• 23 Apr 2024 12:51 PM
• 0

Beta's Alia Makes Historic Transition Flight

By Robert Moorman

Beta Technologies completed the first manned, full transition flight of its Alia A250 electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft at its flight test facility at Plattsburgh International Airport in upstate New York.

On mid-morning April 17, 2024, Nate Moyer, a former experimental test pilot for the US Air Force, initiated a vertical takeoff — powered by the four lifting propellers — and transitioned to horizontal flight, powered by a rear-mounted pusher propeller. The aircraft flew one lap in the pattern and landed.

Beta Technologies CEO Kyle Clark offered the following moments before the flight: “What we want to do with our aircraft is to take off like a helicopter, fly like an airplane and land like a helicopter. Which means we have to go from powered lift flight, into wing-borne flight and back to powered lift flight.”

Beta posted a video of the flight. Additional transition flights of the Alia will soon follow.

This historic event is believed to be the first transition to fully wing-borne flight of a full-scale piloted eVTOL aircraft that was representative of the planned production configuration. Joby and Lilium have made full transitions of their vectored thrust aircraft, but only remotely operated with no one onboard. Wisk made a full transition of an early prototype, the single-seat Zee.Aero Gen 3 test bed in 2017, but this was not their production configuration. Multicopter configurations like the EHang 216 and Volocopter VoloCity do not have wings and do not transition.

“We’ve been progressing toward this huge technical milestone for a while,” according to Beta. “It’s a new flight regime, and we fly all our missions with a pilot in the seat, so we approached it the best way we know how: by respecting physics.”

The transition flight and related incremental testing, “provides us with the data we need to validate our design decisions as we continue toward certifying the A250,” according to the company.

The Alia will first be used by the military, then cargo operators, followed by passenger-carrying operators, the company said.

Beta has flown Alia prototypes for more than four years, clocking 40,000 plus nautical miles in two aircraft. In October 2023, Beta flew 1,700 nm (3,150 km) from Vermont to Duke Field/Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

In January 2024, Beta completed its first deployment with the Air Force, having conducted three months of experimental operations and training with the 413th Flight Test Squadron through the Agility Prime program.