White House adviser and senator tour Beta’s flight testing facility in Plattsburgh, New York

North Coun­try Pub­lic Radio has report­ed on a tour of Beta’s flight test­ing facil­i­ty in Platts­burgh, New York, by US Sen­a­tor Kirsten Gilli­brand and White House Infra­struc­ture Coor­di­na­tor Mitch Lan­drieu.

Ver­mont-based Beta employs about 600 peo­ple, 20 to 30 of whom are based at the Platts­burgh facil­i­ty, and is cur­rent­ly test­ing two mod­els, one with con­ven­tion­al take­off and one with ver­ti­cal take­off.

Beta’s is also build­ing charg­ing infra­struc­ture for elec­tric air­craft, with 13 charg­ing sites online from Ver­mont to Arkansas to Geor­gia, and anoth­er 50 in progress. Gilli­brand says the appli­ca­tions have poten­tial mil­i­tary, med­ical and deliv­ery uses for Beta’s prod­ucts.

Lan­drieu, a senior advis­er to Pres­i­dent Joe Biden, says the administration’s big infra­struc­ture and infla­tion reduc­tion bills are invest­ing mon­ey into rebuild­ing the coun­try, which includes fund­ing for roads, bridges and high-speed inter­net, but also incen­tives for the pri­vate sec­tor to invest in the clean ener­gy econ­o­my.

Beta Tech­nolo­gies CEO Kyle Clark says a key way to make flight more cli­mate friend­ly is to har­ness the 4,300 air­ports across the Unit­ed States, many of them under­utilised, that could house charg­ing sta­tions.

Gilli­brand and Landrieu’s vis­it comes months after the com­pa­ny host­ed First Lady Jill Biden and US Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion Miguel Car­dona at its head­quar­ters in South Burling­ton, Ver­mont.

Beta is part­ner­ing with the Army and the Air Force, which have already con­duct­ed test flights of its air­craft. Clark says fund­ing from the Depart­ment of Defense has helped lever­age pri­vate invest­ments in the com­pa­ny.

Once Beta’s air­craft are FAA-cer­ti­fied, Clark says some of the company’s first cus­tomers will be in the med­ical car­go and logis­tics fields. From there, they plan to move into pas­sen­ger trav­el.

In March, BETA Tech­nolo­gies start­ed the process to cer­ti­fy the CX300, a eCTOL mod­el of its all-elec­tric air­craft, mark­ing the company’s sec­ond all-elec­tric air­craft offer­ing in par­al­lel with its exist­ing ALIA-250 eVTOL.

BETA to cer­ti­fy fixed-wing elec­tric air­plane along­side its eVTOL