UPS to purchase 10 eVTOL aircraft from Beta Technologies for its air service fleet, includes option to buy up to 150

UPS, the world’s largest deliv­ery pack­age com­pa­ny, will buy 10 of Beta Tech­nolo­gies’ eVTOL air­craft by 2024 — with the option to pur­chase up to 150.

Togeth­er with its UPS Flight For­ward sub­sidiary, the air­craft will be used to aug­ment UPS’ air ser­vice for select small and mid-size mar­kets. These air­craft will take off and land on prop­er­ty at its facil­i­ties, help­ing to reduce time-in-tran­sit, vehi­cle emis­sions and oper­at­ing cost.

“This is all about inno­va­tion with a focus on returns for our busi­ness, our cus­tomers, and the envi­ron­ment,” said UPS Chief Infor­ma­tion and Engi­neer­ing Offi­cer Juan Perez. “These new air­craft will cre­ate oper­a­tional effi­cien­cies in our busi­ness, open pos­si­bil­i­ties for new ser­vices, and serve as a foun­da­tion for future solu­tions to reduce the emis­sions pro­file of our air and ground oper­a­tion.”

UPS has also reserved BETA’s recharg­ing sta­tion, which helps ensure safe and rapid charg­ing of the air­craft in under an hour and facil­i­tates a quick turn for the load­ing and unload­ing of car­go. The charg­ing sta­tion also offers the aircraft’s bat­ter­ies a sec­ond life cycle.

After the bat­ter­ies’ first life cycle in the air­craft con­cludes, they can be fit­ted to the charg­ing sta­tions to recharge the aircraft’s onboard bat­ter­ies as well as UPS’s fleet of elec­tric ground vehi­cles. UPS cur­rent­ly oper­ates more than 12,000 alter­na­tive fuel and advanced tech­nol­o­gy vehi­cles, and announced a com­mit­ment to pur­chase up to 10,000 Arrival elec­tric vehi­cles.

BETA founder and CEO, Kyle Clark, said: “We’re com­bin­ing sim­ple, ele­gant design and advanced tech­nol­o­gy to cre­ate a reli­able air­craft with zero oper­a­tional emis­sions that will rev­o­lu­tion­ize how car­go moves. By util­is­ing ver­ti­cal take­offs and land­ings, we can turn rel­a­tive­ly small spaces at exist­ing UPS facil­i­ties into a micro air feed­er net­work with­out the noise or oper­at­ing emis­sions of tra­di­tion­al air­craft.”

BETA aircraft’s 1,400-pound car­go capac­i­ty is ide­al­ly suit­ed to more quick­ly and sus­tain­ably trans­port time-sen­si­tive deliv­er­ies that would oth­er­wise fly on small fixed-wing air­craft.

UPS’s use of the air­craft will also ben­e­fit health­care providers, thou­sands of small and medi­um-sized busi­ness­es and oth­er com­pa­nies in small­er com­mu­ni­ties. With a 250-mile range and cruis­ing speed of up to 170 miles per hour, UPS will be able to plan a series of short routes, or one long route, on a sin­gle charge to meet cus­tomers’ needs.

UPS Flight For­ward received the first U.S. Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (FAA) Part 135 Stan­dard air car­ri­er cer­ti­fi­ca­tion to oper­ate a drone air­line, and is oper­at­ing dai­ly rev­enue-gen­er­at­ing flights with drones. The FAA cer­ti­fi­ca­tion also enables UPS Flight For­ward to fly pay­loads of up to 7,500 lbs. either with an oper­a­tor or autonomous­ly.

Last month, BETA advanced to the next phase of flight test­ing, com­plet­ing an inter­state flight from its test facil­i­ty in Platts­burgh, New York to its head­quar­ters in Burling­ton, Ver­mont. In accor­dance with FAA pro­to­cols for exper­i­men­tal air­craft to fly beyond its home air­port, BETA had to com­plete rig­or­ous test­ing to ensure reli­able and pre­dictable behav­ior of the air­craft.

In the same week, the com­pa­ny set a new per­son­al-best in range while also reach­ing 8,000ft in alti­tude.