US electric aircraft developer Beta Technologies on 13 November completed the first flight of the innaugural Alia CX300 aircraft built on its new production line in South Burlington, Vermont.
The nearly 1h sortie was piloted by Kyle Clark, Beta’s founder and chief executive, who took the pusher propeller CX300 to an altitude of about 7,000ft and conducted “handling qualities evaluation, stability and control test points and initial airspeed expansion prior to flying several approaches and a normal landing”, the start-up says.
The CX300 is the conventional take-off variant of its all-electric Alia, which Beta is positioning to hit the market before introducing an electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) variant called A250.
The aircraft recently rolled off of the line at Beta’s 18,580sq m (200,000sq ft) production facility in Burlington, which opened about a year ago. Beta says the Federal Aviation Administration inspected the aircraft prior to granting the company a special airworthiness certificate for experimental research, clearing it to conduct the test flight.
Clark says that Beta is now embarking on a flight-test campaign with the production aircraft, which will continue for 50h under its experimental certificate before transferring to a market survey and crew training certificate – allowing Beta to fly the aircraft outside of Burlington and train additional pilots.
“This start of our production flight test campaign is a result of years of hard work and focus on studying customer requirements, hard engineering, manufacturing, production, quality and test,” he says. ”It represents a significant milestone for Beta, and is the beginning of an exciting new phase for the business
Beta says it will produce additional aircraft, including examples of the CX300 and A250, will continue building a system for building aircraft “at rate”.
“We learned a lot from this first production build,” Clark says. “We weren’t just building an aircraft company, we were building and refining a system to build high quality aircraft efficiently. This first build allowed the team to collect data and insight on manufacturing labour, tooling design, processes, yields and sequences, all of which are being used to refine our production systems.”
The test flight moves the company closer to its goal of delivering aircraft to customers. Earlier this month, the start-up landed a deposit-backed order for up to 20 of aircraft from medical operator Metro Aviation.
Beta on 31 October disclosed that it had raised $318 million as part of its Series C funding round, led by Qatar Investment Authority – the Gulf state’s sovereign wealth fund. Fidelity Management & Research, Rise Climate and United Therapeutics also joined the round as investors.
