Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies

Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So it seems pretty clear that within, say, fifty 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 plants 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, Ky 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 hockey player.

But he's always been mainly interested in building planes. In fact, the name of his company could be traced back to his early reputation as a tinkerer. My passion was designing things, building things, and you know, even the name of our company, beta. Um, which which is named because of my nickname in hockey because beta was the nerd in the in the Matrix movie in the back, always hammering away on his computer and uh and on the hockey team everyone had a a nickname and my nickname was Beta. 'Cause I was a nerd and I was always studying and just doing applied math and engineering. Um

And so uh so on the hockey team I was a little bit of an outsider, respected, but an outsider. uh focused on designing things and building things. Um I read that your dad ran uh a machine shop. That that's made items for researchers at the at the University of Vermont. And you c w as a teenager and as a kid, we used to go to that machine shop and like

take parts and just tinker around and make stuff. So What were the kinds of things you were making? Yeah, I mean this was probably the best education a kid could ever have. Um it was called the instrumentation and model facility where professors would come in and with wacky ideas and the machinists We'd figure out ways to build it. And so my jobs there were actually taking

you know, twenty years of drawings and converting them into computer models and uh and then serving them back to the machinists or serving 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. um, you know, after hours, we call the government work or G jobs. And uh and and I built a whole lot of stuff in that machine shop, which I can say now'cause my dad's retired and you know, no repercussions for him at the university. Mm.

So when you got to And you studied material science and engineering. W w w did you think that you would go into aviation was that Sort of your goal.

Yeah, there's no 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 and Model airplanes? Yeah, mostly model airplanes. Um, but you know, I 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 and airplanes.

Um I I read that while you were An undergraduate, you wrote your thesis on designing a hybrid electric Airplane. And at the time this was two thousand four. Some of your mentors there, professors, were like this is not realistic. You can't really this this won't work. Can you can you tell me what your

Designing? Yeah, it was a hybrid electric design because I started to realize that electric propulsion had unique advantages over traditional reciprocating engines. And uh and that was actually called beta air. Um

And that was kind of the the the germ of the whole beta air idea. Of course it wasn't fully baked, it was just the beginning of it. All right, so you do this thesis, but but after you graduate you you actually kind of went in a different a few other companies, um, including a company called iTherm Technologies and and another one called Energy Management Systems. Uh b both of which you would go on to sell.

Um and then you also started another company called Venture.co, which is a I guess like a social network for entrepreneurs. Um but all the while in the back of your mind you were you were still thinking about something in aviation? Oh, it was straight in the front of my mind. I I was developing notebooks and notebooks of Ideas on how to make beta era reality. And and so the idea that you had for beta at the time

What What was it? Was it e exactly as you laid out in your thesis, or had it evolved into something different by that point? Yeah. It had evolved to a passenger aircraft, a two person passenger aircraft with a high wing, a hybrid drivetrain and a pusher. Propeller. Your vision was to do a two passenger

Electric. aircraft like a drone that could be used uh what, for like leisure or for just private aviation,'cause presumably it would you know, it wouldn't go that far. Th that's correct. It would it was a private plane that you could um you could take to an airport, disconnect parts of a motorcycle from it. There's a whole idea around um enabling point to point travel. Wow.

It would be a motorcycle embedded into an electric plane. That's right. Yeah, and look. It it is, and it it was really it still is a very elegant design, and some day I'm gonna go and Bring it to the market. Cool idea. I want that. Me too. So you would yeah,'cause it's like when you see like a an R V 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. 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

Um the charge on batteries that would be the primary propulsion to the airplane. Wow. All right. So This is your idea. And and did you have any interest anybody who were like who was like this is it. This is this is I'm in. I I met a few people that were

in but nobody that that was able to Um to to catalyze it alongside me. And you know, meanwhile I was sponsoring teams at the university here. to um to build elements of it. So I had uh 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 he flew from the ground. Ironically, those people now work here. Um, but I was just materializing and formulating the ideas.

There were a lot of believers. in what I was doing. Um, but look, it takes a lot of dough to to bring an aircraft to market. And uh and so it it you know, there's a there's a bit of a um A bit of a uh initiation cost. to bring it from that where flying scale models, flying computer simulations have designs to look, we're gonna go build a real airplane and fly it.

I mean, even with your access to the University of Vermont and and students there, And the fact that you had sold businesses previously, d were you did you have the capital to independently finance this? No, not independently. Um and I and I was aware that it you know, this is this is hundreds of millions of dollars, even, you know, optimistically.

Yeah. Alright, so Meantime, I guess you're invited to present or to go down to

um a either a conference or some kind of presentation that was hosted by A woman named Martine Rothblatt, who uh some people will know that name uh Pioneer uh very famous. um engineer. She's a co founder of Sirius XM United Theraputics um

Yeah, just given Ted talks of seeing her. her TED Talks, um 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 was the story? Yeah, exactly. Um, so Martine, um, through a couple of other colleagues that I knew had I 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 uh and asked to come and present how batteries, inverters, and motors are either fit or unfit to electrify aviation. And uh And about halfway through my presentation on batteries. Um this gal who I didn't know at the time, Martin Rothblatt.

She she kinda interrupted me and she said, Who are you and where are you from? And I said, I'm Kyle, I'm from Vermont. Um 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. She was like, I can tell you you're an idiot. 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. Yeah.

And she goes, We we should talk. And uh And so after the meeting, um, you know, we're standing in the entryway of the Philadelphia Lacht Club where this meeting was. And she goes, um, come to see me on Friday morning. At my house in Vermont.

And uh and so I plan to do that. So just just to sort of clarify what she was working on, she was interested in coming up with some kind of Electric helicopter'cause she had started this company United Therapeutics. And she wanted to Figure out a way to transport I guess. synthetic or or

donated organs from hospitals to patients, but she wanted to to do it in an environmentally responsible way. So she's trying to figure out this challenge, right? Yeah, she I mean she said to me there's no sense in creating a unlimited supply of lungs to save people's lives if we're gonna destroy our environment. Yeah. So what's interesting um about Martine and 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. Ten.

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 a fixed wing plane, a balloon, as long as it met this spec. Okay, so you end up Uh going to Martine's house. And you spend pretty much all day with her, right? Like like talking about this electric plane project and and aviation more broadly and what th then what, like at the end of your time together?

I guess she gave you some some sort of special assignment? Yeah, so I leave there somewhere before Eleven 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 an airplane, but how would you elicit critical thinking in aviation? Um

And so I went home, I painted a watercolor, wrote all over it. And sent it to her at about four A. 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. And I'm like Wow. I I mean I now I gotta actually like create this company. Um I've got a customer, I've got a vision. And uh

En and I told her that in ten months We would create This electric aircraft and fly it across the country. 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 Roz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Ross, and my guest today is Beta Technologies Found, Ky 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 Martin Rothblatt. And and at that point, uh, I guess she wired you one and a half million dollars in seed capital for beta technologies. Yeah, she it and in interestingly enough, it wasn't actually in Seed Capital. She Propose to be a customer.

Um, so she did not take an equity position in the company. She just said, Um, I believe in what you're doing, let me fund this as a customer. Wow. So with a one point five million dollars. You said this is nuts. You said within ten months I'm gonna have a prototype. That's right.

So How did you do that? How did you start to even do that? Look, I I mean you have to be like wildly audacious and and stupid to do any of this stuff, knowing that the probability of failure is pretty high. Um however What I did then is I opened up my black book and I called the twenty 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 gonna 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 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. Yeah. So day one I took seventy percent of the business and usually people take eight or ten or seven or

five percent of the business and say, that's gonna be the employee pool. I took 70% of the business and I said, this is what I'm gonna use to attract people to be really meaningfully a part of this. Hm. And and you know, diluted myself, but I would rather be a uh a meaningful business in a smaller equity holder than a big equity holder in a business that can't do something.

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 Um Medical supplies, organs. Right. So now you're focusing on

Creating a plane designs. Really purpose built design. for transporting goods. Yeah. I mean there was a couple of big points that she made was No more of this hybrid talk. We're going all electric. Full all electric, zero operational emissions. We'll figure out how we charge that in a in a sustainable way as well.

We want it vertical. We need to go hospital to hospital. And uh and we needed to move. cargo, like you said. Now the most critical cargo you can imagine. human organs, right? Somebody's life's on the line. It's very valuable. And uh 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. Alright, so you have got this team gathered, you're gonna w start to work on building this Electric transport. aircraft and was the original design gonna be a drone, uh sort of a fixed wing drone design.

Yeah, we started with a fixed wing drone design with eight rotors that 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 four thousand pound version of this with me in it. After ten months. And we kept our promise. And when we did that. Um, 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 tones of hundreds of millions of dollars. With the small scrappy you know, uh proactive and and and frankly pragmatic team in Vermont. Um I want you to build me a commercial version of that.

All right, so you figured out how to build this and when you You h you have this prototype. W what did it do? I mean, how far did it fly? Um it it flew for about 17 minutes at a time. Um and and we were really restricted to flying over the airport. Right. We did about a hundred test flights in it, though. Wow. And and we brought it up to about sixty five knots. Um, you know, shut the shut the torque down, put it on the wing. uh, you know, did it in heavy crosswinds, a lot of maneuverability. It was actually a remarkably good performing aircraft.

And did you go in in some of those Early flights yourself? Oh I did'em all. Yeah. 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. No, w what's fascinating about it is that this particular plane had eight 11 foot diameter rotors. Okay. And they were they were positioned in four spots coaxially. So they were turning in alternate directions at each corner of the airplane.

And and these by the way, and these rotors. Would would rotate up and sort of down midair to sort of fly horizontally. But then they would rotate to land. So you could just like land like a helicopter. 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 wooshing sound. Yeah. Because electric motors produce instantaneous torque.

It was incredibly responsive, almost dangerously responsive. And you've seen a drone do aerobotics. It is you're inside that. And uh and and the 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. Yeah, I mean it's like an electric car. When you uh the first time you sit in one, you hit the you hit the gas, or you hit the accelerator just takes off like a rocket. That's right. I mean even the cheapest electric car feels like a Porsche. It's amazing, actually. So All right, so you get this off the ground and

Martine Rothblad, who had m huge contracts with other there other companies working on this technology Essentially took most of most or maybe all of the those contracts and just diverted it to your your company.

That's exactly almost fifty million dollars. That's right. Yeah, forty eight million dollars 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. Yeah. So So we did, but you know, we learned what not to do in that aircraft, because in all those test flights, we really learned what was not reliable, which was problematic from a noise and EMI perspective.

And uh and focused all our efforts on making the simplest most elegant aircraft that we could. Alright, so you spend most of twenty eighteen trying to commercialize this. Prototype. But um after working on this for about a year

Um I guess You decided to kind of tear up the plans of this thing that had worked that you liked, that Martine liked. Uh and you sort of were like, No, we gotta start over. What what what happened? Yeah, I mean the 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. In terms of it didn't it it in terms of range in terms of what? Yeah, range and payload. Uh range and payload and And and some of the big realizations we had were that

um 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 call the first aircraft. And start designing this new one, and here's what it's gonna 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 um 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. Now go do the thing you said you're gonna do. Alright, tell me a little bit about what some of these specs were in terms of you know things that that uh that we would, you know, understand n non technical people. Like for example,

How far did you want these to fly? How much Uh you know, what kind of payload? What what could it you know, how much freight could it carry? What were you Trying to get to the Yeah, so the initial specs that Martine had outlined, and she did this by sing 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 two hundred and fifty nautical miles. Within the context of flying at a hundred knots and carrying six hundred pounds and having less than a fifty foot wingspan. And 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. Um and do meaningful work, which was move organs.

So can you describe how you redesigned it? Yeah, after we did all these analyses, we realized that 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. Yeah, it's two longitudinal, we call them booms. You can imagine just two big long tubes.

Down the wing and on the four corners two long tubes. Are twelve foot diameter Rotors with motors underneath them. And 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 Um 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 Thirty 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.

Mm. 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. 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. Wow. All right. So How long did it take you to get Ali uh up and running. That's right. That's about it what it took it. It took us from August of um of twenty eighteen.

And in our first round the pattern flight was January first, twenty twenty. So it took us under eighteen months, um, 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. Um that that is actually an exceptionally fast program.

So now as you are Obviously. You know. Uh building this out, um you h have to assume you had to raise a lot more money and you have because uh this was going to become much, much more expensive to do that. Um

Did Did the business model kind of evolve? to Uh 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 and Federal Express and Amazon. W did that become clear? Pretty soon after you start to collaborate with Martine that that's what this could be. 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 um even though she was funding to like you said before this forty six million dollar contract to develop the aircraft. Um, 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 a not only a launch customer, but a launcher that is funding RD.

And and she only wants, you know, one and a half percent of the total market opportunity All these other massive markets are available to us. Um And And uh and we believe we have the best design.

And When we started, you know, our business gone through a few phases. We were a think tank, we were a product development company, we were an engineering company. Then we went into um this in this this commercial exploration over the last, you know, I'd say twenty, twenty two. where we started doing demonstration flights for UPS and Amazon and and and the the Marines and and and the Army and the Air Force. And 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 led to funding. We're gonna 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. Welcome back to how I built this lab. My guest today is Ky 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 or Louisville in Memphis. Those are really important hubs, but um, you know, a uh a D C nine or whatever is being flown is still gonna land at LAX or SFO or whatever.

These Alia Plains Um electric planes. What will their role be? 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. get sorted along with another five to eight million packages.

And then it'll get sent out to Buffalo. Which by the way is only a hundred and thirty miles from where I sit today. So even if you do like next day air, it's gonna go on Three or four different planes before it goes back to the 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 to to to to Hoboken. So So that that's a thirteen hundred mile trip from from Burlington to Buffalo, if you go that route. Where if you go direct, it's a hundred and thirty 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 The biggest jets, the seven fifty sevens and the MD elevens, they're already going in out of there. And and so um 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. Um They they imagine doing uh 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. And uh and it starts to kinda hit parity with trucking. And the whole logistics world changes.

And these aircraft essentially can land in these sort of purpose built helipad type areas maybe in airports. Or they would just Be charged.

As they're as they sit there. And then so let's say you want to send something from Burlington to Buffalo. What you're essentially saying is that You would s you would maybe drop it off at a UPS store. um that UPS, you know, uh van would deliver them all to Burlington Airport as they do now. But instead the w 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 Yeah, but even better than that. Um

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'll 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 o omits all the handoffs and the trucks and the airport access. And and that's we're gonna get there. It's gonna take a couple of steps. Like you said, it's gonna go to the airports first. Um But uh but

But that's that's the future of uh what we call a distributed mesh network of cargo and logistics. So Are you commercialising any of this right now? K I mean, y you're are you restricted from commercialising it because You still need FAA approval for You know. for flying these aircraft in you know in in a commercial setting?

Yeah, it's it's not a yes or no answer. So we are commercializing them with the military. So we've 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 uh and they're doing operational experimentation. Um 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.

Um because we don't have FA certification yet. When we get FA certification, they can use it for commercial hire. 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. In what countries? Um the the first regulatory uh letter we have is from the UAE between Abu Dhabi and Debai.

two or three years ahead of The rest of the world and what they're is sort of willing to to experiment with. Yeah, and you know it's neat. It's it's a 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 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 asked 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. And right now are there any operational charging stations? Or or or not yet. 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 um and so we have about a hundred and five permits around the country for charging stations. And are they at airports or near airports? Yeah, they're predominantly at airports. And the you know, the neat thing is We put a charger in and then we put a dispenser like the 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. Wow. So realistically, what what is the time frame. I mean, you know w this future we're talking about. having these short hops. Two hundred fifty mile hops where

packages are delivered, maybe even humans are delivered on on on these all electric planes. I mean, they fly. I think you've you've had twenty two thousand lifetime miles on these aircraft. 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 twenty twenty five This is just gonna be normal. It's gonna be like

You know. Like the internet. twenty years ago. Yeah, absolutely. I mean look, I I'm at the risk of sounding too optimistic. By twenty thirty you'll see more electric airplanes in the air. Yeah.

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 walk into our facility, you'll see it'll be the largest net zero building east of the Mississippi. And and we're turning it on here in a couple of months. And we're already building conforming product and uh and and those aircraft will go into type certification testing. And yes, by twenty twenty-five they're doing commercial operations here in the US. And uh and then we just basically build them as fast as we can. I mean, we have a six hundred 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 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.

And and and I guess you don't really have to worry I mean, are you are you thinking about Um you know. cross country, you know, r a range that could you know, three thousand miles or is that just Absolutely. Yeah, I mean look, here two two comments on that. Um it is just a matter of time. Uh anybody who is gonna pretend that though the everything that can be invented has been invented, then they they shouldn't be in in in technology, right? We aren't that smart yet. We're getting smarter every day. Therefore battery energy N C is gonna 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 gonna put batteries in this year. I'm gonna put a hydrogen fuel cell or I'm gonna put a hybrid system in. Yeah.

We're flying thousands of miles already. Uh with that technology. 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'cause I'm so excited about it, but it's it is uh it it's it's an entire new paradigm that people are in some cases in denial of, um, because their businesses don't allow'em to accept it yet. And you know the other thing that I think people are underappreciating is when I take people up in the electric planes

And they get in it and the propeller, remember, is is twenty 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. So you lose the castrophobia, 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 the 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 got to go in that beating drum of a castrophobic plane. They're like, This is awesome. Yeah. How much of an impact can this have. On reducing the

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 w 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, by twenty thirty five, if we don't do anything about aviation, it will be the biggest producer of carbon emissions and transportation. We're doing something about it, right? Not only that. Um, as we as we get to higher higher in efficiencies and battery energy densities goes go 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 our 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. I mean I mentioned briefly that we built a a net zero manufacturing facility. Our job as millennials is to turn the corner on climate change.

And and we're not gonna 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. Hy Clark, thanks so much.

Thank you. 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 Ramteen Arab Loui and Sam Paulson. It was edit by John Isabella with research help from Casey Herman. Our audio engineer was James Willetts.

Our production staff also includes JC Howard, Alex Chung, Carrie Thompson, Elaine Coates, Neva Grant, Chris Massini, Carla Esteves, and Ramel Wood. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

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