg said the nonprofit, founded 75 years ago as the American Helicopter Society, has more than 6,000 members worldwide.
“A lot of people who are entering this space don’t realize what a challenge it will be,” he said. “With any kind of aircraft, it generally takes hundreds of millions of dollars to certify it. It’s not that challenging to build an aircraft to get it to fly, but to certify it and have it be an economically compelling product that people want to buy and operate … those are much more difficult goals.”
Clark said he’s much further along than his peer eVTOL-developers, and that his prototype is the largest electric plane by weight ever to fly.
The company has to keep its prototype in Plattsburgh, New York, so it can conduct test flights over Lake Champlain; the FAA won’t let Beta do test flights over a population center. Right now, Clark is the only authorized test pilot for it, and he’s not allowed to carry anyone else in the two-seater.
As for his competitors, including NASA, “there are 150 eVTOL companies raising money and claiming to be able to fly things that are technically infeasible to fly,” Clark said. He has a wall covered in photographs of scale models. They’re not as far along as Beta, he said.
“They’re just like flies circulating a light bulb; they’re all hovering around Uber saying, ‘I’m going to be your next air taxi,’ these wanna-be manufacturers,” he said. But those projects are still on paper.
“Unless you build a real airplane, can you consider yourself a real aerospace company?”
Clark’s company is unique among the eVTOL startups with its goal for long-range flight, said Christian Bailey, a pilot who co-founded a venture fund called Curated Innovation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Beta is building platforms on shipping-type containers that would hold battery packs and even sleeping space for pilots. A network of these charging pads would be required for the electric craft to travel long distances – the way Tesla rolled out charging stations when it started selling its electric cars.
“I was kind of stunned to see those shipping container battery packs,” said Bailey, who visited Clark’s company in November. “They can drop those things across the U.S. and allow one of these craft to cross the whole country without ever needing to go to an existing (base), and certainly nobody else in the space is doing that.
“They’ll be the first ones to do a cross-country flight,” he said.
Under construction now in Beta’s company’s workshop is a craft that will be twice the size of the prototype, able to do twice the distance. It will have a wingspan of under 50 feet and will be able to fly 290 miles before recharging, Clark said. It’s due for its first flight in December 2019. Eventually, Clark expects the commercial version to cost approximately $1 million, about the same as a conventional six-seat propeller plane. He plans to create craft used for cargo first, and then passenger craft.
Clark, who grew up in Huntington, got an early start in manufacturing. His father ran the University of Vermont’s instrumentation and model facility, and Clark said he spent hours there as a child working with lathes, welding and using other machines. Those skills have come in handy in areas like the production of propellers, which are handmade from maple in his shop.
“I’ve never brought on an engineer that isn’t also an artist,” he said. “In prototyping, it is so important that you have engineers who know how to make stuff.”
Clark studied applied math and materials science at Harvard. He took some time off from school to play hockey, including a professional stint with the Washington Capitals. Along the way, he had taken flight lessons and joined the Experimental Aviation Association.
After graduating, Clark started and sold a number of companies and co-founded the Burlington software company Venture.co. Those enterprises gave him the capital he needed to bootstrap Beta in March 2017.
One looming challenge for Clark and his many competitors is to produce an autonomous aircraft. He expects commercial autonomous aircraft to surmount technological and regulatory hurdles and be flying by 2030.
“We made a strategic decision to develop aircraft that are optionally piloted,” he said. “They have provisions for a human pilot in them, but in the future when the regulatory environment allows, we can take the pilot out.”
The FAA’s regulatory structure is built on the concept of a piloted aircraft, and changing that will take some time.
“The operation of an unpiloted aircraft needs to be rigorously tested, and public input is needed before it can be put into operation,” an FAA spokesperson said.
Turbulence in the industry
Even in college, Clark was shaking up long-held beliefs about how pilots should interact with planes. The flight simulator he built then was based on the chassis of a motorcycle. The primary goal then, as now, was to improve the pilot’s experience.
“People have been controlling airplanes the same way since maybe 1930,” he said. “Humans are not catered to when we build airplanes. I have a theory that if you make it easy for the person, it’s safest and more enjoyable.”
Another goal, and the reason for producing electric planes, is to cut pollution.
“I’d like to take that 9 percent of carbon emissions that are produced by aircraft and make that zero,” he said. “I’ve got four little kids; I really don’t want to destroy this world.”
Clark’s aircraft isn’t the first plane to rise or descend as a helicopter, without the need for a runway; there have been military craft such as the Harrier Jump Jet doing that since the 1960s. Bailey said Beta is probably one of four firms in the world that is flying a full-scale prototype.
Bailey said he expected eVTOLs to be available commercially within 15 years.
“The regulatory environment is why I’m more inclined to invest in Kyle, because his initial launch customer is transporting cargo rather than people,” Bailey said. “So I think they’re going to have a much cleaner path to commercial operation without FAA problems.”
But Clark still has steep certification hurdles to pass. For now, he’s the only test pilot approved to fly the prototype. His company is bare-bones at the moment, with no HR, marketing, or other staff – only engineers, many part-time, some unpaid.
He said his plane is 10 times less expensive to operate than a conventional helicopter. It’s not yet clear how the cost of using an aircraft would compare to the cost of using a car. An Uber white paper on eVTOL has direct costs per mile of 50 cents, with flight distances usually shorter than driving distances to the same destination.
“We can expect that the price for a 45-mile pool VTOL, which would replace a 60-mile automobile trip, could approach as low as $21 for the 15 minute journey,” Uber said.
Beta is working with the airport to use some land to build a recharging pad for the craft. Clark said he intends for most of the manufacturing to happen in Vermont. He’ll start out by building piloted craft while the technology is developed elsewhere to keep autonomous craft safe from mountains, other aircraft, buildings, birds and other hazards.
“That requires a little more technology than presently is in aviation,” Clark said. “It is inevitable we will get there.”
He’s also planning to raise money for production.
“There are institutional investors who allow for the founding team to maintain independence, and we would probably look to raise money from folks like that,” he said.
