The CEO is an impressive component of the development...great leadership & technology!

So impressive!!! This is an incredible achievement - FIRST EVER FAA SANCTIONED BASE-to-BASE FLIGHT BY AN EVTOL AIRCRAFT!!!!!! And 1 month till full VTOL... looking forward to your first hand report Eric!

I'm impressed with the ethos of this company and its logical approach to the task. Nice video.

I will forever be searching for moments when I can use the phrase "painting the corners of the envelope".

I really like this video. In a space where you normaly get snippets of 6 to ten minutes, this docomentery positively stands out. Well done!

On top of that, their team is from my observation a great bunch of people enthusiastic about the work. Kyle is a great guy as well. When I was working at the airport, he offered to take me up any day they were flying and had a seat. Unfortunately, I never got the chance as I left shortly after. But I've seen a particularly excellent example of his piloting skill and would happily fly with him

The real point the CEO is making is that this EVTOL never stalls when taking off (he says it's really STOL onto a pad). The Joby S4 is vulnerable to a rotor failure between 1m and 10m off the ground when the Joby would be stalled and would drop like a brick. However this Beta Technologies plane moves straight to horizontal flight from takeoff. And is thus very very much safer than the Joby. It's a totally different approach and imo a winning one with the regulators. The CEO is a pilot and knows that the issue with takeoff is the difference between V1 and V2 and he's made them overlap. Very very smart.

What an interesting person Kyle Clark is . Seems very intelligent,calm and approachable which makes for a great combination to do what he is achieving. May the best come to him and his team .

The entire approach of this company Is impressive, not just from a technological but also from a business/leadership prospective. Bringing the two together in 1 single Super CEO doing all aspects IS impressive

Very impressive. The CEO is brutally honest in terms of what they are doing (control and battery management) and what they are not doing (avionics). Seems a good bet to me. He's right about the issue is air taxi certification vs industrial park landings. Design looks good to me too. Can glide easily if power loss. Winner.

I've been flying this in X-Plane 12, and even though I'm not a professional pilot, I find it very predictable and fun to fly. She's very well behaved in all regimes, at least in the simulator. Looking forward to seeing how the real bird pans out :)

I came to this age researching everything about flying planes. I am so passionate about them, that I am ready to spend hours on youtube watching interesting videos like this in your post. All this passion was added even more when my parents did not allow me to become a pilot, as at that time, two pilots from my hometown died accidentally within a very short time while flying military planes.

This is the most sensible approach to electric and VTOL (or ExtremelySTOL) that I have seen. Great engineering. Looks most promising. 😎👍

I absolutely loved flying it in xplane 12.. can't wait to fly a real one.

It is a shame that Ed Sweringen, N. O. Brantly, and Frank Erickson can't see this. Ed came the closest, designing and building cutting-edge planes right up to the end a few years ago. Frank and Brantly would have drooled over the airframe and lack of moving parts. It would be an interesting conversation. Good Luck!

Look, Ma! No gas!

Nice work Eric! That was very watchable and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Really nice video, best wishes for success. A lot of the features you describe can be commonly found on RC model quadcopters, but perhaps overlooked. But, still important as you scale up in size. Interesting that you modeled the overall design on the tern, giving a nod to the efficiency of nature and evolution over strict aerodynamic design theory. Am also impressed that your pusher propeller size is not that large in proportion to the overall size of the craft (maybe because it's empty during testing?) and that your overall wing aspect ratio looks relatively high compared to conventional craft but not extreme. Really cool.

Nice looking design! I was impressed with it's fixed wing design element as well. I think this could also be a success as a electric but non vertical takeoff plane as well. It looks great. There are so many potential compromises that have to be addressed. Weight is a hard one to control. I build a couple of composite home-built airplanes and they both ended up heavier than was ideal. There was obviously allot of thought that went into this design.

I watched this fly over today, with a helicopter accompanying it. (In Plattsburgh) Really cool.

Great video and interview, great work Kyle!

Looks very promising. Very well explained too.

What a fantastic video . Thank you .

Very impressive! Great video as well! Awesome job!

I would suggest touching base with Harbour Air in Vancouver. Whilst they are primarily float plane based. The vtol on pad could possibly fit with some of their operations as an adder. Could possibly be a floating deck/barge.

Really fabulous looking aircraft. I will be watching with great interest.

Really fantastic interview!

Fascinating design, great report! I am a pilot, currently teaching type ratings and recurrents on full flight sims. It would be an absolute dream come true to fly an electric VTOL. Can’t say how much I look forward to seeing these aircraft in commercial use. I wish people would understand better the differences between a drone like (very cruise inefficient) aircraft and designs like these who truly aim to make a practical aircraft in that they are efficient in cruisend have descent range. Best of luck to you. I am hawkeyeing this space.

Great doc with good tech insight from the CEO.

Observing nature for inspiration is an awesome starting point. It all seem s very well thought out. When there are more charging stations, it will be a positive selling point. It looks good. I do have one little niggle from a personal perspective, moving in and out of hangers wont be easy unless the skis are replaced with wheels. Using a set of wheels to move a plane with skis is a lot of extra work.

This could be in the top 5, time will tell.

Very interesting. Nice report.

Amazing aircraft I LOVE it. Subscribed.

This is awsum it looks amazing plus its electric and quiet aswell so ppl close to runways airports won't be disturbed

I guess I have to follow this program now. How impressive the approach. I appreciate the explanation of why this is better than transitional vectoring. I may have to send in an application and take advantage of that free flight training! :P Great vid, thanks.

Great work, the first no BS report I have seen in a very long time! Brilliant ... not subscribing to your channel would be missing out on essential information ... hope the rest is also with focus on aviation and high tech and a serious 1 on 1 with progressive people who know exactly what they are doing.

3:46 This picture is so beautiful! I want this picture to set my windows pc wallpaper!

Excellent piece on an impressive aircraft and company.

This is incredible!

Great presentation and interview. It seems like the right approach for the mission. Now, questions about airspace regulation and the market???

What a neat aircraft? I love it.

The battery placement kind of act like a keel which along with Kyles explanations makes sense .

such a pleasure listening to an intelligent person talking in joined up writing

Glad I found this wonderful channel. I'm obsessed with minimal electric recreational aircraft and fear battery technology is still so weak I might never see a two hour endurance paratrike or hang glider nano trike. I wish a company like Beta would take over this challenge so that I can sleep at night.

Great Report and Insight! Great Company

Scale effects and the complexity of this design will be daunting as will the survivability of system failures. There is an extremely high bar betwixt cup and lip when it comes to FAA certification. Further down the road, the challenge of certification for known icing, etc will be major. From a business perspective, Beta's plans won't be nearly as simple as when the major parcel carriers and various bush region operators embraced the relative simplicity of the Cessna 208 and similar aircraft. Green goals are admirable but overly broad. EVs will surely help, but a reduction of the traditional hyperactive personal and business travel will have a more immediate impact.

Impressive video. Covered a lot of ground (no pun intended) in a short amount of time. Was a little surprised not to see the first flight from base-to-base w/o rotor props. But I'm sure there's a good reason. Interesting about the dihedral in the wings and the tail-feather shape. Great watching the amazing progress of your team, Kyle.

Wow awesome thanks for sharing

Such an aesthetic wing design. Pretty. Have u seen BlackFly? Their aircraft is interesting too.

Superb!

One little thing I noticed , the colour of the aircraft blends in too well with the environment? But what a dream liner !

That concept I can see. Much better than the quadcopter inspired concepts that have been presented before.

Sweet !

This design creates some very interesting failure mode scenarios. With 4 rotors, I would imagine that the failure mode of one rotor causes Pitch, Roll and Yaw moments if the three remaining rotors’ torque is increased equally, or only a (stronger than previous case) yaw moment if the cross opposing rotor is slowed to minimise pitch and roll moments. Both cases would still result in negative or neutral stability in pitch and roll that can only be controlled by aerodynamic means. The V shaped horizontal tail planes would lend themselves very well to compensating moments in all three axes since the deflection of one of it’s surfaces produces both a yaw, rolland pitch moment in the correct compensating direction if you loose one of the front rotors. Loosing one of the rear rotors would be more complex solution, requiring use of the ailerons. Either way, the really interesting thing here, is that there would be a minimum control speed at which loss of one of the rotor systems could still be controlled, ... but! That speed might be much lower than the 1G aerodynamic lift stall speed, allowing safe approach conditions well below that speed. It would be interesting to design operating procedures that minimise the time between minimum aerodynamic control speed and safe hover height. What I mean by that is that there would be a safe hover height where the power can be removed or reduced such as to produce a safe impact speed. Taken the fact that skids can make quite high impacts survivable, that time might be quite minimal. When I was a helicopter pilot on the North see, we were faced with similar scenarios, whereby we tried to minimise the time between hover an minimum one engine out flyaway speed. Anyway, I’d love to see this aircraft succeed. Keeping a close eye on it!

Great aircraft love it👍🇬🇧

I like everything excellence achievement congratulations.

I wish you the absolute best!

love the video! so at the end that landing was not under powered vtol rotors. they were not installed yet as im understanding?

Wo it's amazing EV plane.

Congratulations Cameron

Looks promising

Very impressive. I like this guy I like this company and its concept. Of all the upstarts in this business I have watched over the years if I had the money to invest this would be it. Keep up the good work .

Eric, I learnt about this design yesterday and had a lot of questions about the dead weight that will be carried by the aircraft in different flight regime's. The first prototype of the aircraft has no vertical lift capacity. That said, if you can cover the aircraft when the vertical lift rotors have been fitted and it has made its first transition. It would be amazing. As that would be the real test of the quality of the company and the design.

Nice video and great explanation by the CEO. I wish them success on this one. Strange that youtube will register a thumbs down but not a thumbs up for me on this video. Because Google has their own competing EVTOL designs?

stoked

I don’t know what place is that but looks very beautiful. Vermont?

Interesting concept and development. When I ran an engine company 30 years ago, I also offered flight training to all employees. Regardless of ability, though, having the CEO as chief test pilot is risky for investors, viz. Monarch, Commuter Craft, and several others.

Great application of proven technologies and common sense....sound foundation for robust, effective reliable flight!

Nice interesting video about tomorrow’s aviation. Good luck Kyle Clark and team with Alia. Ps. At this latter stage of the project I would definitely find a new test pilot, you know what I’m saying 😬

Test pilot is the ceo, that sounds super risky to the business

Question on the location of the batteries. With a latch system and a focus on faster recharging, along with the construction of dedicated charging locations, would it make sense to be able to swap batteries out once you've landed for freshly charged batteries? Surely it would only take a few minuets with a specialized jack cart similar to a helicopter tug that would go under the airframe, lower the old batteries out, and then swap them out for freshly charged ones? I know one of the biggest concerns I've had when running numbers on jumper routes with an aircraft like a Caravan versus an Electric aircraft would be the amount of potential flights that could be done, and charging time seemed to be one of the biggest obstacles to long term profitability with electric aircraft. What's the point of having the cheap operating costs of electric aircraft if it can only fly 2-3 routes/day? You'd either need more electric aircraft on a single route to allow time for charging, or have liquid fuel aircraft which can be turned around in 10 minuets. Maybe the type of missions this aircraft is planning to do doesn't rely on multiple swift turnaround times in a day, but I just wanted to ask to see what the answer might be?

A "drop drone" attached to deliver widgets would be cool.

Sounds like a really solid guy

This concept is so much similar to the Boeing air taxi and Ubers VTOL design, including ubers initial test models. Only the perception of this design looks better and smooth.

So... are the blades going to be retracted inside the booms to even out with their surface or simply left in the longitudinal position?

Gotta love those Cessna’s and their low center of gravity… 🛫

Great! What kind of pilot licence they are expecting ?

So based on the fixed wing flights, it looks like they have the electric flight for fixed wing down. I'm curious what the current flight time and range is and what milestones for payload will be.

The extreme sweep and dihedral of the tail is likely to cause problems with high yaw and pitch situations (eg spin recovery/non linear behaviour) -several V tail gliders that had sweep had 'issues' (first standard Austria etc first BD5 et al ) . The small cruise propeller would seem to guarantee high noise levels especially with wake interference added --a show stopper for urban use . The SIZE of this aircraft -like the Joby,Archer,Wisk mk2 etc is excessive for such a low capacity seating --this reflects the problem that this is really a ten seat or more aircraft but the weight of the missing passengers is under the floor in the form of batteries .

I would like to add the use of the rotors during forward motion could add to the horizontal lift if turned perpendicular to the foreword motion as additional wing surface lift.

WOW

Cool

I want to see this hovering so bad!!

Will there be an antonymous version of the aircraft?

Instead of 50 minutes to charge the batteries, this seems like a good application for NIO’s battery swap technology. Fully charged batteries could be swapped into place in 5 minutes.

@20:56, also battery swap make it easy 🥸.

That is a great design best of luck to you just saying

I think all the EVTOL air taxis are all hot garbage that we will never see operate in our lifetimes (just like the flying cars people have been working on since the 1970s), but I like this design and can see the cargo applications. Very interesting.

they need to add and emergency parachute system to make it even more safer.

Why not after take off free the rotor blades on the wing for vertical take off, but allow them to be driven by the wind as the plane goes forward, so it can generate electricity to allow further range that is if the increase in drag does not exceed the amount of electricity that can be generated. Also, perhaps for take off you may be able to use hard-wire electricity for vertical take off to save battery powers, which can also help to extend the range

Just don't know how comfortable I'd be getting into a VTOL where failure of a single rotor or motor = instant flipping followed by death. Perhaps I'm being irrational, I'm sure modern electric motors and rotors are very reliable.

12:05 dedicated lift motors are dead weight, and in this case structure and props create additional drag.

Does it have a parachute?

this model will make it through.

Does Elon know about this ? I think it could save him reinventing the Wheel …. This Design is Awesome I like its potential … may every success follow you !

The rear propeller is tiny. I was surprised it could fly using such a small propeller.

Why not a removable battery compartment option? That way you could land, taxi, drop the battery pack from the bottom, slid in another one and then your ready. We use electric drills, concept is the same.. If a charged battery is avail then great, if not then a 50min recharge is available.

How to effectively combine effective liftoff and effective cruise

Please consider organizations like EAA members to assist your development of propulsion and control. I known many very qualified people that would trade their expertise and testing for the use of your motor and control equipment.

Na prancheta tudo funciona .