Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies

Not only is BETA Technologies completely changing the flying experience with its all-electric aircraft, it’s upending the logistics of shipping altogether... This week on How I Built This Lab, founder and CEO Kyle Clark shares how BETA is building zero-emission, battery-powered aircraft, as well as a national charging network. Also, how the transition to electric will address aviation’s emissions problem, and how a chance encounter with United Therapeutics founder Martine Rothblatt started it all. This episode was produced by Sam Paulson, with music by Ramtin Arablouei and Sam Paulson. Edited by John Isabella, with research help from Casey Herman. Our audio engineer was James Willetts. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 5:12Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So it seems pretty clear that within, say, 50 years, most cars will likely be electric. The internal combustion engine is on its way out, but that's not necessarily the case for air travel. So far, it's been difficult to figure out how to create a long-range, commercial, electric airplane. But when it comes to shorter distances, electric planes will start to play a much bigger role, especially in transporting goods like medicine and packages. One of the leading companies in the space is Beta Technologies. The company's founder, Kyle Clark, is a bit of a jack of all trades. He's a serial entrepreneur who started three other companies, and he's also a former NHL

• 5:57Guy Raz?

  hockey player. But he's always been mainly interested in building planes. In fact, the name of his company can be traced back to his early reputation as a tinkerer.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  My passion was designing things, building things, and even the name of our company, Beta, which is named because of my nickname in hockey, because Beta was the nerd in The Matrix movie, in the back, always hammering away on his computer. And on the hockey team, everybody had a nickname, and my nickname was Beta, because I was a nerd. And I was always studying and just doing applied math and engineering. So on the hockey team, I was a little bit of an outsider, respected, but an outsider, focused on designing things and building things.

• 6:43Guy Raz?

  I read that your dad ran a machine shop that made items for researchers at the University of Vermont. And you, as a teenager and as a kid, we used to go to that machine shop and take parts and just tinker around and make stuff. So what were the kinds of things you were making?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this was probably the best education a kid could ever have. It was called the Instrumentation and Model Facility, where professors would come in with wacky ideas and the machinists would figure out ways to build it. And so my jobs there were actually taking 20 years of drawings and converting them into computer models and then serving them back to the machinists or transferring them to the professors. And all I was doing was really copying the designs of other people. And on the side, I was building parts for airplanes, for ice boats, for go-karts. After-hours, we called it government work or G-jobs. And I built a whole lot of stuff in that machine shop, which I can say now, because

• 7:46Speaker 01

  my dad's retired and no repercussions for him at the university.

• 7:50Guy Raz?

  So when you got to Harvard and you studied material science and engineering, did you think that you would go into aviation? Was that sort of your goal?

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was no question in my mind at that point that I was going into aviation. In fact, I was building all kinds of airplanes in my dorm room.

• 8:10Guy Raz?

  When you say building airplanes, like model airplanes?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, mostly model airplanes, but I'd go over to the local airport and help people build experimental airplanes. And even before that, in high school, started building real-scale ultralights and airplanes.

• 8:26Guy Raz?

  I read that while you were an undergraduate, you wrote your thesis on designing a hybrid electric airplane. And at the time, this is 2004, some of your mentors there, professors, were like, this is not realistic. You can't really, this won't work. Can you tell me what you were designing?

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a hybrid electric design because I started to realize that electric propulsion had unique advantages over traditional reciprocating engines. And that was actually called beta air. And that was kind of the germ of the whole beta air idea. Of course, it wasn't fully baked. It was just the beginning of it.

• 9:06Guy Raz?

  All right. So you do this thesis, but after you graduate, you actually kind of went in a different direction. You went on to found a few other companies, including a company called iTherm Technologies and another one called Energy Management Systems, both of which you would go on to sell. And then you also started another company called Venture.CE, which was, I guess, like a social network for entrepreneurs. But all the while, in the back of your mind, you were still thinking about something in aviation?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Oh, it was straight in the front of my mind. I was developing notebooks and notebooks of ideas on how to make beta air a reality.

• 9:43Guy Raz?

  And so the idea that you had for beta at the time... What was it? Was it exactly as you laid out in your thesis? Or had it evolved into something different by that point?

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it had evolved to a passenger aircraft, a two-person passenger aircraft with a high wing, a hybrid drivetrain and a pusher propeller.

• 10:02Guy Raz?

  Your vision was to do a two-passenger electric aircraft, like a drone, that could be used, what? For like leisure or for just private aviation? Because presumably it wouldn't go that far.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  That's correct. It was a private plane that you could take to an airport, disconnect parts of a motorcycle from it. There was a whole idea around enabling point-to-point travel.

• 10:26Guy Raz?

  Wow, it would be a motorcycle embedded into an electric plane?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 10:32Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  And look, the-

• 10:33Guy Raz?

  It's like a transformer.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  It is. And it was really, it still is a very elegant design. And someday I'm going to go and bring it to the market.

• 10:40Guy Raz?

  Cool idea. I want that.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 10:43Guy Raz?

  So you would, because it's like when you see like an RV with like a, you know, towing like a small vehicle behind it, basically, or a motorcycle. You basically could fly somewhere, drop the plane off and get on your motorcycle and go to the final destination.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  That's right. And you would actually ride your motorcycle straight out. And that's what made it hybrid, because you'd use the high-power-density motorcycle engine to maintain the charge on batteries that would be the primary propulsion to the airplane.

• 11:10Guy Raz?

  Wow, all right. So this is your idea. And did you have any interest? Anybody who was like, this is it? This is, I'm in?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  I met a few people that were in, but nobody that was able to catalyze it alongside me. And, you know, meanwhile, I was sponsoring teams at the university here to build elements of it. So I had several years of actually senior design teams that had built a flying drone that you flew from the ground doing the same idea, a fixed-wing aircraft you flew from the ground. Ironically, those people now work here. But I was just materializing and formulating the ideas. There were a lot of believers in what I was doing. But, look, it takes a lot of dough to, to bring an aircraft to market.

• 12:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  And, and so it, you know, there's, there's a bit of a, a bit of a initiation cost to bring it from that. We're flying scale models, flying computer simulations, have designs to, look, we're going to go build a real airplane and fly it.

• 12:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, even with your access to the University of Vermont and, and students there, and the fact that you had sold businesses previously, were you, did you have the capital to independently finance this?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  No, not independently. And, and I was aware of that. You know, this is, this is hundreds of millions of dollars, even, you know, optimistically.

• 12:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. So meantime, I guess you're invited to present or to go down to either a conference or some kind of presentation that was hosted by a woman named Martine Rothblatt, who, some people will know that name, a pioneer, a very famous engineer. She's a co-founder of Sirius XM, United Therapeutics, you know, she's given TED Talks, I've seen her, her TED Talks, amazing story of, you know, of, of innovation. She's working on an electric helicopter, I guess, and what, you're invited down to go assess it? Or what, what, what was the story?

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So Martine, through a couple of other colleagues that I knew, had been very interested in having people download to her thoughts on electrifying aviation. And one of the entry points was the assessment of this electric helicopter. Like you said, she had commissioned to be built. And so I was given, you know, a rough outline of what it was and, and asked to come and present how batteries, inverters, and motors are either fit or unfit to electrify aviation. And, and about halfway through my presentation on batteries, this gal who I didn't know at the time, Martine Rothblatt, she, she kind of interrupted me and she said, who are you

• 14:03Speaker 01

  and where are you from? And I said, I'm Kyle, I'm from Vermont. I've worked a lot in batteries, motors, inverters, and other such things. And she goes, are you getting paid to be here? And I said, no. And she goes, I can tell. And I didn't know quite how to respond to that.

• 14:17Guy Raz?

  Maybe she was like, I can tell you're you're an idiot, but.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that's that was my first thought, right? But but what she meant was that I was expressing so much passion and so much care about this, that that this wasn't a job for me.

• 14:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  And she goes, we should talk. And and so after the meeting, you know, we're standing in the entryway of the Philadelphia Yacht Club where this meeting was. And she goes, come to see me on Friday morning at my house in Vermont. And and so I planned to do that.

• 14:49Guy Raz?

  So just just to sort of clarify what she was working on, she was interested in coming up with some kind of electric helicopter because she had started this company, United Therapeutics. And she wanted to figure out a way to transport, I guess, synthetic or donated organs from hospitals to patients, but she wanted to do it in an environmentally responsible way. So she's trying to figure out this challenge, right?

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, she I mean, she said to me, there's no sense in creating an unlimited supply of lungs to save people's lives if we're going to destroy our environment.

• 15:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  So what's interesting about Martine and a lot of folks that I've met, that she actually doesn't have a concept of how to do it. And she but she has an idea of the elements to get it done and what she wants done or what is feasible. So she had written this 10 point spec of what she thought was realistic and aspirational at the same time to move organs. And actually, she didn't care what it looked like, whether it was a helicopter, a drone, a fixed wing plane, a balloon, as long as it met this spec.

• 15:52Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you end up going to Martine's house, and you spent pretty much all day with her, right? Like, like, talking about this electric plane project and aviation more broadly and what than what, like, at the end of your time together? I guess she gave you some, some sort of special assignment?

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I leave there somewhere before 11 o'clock at night. And she goes, listen, why don't you write down how you would elicit critical thinking in aviation? And again, that's another like interesting, not how you'd build an airplane, but how would you elicit critical thinking in aviation? And so I went home, I painted a watercolor, wrote all over it and sent it to her at about 4:00 AM. And, uh, and I went to bed for a couple hours, got up a couple hours later, went out to the garage, was building another motorcycle. And my wife comes out with my phone and there's a text on it from Martine. And it just says two words, it says, you're on.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Like, wow. I, I mean, I know I gotta actually like create this company. I've got a customer, I've got a vision. And, uh, and, and I told her that in 10 months, we would create this electric aircraft and fly it across the country.

• 17:04Guy Raz?

  We're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, Kyle spends months building an aircraft just to scrap it and start all over again. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 17:22Guy Raz?

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• 21:03Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz and my guest today is Beta Technologies' founder Kyle Clark. Back in 2017, he started designing an all-electric aircraft for transporting organs and critical medical supplies. So, all right, so you get this commitment from Martine Rothblatt. And at that point, I guess she wired you one and a half million dollars in seed capital for Beta Technologies.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, interestingly enough, it wasn't actually in seed capital. She proposed to be a customer. So she did not take an equity position in the company. She just said, I believe in what you're doing. Let me fund this as a customer.

• 21:42Guy Raz?

  Wow. So with a $1.5 million, you said, this is nuts, you said, within 10 months, I'm going to have a prototype.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 21:54Guy Raz?

  So how did you do that? How did you start to even do that?

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Look, I mean, you have to be wildly audacious and stupid to do any of this stuff, knowing that the probability of failure is pretty high. However, what I did then is I opened up my black book and I called the 20 smartest people that I've ever worked with and started to convince them to come and work with me. And my pitch was simple. Look, let's go change the world. I'm not going to pay you anything. And I don't know where this is going. And they started joining the team. But I'll tell you what the other interesting thing I did is I had this early revelation that it was more important to me that this business and this idea was successful than I got any financial gain out of it.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  So day one, I took 70% of the business. And usually people take eight, or 10, or seven, or 5% of the business and say, that's going to be the employee pool. I took 70% of the business. And I said, this is what I'm going to use to attract people to be really meaningfully a part of this. And diluted myself, but I would rather be a

• 23:03Speaker 01

  A meaningful business and a smaller equity holder than a big equity holder in a business that can't do something.

• 23:09Guy Raz?

  So your initial idea was to have a two-passenger aircraft. Her idea was totally different. It was not to transport passengers. It was to transport medical supplies, organs, right? So now you're focusing on creating a plane designed, really purpose-built designed for transporting goods.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there was a couple of big points that she made was no more of this hybrid talk. We're going

• 23:36Guy Raz?

  All-electric.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Full all-electric, zero operational emissions. We'll figure out how we charge that in a sustainable way as well. We want it vertical. We need to go hospital to hospital and we need it to move cargo. Like you said, now the most critical cargo you can imagine is human organs, right? Somebody's life's on the line. It's very valuable and it doesn't, you know, it's, it's, it's cost per mile or per hour or whatever is nearly irrelevant relative to the benefits it's providing.

• 24:06Guy Raz?

  All right. So you have got this team gathered. You're going to start to work on building this electric transport aircraft. And was the original design going to be a drone, sort of a fixed-wing drone design?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, we started with a fixed-wing drone design with eight rotors that took off vertically, thrust vectored forward. That means the rotors tilt in the air to push the air backwards after it's pushing it down. And we designed, built and flew a 4,000-pound version of this with me in it after 10 months. And we kept our promise. And when we did that, Martine looked around and she's like, wow, not only did you elicit critical thinking in aviation, you just like blew past companies that were funded to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars with this small, scrappy, you know, proactive and frankly pragmatic team in Vermont. I want you to build me a commercial version of that.

• 25:04Guy Raz?

  All right. So you figured out how to build this. And when you you had this prototype, what did it do? I mean, how far did it fly?

• 25:13Speaker 01

  It flew for about 17 minutes at a time. And and we were really restricted to flying over the airport.

• 25:20Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  So we did about 100 test flights in it, though.

• 25:23Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  And and we brought it up to about 65 knots, you know, shut the shut the torque down, put it on the wing, you know, did it in heavy crosswinds, a lot of maneuverability. It was actually a remarkably good performing aircraft.

• 25:38Guy Raz?

  And did you go in in some of those early flights yourself?

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Oh, I did them all. Yeah.

• 25:43Guy Raz?

  And and how did it fly? I mean, I mean, did it feel like you were flying a helicopter or or a plane or not quite either?

• 25:50Speaker 01

  No, what's fascinating about it is that this particular plane had eight 11-foot diameter rotors.

• 25:56Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  And they were they were positioned four spots coaxially. So they were turning in alternate directions at each corner of the airplane.

• 26:03Guy Raz?

  And by the way, and these rotors would would rotate up and sort of down midair to sort of fly horizontally.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:10Guy Raz?

  But then they would rotate to land. So you could just like land like a helicopter?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Exactly. Exactly. So you take off like a helicopter, but it wasn't that beating sound of a helicopter because every rotor is turning at a different speed. So it almost felt like you were swimming and it was like a whooshing sound. Yet, because electric motors produce instantaneous torque, it was incredibly responsive, almost dangerously responsive. And you've seen a drone.

• 26:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Do aerobatics. It is you're inside that. And and the aircraft handled way better than any helicopter I'd ever flown. And and and all of a sudden, you're like, this sounds it different, it feels weird, and the controllability is spectacular.

• 26:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, it's like an electric car. When you the first time you sit in one, you hit the you hit the gas or you take the accelerator and just takes off like a rocket.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  That's right. I mean, even the cheapest electric car feels like a Porsche.

• 27:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah, it's amazing, actually. So, all right. So you get this off the ground and Martine Rothblatt, who had huge contracts with other, there were other companies working on this technology, essentially took most of, most or maybe all of those contracts and just diverted it to your, your company.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 27:22Guy Raz?

  Almost $50 million.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah, $48 million she had out in contracts elsewhere and she, she brought those back in because they were behind schedule, not keeping promises. And she redirected that at us and said, go build a commercial version that I can move organs with.

• 27:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  So, so we did, but you know, we learned what not to do in that aircraft because in all those test flights, we learned what was not reliable, which was problematic from a noise and EMI perspective and, and focused all our efforts on making the simplest, most elegant aircraft that we could.

• 27:56Guy Raz?

  All right. So you spent most of 2018 trying to commercialize this prototype, but after working on this for about a year, I guess you decided to kind of tear up the plans of this thing that had worked, that you liked, that Martine liked, and you sort of were like, no, we got to start over. What, what happened?

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the, the reality was that all that testing and all that critical thinking revealed that we had an aircraft that probably couldn't be certified and probably wasn't the highest performing aircraft.

• 28:30Guy Raz?

  In terms of, it didn't, in terms of range, in terms of what?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Range and payload, range and payload. And, and some of the big realizations we had were that, that it was too complex to make truly redundant. What we need is a really simple aircraft. So it was hard. I had to go to Martine and say, look, I think the right thing to do for our program is to retire Ava, that's what we called the first aircraft, and start designing this new one. And here's what it's going to look like in concept. And she came to me and she said, I remember this very specifically, she goes, if you're asking me if you kept your promise, Kyle? You did. And that's all she said to me. And I sat there thinking about it. And what she was really saying was that you did the right thing. You elicited critical thinking in electric aviation.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Now go do the thing you said you're gonna do.

• 29:22Guy Raz?

  All right. Tell me a little bit about what some of these specs were in terms of, you know, things that we would, you know, understand, non-technical people, like, for example, how far did you want these to fly? How much, you know, what kind of payload? What could it, you know, how much freight could it carry? What were you trying to get to?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the initial specs that Martina had outlined, and she did this by taking simple physics around four elements of flight, lift over drag ratio, which is how slippery the aircraft is, the empty weight fraction, which is how much is left over for batteries, the battery energy density, and the conversion efficiency. All of those things together said the theoretical maximum of an electric airplane was to fly about 250 nautical miles, within the context of flying at 100 knots and carrying 600 pounds and having less than a 50-foot wingspan. And I could tell you all the reasons for those things, but fundamentally, we wanted to be able to deploy them immediately without regulatory change or helipad changes and do

• 30:28Speaker 01

  meaningful work, which was move organs.

• 30:30Guy Raz?

  So can you describe how you redesigned it?

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. After we did all these analyses, we realized that the simplest and most elegant and lowest drag version of an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft was to kind of make it really simple. It has a big 50-foot wing that's on the top of the fuselage. It's 44 feet long from the tip to the tail. It has two longitudinal, we call them booms, you can imagine just two big, long tubes down the wing. And on the four corners of those two long tubes are 12-foot diameter rotors with motors underneath them.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  And that's what picks the airplane straight up in the air. And then right at the tail, there's a conventional propeller with another electric motor. And the way it works is that those four rotors on the top pick the aircraft up off the ground at the hospital. And then if you imagine that rear rotor turning on and pushing the aircraft forward, those top rotors start reducing their thrust as the wing starts to develop lift. And 30 seconds after you take off, you've totally shut down your top rotors and you and you stow them like javelins straight into the wind. And the pusher motor is pushing you now through the air. So you have this super slippery airplane that used a lot of power. But remember, energy is the integration of power over time.

• 31:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  But it was a very short amount of time. So you didn't use a lot of energy to pick this thing up and make a runway in the sky. And then you're off to deliver the organ. And at the other end, you do just the reverse.

• 32:02Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right. So how long did it take you to get Alia up and running? Another 18 months?

• 32:08Speaker 01

  That's right. That's about it, what it took. It took us from August of 2018. And in our first round the pattern flight was January 1st, 2020. So it took us under 18 months with a fresh, you know, clean sheet design where we had to build the molds and the structure, design a flight controller, write the code, build the propellers and and put it in the air safely. That that is actually an exceptionally fast program.

• 32:38Guy Raz?

  So now, as you were obviously, you know, building this out, you have to assume you had to raise a lot more money and you have because this was going to become much, much more expensive to do that. Did, at what point did, did the business model kind of evolve to? Maybe it didn't evolve. Maybe it was always the idea, but it seems like now the model is to really work with transport and delivery companies down the road like UPS and Federal Express and Amazon.

• 33:12Guy Raz?

  Did that become clear pretty soon after you started to collaborate with Martine? That that's what this could be?

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah. I mean, her and I talked a lot about this, the cost to develop an aircraft program and everything. And what we agreed to was that even though she was funding to, like you said before, this $46 million contract to develop the aircraft, she knew that that wasn't enough to develop an aircraft. So she took a license to be able to use this in organ and tissue delivery, yet we maintained the ability to build this airplane for military, passenger, cargo, logistics, surveillance, all these other applications. And that allowed us to go to the financial markets and say, look, we've got not only a launch customer, but a launch customer that is funding R and D. And she

• 33:59Speaker 01

  only wants, you know, 1.5% of the total market opportunity. All these other massive markets are available to us. And we believe we have the best design. And when we started, you know, our business has gone through a few phases. We were a think tank. We were a product development company. We're an engineering company. Then we went into this commercial exploration over the last, you know, I'd say 2022, where we started doing demonstration flights for UPS and Amazon and the Marines and the Army and the Air Force. And the thing really worked. And we were able to prove to our customers that we had something that worked really well. And in doing so, we got orders. And of course, that

• 34:44Speaker 01

  led to funding.

• 34:46Guy Raz?

  We're going to take another quick break. But when we come back, more from Kyle on commercializing Beta's electric aircraft and how the company is changing logistics as we know it. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 35:19Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guest today is Kyle Clark, co-founder and CEO of Beta Technologies. It's a company that's building and commercializing all-electric aircraft. So, all right, let's talk about how this impacts logistics and delivery, right? Like, I think, I think the two main logistics hubs in the US are Louisville and Memphis. Those are really important hubs, but, you know, a DC-9 or whatever is being flown is still going to land at LAX or SFO or whatever. These ALIA planes, electric planes, what will their role be?

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So, right now, you're right. It's a radial network where if I ship something from Vermont to Buffalo, New York, it'll go from Burlington to Manchester, New Hampshire, to Philadelphia, down to Louisville at the hub, gets sorted along with another five to eight million packages, and then it'll get sent out to Buffalo, which, by the way, is only 130 miles from where I sit today.

• 36:18Guy Raz?

  So even if you do like next-day air, it's going to go on three or four different planes before it goes back to-

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Because, look, they gotta, they gotta bring everything to the hub and then redistribute it. Now, if they're very short-range, they drive it, like if it's going from Hartford to Boston, or New York to Hoboken. So, so that, that's a 1,300-mile trip from Burlington to Buffalo if you go that route, where if you go direct, it's 130 miles, right? So, the, the hub-and-spoke network of yesterday will be replaced by a mesh network of the future, where we have already saturated, as you pointed out, Memphis and Louisville. You can't put any more jets in there every night. The jets can be bigger, but the biggest jets, the 757s and the MB-11s, they're already going in and out of there.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  And and so these logistics companies, the the express cargo companies, they need a way to grow and and accommodate the growing e-commerce shipping market. So so they imagine, and and this is what we've been demonstrating, by the way, we just completed a bunch of flights with these guys. They they imagine doing a direct point to point, like I said, a mesh network of the future. What fundamentally enables it is the airplane because not only is it sustainable and all electric, but it's substantially lower cost. And when you put those things together, you can start to right size the aircraft and sweat the asset and use it continuously from point to point, from Burlington to Buffalo, Buffalo to New York City, New York to Portland, Boston to Hartford.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  And and it starts to kind of hit parity with trucking and the whole logistics world changes.

• 37:58Guy Raz?

  And these aircraft essentially can land in these sort of purpose-built helipad-type areas, maybe at airports, where they would just be charged as they as they sit there. And then so so let's say you want to send something from Burlington to Buffalo. What you're essentially saying is that you would you would maybe drop it off at a UPS store. That UPS, you know, a van would deliver them all to Burlington Airport as they do now. But instead, the the, you know, the packets, packages going to the Northeast would be flown to Boston on one of these electric planes instead of going down to Louisville.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, but even better than that. So so in the near future, the next few years, they'll go to the airport only because of regulatory challenges of putting off airport landing sites. But in the next four to six years, what will happen is these aircraft will actually go to the distribution center, which is where the UPS trucks is. They don't even have to go to the airport. And it'll go directly from a distribution center. And when there's sufficient package volume between Burlington and Buffalo, they'll fly the airplane directly to Buffalo. And so it omits all the handoffs and the trucks and the airport access. And that's, we're going to get there. It's going to take a couple of steps. Like you said, it's going to go to the airports first.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  But, but, but that's, that's the future of what we call a distributed mesh network of cargo and logistics.

• 39:24Guy Raz?

  So are you commercializing any of this right now? I mean, you're, are you restricted from commercializing it because you still need FAA approval for, you know, for flying these aircraft, you know, in a commercial setting?

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's not a yes or no answer. So we are commercializing with the military. So we received what they call a military flight release to get paid to fly for the military. So we're doing that. We've been doing that for more than a year. We've had Air Force and Army pilots flying our planes. We're deploying planes into bases and we've flown into bases and, and they're doing operational experimentation. And then domestically, we've been flying trial missions with Amazon and UPS and other customers where we're not allowed to get paid. So we move packages for charity, for example, because we don't have FAA certification yet. When we get FAA certification, they can use it for commercial hire.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  But the, the secret little knob there is that we just got regulatory approval to do this over in the Middle East for hire, for commercial, making money.

• 40:30Guy Raz?

  And what countries?

• 40:31Speaker 01

  The, the first regulatory letter we have is from the UAE between Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

• 40:36Guy Raz?

  And they're oftentimes like two or three years ahead of the rest of the world and what they're sort of willing to, to experiment with.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you know, it's neat, it's, it's fascinating thing where here in the US, when you go and you, and you propose a new thing in a regulated environment, the first question is, is how does that relate to our entire, you know, mental inertia and prejudice of what regulation means in the context of what's already been certified? Over there, they ask the simple question like, prove to me it's safe. It's reliable for the mission that you're going to do. And you're not trying to redefine what a turbine engine is. They're looking very forward. Here, we kind of compare it to all the stuff we've already done first before we can move forward. So they just fundamentally move faster in a regulated world.

• 41:24Guy Raz?

  And right now, are there any operational charging stations or not yet?

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. We've built a network for all these test flights that goes from here in Vermont down to Arkansas. We've commissioned a bunch down the East Coast and right now we're building a network that connects Texas to Florida. And so we have about 105 permits around the country for charging stations.

• 41:46Guy Raz?

  And are they at airports or near airports?

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're predominantly at airports. And you know, the neat thing is, we put a charger in and then we put a dispenser, like the part that plugs into the vehicle, on the airport side and on the parking side. And we have been flooded with people who go to the airport to use a super fast charger, because it's, you know, it's higher power than a Tesla supercharger, to charge their cars or their trucks or their package delivery vans.

• 42:12Guy Raz?

  Wow. So realistically, what is the timeframe? I mean, you know, this future we're talking about, having these short hops, 250 mile hops where packages are delivered, maybe even humans are delivered on these all-electric planes. I mean, they fly. I think you've had 22,000 lifetime miles on these aircrafts. So they work. You know they work. You've flown them all over the United States. Realistically, do you have a sense, like, are you able to say, you know, by 2025, this is just going to be normal. It's going to be like, you know, like the internet, as anticipated 20 years ago?

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, I'm at the risk of sounding too optimistic. By 2030, you'll see more electric airplanes in the air than gas-powered airplanes. And when you walk into our production facilities, people walk in and they're like, what are you doing? Like, how could you, you're proposing to build more airplanes out of this facility than the largest producer of general aviation aircraft right now? And I'm like, of course we are. And if you walked into our facility, you'll see it'll be the largest net zero building east of the Mississippi. And we're turning it on here in a couple of months. And we're already building conforming product. And those aircraft will go into type certification testing. And yes, by 2025, they're doing

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Commercial operations here in the US and and then we just basically build them as fast as we can. I mean, we have a 600 unit backlog right now, right? We we have to, we we have to, our our biggest impediment right now is ourselves. And and we're working our tails off to industrialize this, put these aircraft in the air. And like, there's a line around the block to get them, like I said, it is, it is amazing. And and it's not complicated why, you know, you're at a six to half the cost of flying gas powered airplanes and you're doing it sustainably. The the aircraft doesn't need much more than that.

• 44:10Guy Raz?

  And and and I guess you don't really have to worry. I mean, are you, are you thinking about, you know, cross country, you know, a range that could, you know, 3,000 miles or is that just?

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, look, here, two, two comments on that. It is just a matter of time. Anybody who's going to pretend that the everything that can be invented has been invented, then they shouldn't be in in in technology, right? We aren't that smart yet. We're getting smarter every day. Therefore, battery energy NC is going to go up. But here's the interesting thing. It's an entire new paradigm in aviation because when you buy an airplane, its worst performance will be on its first day. And every year, when you put new batteries into that, you you get better performance. And then and then if you say, I'm not going to put batteries in this year, I'm going to put a hydrogen fuel cell or I'm going to put a hybrid system in. Yeah, we're flying thousands of miles already with that technology.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  And and now you put it into something that has this ever increasing adoption of of of energy storage mediums. It it's a fascinating new paradigm in aviation. So we absolutely will be flying coast to coast. I mean, I know I'm an evangelist. I'm I've recognized that I'm about to jump through the microphone right now because I'm so excited about it. But it's, it is, it's it's an entire new paradigm that people are, in some cases, in denial of because their businesses don't allow them to accept it yet. And you know, the other thing that I think people are under appreciating is when I take people up in the electric planes and they get in it and the propeller, remember, is is 20 something feet behind you. And the windows go from your forehead all the way down to your feet and it's silent inside the cockpit.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  So you lose the claustrophobia, you lose that anxiety from all the noise and the percussion of the of the propeller. And it's beautifully quiet and the visibility and that you can hear the air coming over the wings and over the fuselage and you feel like a bird. I know that sounds corny, but you can hear the wing stay like near a stall and then you bring it down, you go faster and it starts accelerating. It's like you don't even need an airspeed indicator because you just feel the plane strapped to your shoulders, which you never get. You get it in a glider sometimes, but but in an electric airplane, it's magical. And and and never mind how good it feels to me, for passengers that are flying these in the future, they're not going to be like, oh, God, I gotta go in that beating drum of a claustrophobic plane. They're like, this is awesome. Yeah.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  How much of an impact can this have on reducing carbon emissions? Look, if so, so cars are going electric, scooters, motorcycles, Marines going electric, rail went hybrid a long time ago and it's incredibly sustainable. Aviation has this bow wave of unconsumed technology and we prioritize weight and performance over sustainability. And so unfortunately, we operate in this cognitive dissidence as aviators that we're doing something good as we fly around the country. But what we're doing is we're using 1960s technology and turbines and jet engines and we're polluting the environment and even with leaded fuel in piston engines, right? So so with that as a foundation and the fact that new technology isn't being adopted

• 47:21Speaker 01

  by 2035, if we don't do anything about aviation, it will be the biggest producer of carbon emissions in transportation. We're doing something about it, right? Not only that, as we as we get to higher and higher inefficiencies and battery energy densities goes get better and better, we start to capture more and more of aviation. Not only do we curtail that awful trajectory it's on now, we start to bring it down to one of the most sustainable modes of transportation because it doesn't require all this infrastructure and other things. And the last little bit there is you have to charge it in a sustainable way. So, you know, part of the reason that we own the charging network is so that we can control where that energy comes from and that we're charging it in a clean way.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  I mean, I mentioned briefly that we built a net zero manufacturing facility. Our job as millennials is to turn the corner on climate change. And we're not going to do it with our head in the sand. And so how big of a difference can it make, you ask? It is the biggest difference that we can make as a company and I can make as a person. So a big difference.

• 48:22Guy Raz?

  Kyle Clark, thanks so much.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 48:25Guy Raz?

  That's Kyle Clark, CEO and founder of Beta Technologies. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. This episode was produced by Sam Paulson with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei and Sam Paulson. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Casey Herman. Our audio engineer was James Willetts. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Alex Chung, Kerry Thompson, Elaine Coats, Neva Grant, Chris Messini, Carla Estevez, and Ramel Wood. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.