On Tuesday morning, the first-ever passenger flight of an electric-powered plane in North America glided down onto the tarmac at JFK with little more than a whisper. The quiet milestone has big implications for the future of aviation.
“We’ve drastically lowered the cost of flying, increased the safety and reduced the noise of the airplane — all concurrently,” Kyle Clark, the pilot of the flight and CEO of electric aerospace company BETA Technologies, told NYNext.
The 49-minute, 72-nautical mile jaunt from East Hampton to Queens was fueled by just $8 worth of electricity, but it was the culmination of years of development.
Clark, a 45-year-old entrepreneur who studied engineering at Harvard, launched BETA Technologies in 2017 with the aim of developing electric-powered aircraft and the infrastructure to support them. He’s since raised more than $1 billion in funding from investors such as the Qatar Investment Authority, Fidelity, and Amazon.
In 2018, design began on the ALIA, a sleek, electric-powered aircraft that can seat five — four passengers and one pilot — and take off both horizontally, like a traditional plane, and vertically, like a helicopter or military jump jet. The latter is accomplished with the addition of four modular propellers mounted atop the aircraft that give it the look of a giant drone.
“I would never compare ourselves to the Wright brothers,” Clark said, “but creating a new form of air transportation will be transformative for society.”
ALIA are manufactured in Burlington, VT. And while there are others working to build similar vessels, Clark said that Beta is the only company in North America producing at scale.
Thus far, the plane has completed tens of thousands of nautical miles in flights — many of them out of a small airport in Plattsburgh, NY. But Clark selected JFK as the landing site for Tuesday’s flight to demonstrate the plane’s true potential.
“It would have been too easy to fly between two minor class airports,” said Clark, who started taking pilot lessons in his early 20s, after dropping out of Harvard, to play professional ice hockey for three years. “And to do so wouldn’t really show the world that the FAA, the Port Authority and the controllers at JFK are ready for this new form of air travel.”
At JFK, ALIA had to integrate seamlessly into Class B airspace — the most tightly controlled in the U.S., matching commercial jet approach speeds and altitudes while responding to air traffic control without deviation or delay.
More remarkable than the plane’s compliance with commercial protocols is its quiet nature.
Until 1977, New Yorkers could fly from Midtown to the city’s major airports, including JFK and Newark. Today, heliports are largely confined to the city’s periphery because of noise concerns. Quiet aircraft, though, could mean that ports could be built in denser, more convenient locations.
Blade, who works with BETA and other leading aircraft manufacturers, is planning on it.
“Quiet and emission-free aircraft will not only mitigate noise issues that concern New York and East End residents, but it will also make flying more affordable and accessible to the public,” Blade CEO Rob Wiesenthal said.
While Tuesday’s flight took off and landed horizontally, other test flights have ascended and descended vertically; vertical passenger flights are expected within the next year, and commercial service with the ALIA is expected within the next two years.
“There are many, many safety thresholds that we have to cross on our way to get there,” said Clark. “But we’re rendering the recurring cost of operation to be pretty small — and that’s after you increase the safety and reduce the noise.”
BETA has already signed agreements or entered into partnerships with various companies, including UPS and Air New Zealand. The research and development that went into getting ALIA to this point, Clark estimated, cost BETA somewhere in the ballpark of $300 to 500 million.
A similar amount, he told NYNext, went toward building a charging network. In addition to the 46 operational sites stretching from Monterey County, CA., to Gainesville, FL., to Portland, Maine. — each able to fully charge ALIA in under an hour and support electric vehicles like Teslas — another 50 are in permitting or construction phases.
While BETA’s long-term goal is to enable short-haul electric flights across the U.S. and beyond, Clark’s current focus is squarely on New York.
The ALIA could quietly land on vertiports on rooftops, ferrying passengers from Midtown to JFK with ease. Clark envisions a city connected by air — ala “The Jetsons” — not someday but soon.
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Electrification, he believes, is aviation’s next great leap, a long overdue new chapter after the jet age made flight global in the mid 20th century.
“This really has all the legs,” he said, “to be a meaningful mode of transport for New Yorkers.”
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