Very pleased to have the CEO and the CFO of BETA Technologies here. For those of you that don't know me, I'm John Godyn. I'm Citi's Aerospace and Defense Analyst. BETA is one of the leading-edge technology providers in the eVTOL space. Kyle, maybe just to kick us off, because we're not sure, you know, if everybody in the audience is up to date on eVTOL. What is eVTOL? What are the big trends in the space, and how does BETA fit into it?
Sure. Well, first of all, it's great to see everybody here. So electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft is something that is kind of a technological step in aerospace and aviation, enabled by a confluence of multiple different technologies: battery energy density, high power density electric motors, and control systems. Material science and other things enabling lightweight structure contribute to this, but they aren't foundational to electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. And a ton of different companies, be it Amazon, UPS, the U.S. Air Force, the Army, and independent companies like ours, realized at pretty much the same time that the physics started to close.
The material science, the battery energy density, the motor torque density could create a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that could be all electric, with the massive benefit of drastically reducing the cost of the aircraft and the operation. And then came the trick: how do you take the first principle physics of this and put it into a configuration or an aircraft that can go do something useful, make it at an economical level, and then keep it in the air so that it can make money for the customers? And that's where the industry started to diverge into a series of different configurations, market entry strategies, and certification strategies. So BETA, ironically, was my senior thesis in college 25 years ago, and at the time it was a hybrid aircraft, 'cause that's what closed from a physics perspective.
Fast-forward to 2017, I continued to pitch this to everybody that would listen. I got thrown out of Thanksgiving dinners for pitching it to my family. I met Martine Rothblatt, who is the SiriusXM founder, the founder of United Therapeutics, prolific aviator, and she grabbed me at an old Boeing facility in Philadelphia and said, "Let's go. We're going to do this." We leaned into developing an aircraft for the purpose of organ distribution. We designed, built, and flew our first thrust vectoring, and that's an important note here. Vertical takeoff and landing, all-electric aircraft set the world record for the longest period of time in the air, and the heaviest VTOL aircraft, electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft ever flown.
And then we earned commercial contracts with United Therapeutics, with UPS, with the Air Force, to go and build a commercial variant of this aircraft. So what you're... I guess we don't have a video here today, but, what we've developed since then is a distributed propulsion, so we have multiple different rotors picking the aircraft up. VTOL aircraft, weighs 7,000 lbs, carries six to eight people, 200 cu ft of cargo, and, flies a significant distance. So our initial target range was 250 NM, and our CTOL aircraft are flying 330 NM right now, all electric. So BETA went through, from a financing perspective, a series of financing rounds. We never took venture capital. We funded through customer contracts up to the point of our Series A investment, where Fidelity was our lead investor.
Amazon co-led that investment. Then we went on to our Series B or C, and then we did an IPO last fall. We've set the world record for the heaviest payload, longest range, and fastest electric aircrafts in the world, and we have more miles than anybody else in this entire industry. And we've done it on the backs of some really first principle philosophies of simplicity and pragmatism, and we've been a pretty quiet company in this space with the most certifications, the most miles flown. I think by a factor of 100, the most pilots have flown our aircraft in a ton of different places all over the world on four continents now. So, so that's, like, BETA in kind of a nutshell, and I'd love to talk about the technology, but I know that's not the topic today.
No, that was a fantastic overview, and there's so many things in there to follow up on. Maybe a good place to start is just to expand on this idea of a CTOL variant and of eVTOL variant and how you decided to move in that direction, because I think that's a big difference between you and some of the others.
Yeah. So our certification strategy is different. Our market entry strategy, going cargo logistics into passenger, certainly our financing strategy is different. But from a strict certification strategy, we said there are certain things the FAA can type certify. There are other things in TSO or, accept under technical standard order motors, propellers, airplanes, and aircraft are all type certifiable. So we broke up our Type Certification project and said, "We can certify a propeller first," which we did. We've got it under our belt. We finished it last summer. And then we can certify the motor, which of course isn't in sequence, but it's phase-shifted, but overlapped, that we are in the final stages of. So we had to build conforming motors. We had to build a whole bunch of prototypes, but they worked.
Prove the performance, build a manufacturing process, quality systems, work instructions, configuration management, calibration, all that stuff, and then we started building what they call FAA-conforming motors. We started that in our IPO, and we went into that right through our IPO, and we put those motors into what they call FAA for-credit testing. This is where they come in with the testing, and that is in its stages right now of of testing and all that data, the FAA to get a type certification. Now, what's interesting about that is our airplane isn't far behind that, and the certification of the propeller and the motor are ported into the certification of the airplane. So that airplane, then you don't have to re-litigate the certification of the things that are either TSO'd or previously type certified. But the magic here is then what happens next?
So then the entire airplane gets ported into the VTOL, the wing, the tail, the interior, the lighting systems, the batteries, the pusher propeller, all that stuff is identical. And all you do is you add the lift motors, 15% increase in requirements, and then go through type certification with that. Now, you don't have to relitigate all those things you've already type certified. And we get to make a lot of money off selling the CTOL, conventional takeoff airplane. Unfortunately, and this happened just after our IPO, we started selling our motors. We were selling prototypes before, and we had our first major production contract with Embraer about $1 billion of motors. We have contracts with Textron, with General Dynamics, you know, a partnership with GE, Embraer, obviously, and we have a couple of non-public projects where we supplied all the propulsion.
This Type Certification strategy of propeller, motor, airplane, VTOL, not only gives us a clear path to work through the FAA, but it also gets us revenue too.
Yeah. And John, one thing, if you were to unpack our current backlog, more than a third of the backlog is CTOL aircraft, just because the economics there, it's about a 2% reduction when you compare it to a conventional takeoff, landing, powered fossil fuel. So the backlog is there, use cases are there, and when it's certified, there are plenty of customers out there ready to take it.
Yeah, one kind of anecdote to that: UPS came up to see our flight test program, and our flight strategy had always been, let's start with an airplane that's, that's doing vertical and another one that's doing horizontal flight, and this one will start going faster and faster, and this one will start going slower and slower. We'll converge at the transition envelope, and then we'll have aircraft that can full envelope. They had an order for VTOL aircraft. They came, and they saw CTOL aircraft, conventional takeoff and landing aircraft flying, and they started asking these economics, the operational economics. They're like: "Actually, we want that thing.
Because average range is 115 NM for feeder fleet flying between secondary city pairs. Unload the big jet, little airplanes, have it go out, and have it come to the big jet with the new packages back to Louisville, back out to the world. And so all of a sudden we realized, holy cow, this customer is asking the thing we're just testing. And then a bunch of other customers came in, and more recently, we've had a bunch of conversions of VTOL orders into CTOL orders. So the commercial viability of this thing was really proven by customers.
Yeah. It's not just cargo. Maybe you can talk about some of the early adopters of CTOL and VTOL, who's been sort of end customers in the backlog so far, you know, and ultimately, we'll talk about market sizing, et cetera. But you know, maybe talk about the earliest adopters.
Yeah. So therapeutic medical application, we think medical application is just moving blood products and drugs and organs sometimes. But when there's organ explantation, replantation, retransplantation, they often move along with it, the organ tender, they have other people. So that aircraft needs to carry an organ, an organ tender, potentially a surgeon, some nurses. So that's an early adopter of this technology, where they said, "Helicopters right now do not have de-icing capabilities. Few of them have IFR capabilities. We want an all-weather aircraft fit for lightning strike, icing, IFR, of course. We want it to be economical, and we need it to go a meaningful range." So that was our very first customer. Then the next customer was the Air Force, and then the next customer was UPS, who still holds our single largest order in the aircraft.
And their application is feeder fleet initially, but after that, their words, they want to create the mesh network of the future. Instead of having the radial network of everything coming through Louisville, they want to go between city pairs. And right now, there's-- I probably am not allowed to say the number, there are hundreds of city pairs that have sufficient package volume to justify continuous routing of low-cost electric aircraft and bypass the hub of Louisville, which is constrained. It's not a secret. It's constrained. So, so that's another anchor customer. And then Amazon came in and made a meaningful investment in our Series A.
We can't really talk about their commercial interests, but they have been very public about increasing Prime delivery to rural communities. They want to do that in a sustainable way. We're the second largest investment out of their fund behind Rivian. They stepped in, and then we started to engage with passenger air companies like, like Embraer. Full traction on both. What's interesting, fair, that just two weeks ago, they're start cargo and moving to passenger. Kauai, Molokai, coming off the big Maui, they have right now moving. You say, "Oh, I can get to cost parity with an aircraft moving cargo? 200 at a time, couple thousand pounds. Yeah, we'll do that in the islands." Sure, perfect for aviation, and they don't have to carry a passenger yet.
Regional, regional air mobility is a great use case. About 20% of all global takeoffs and landings are under 300 mi. So that could already fit the CTOL envelope that we're talking about. So it's a great use case. And when you look at the backlog, as Kyle said, cargo logistics, medical, that's where the big orders are, but passenger is there as well. We're currently working. We have an LOI with Republic Airways. We're working with them. That's not in our backlog that we describe, because our backlog is defined by firm orders that are deposit-backed, and once we receive that, then it comes into our backlog. So we're very, you know, very narrow in how we define an order.
I just wanna address one thing. Like, we take a lot of different spheres. We're a relatively quiet company, but very pragmatic approach to things, and people will say, "Hey, why aren't you focused on passenger? It's a huge market. Why aren't you focused on urban air mobility and passenger? It'll transform the way people and goods move." Like, yeah, we know. Well, that's what we're focused on. But our focus is not to try and stand at the bottom of the stairs and jump to the top in one step. It's a really hard task. You could be developing, developing, developing the leg strength to try and do that, or you can just walk up one step at a time, and I'll get... But I'll bet we beat everybody to urban air mobility doing it this way.
So, like, for example, everybody's talking about passenger flights. The New York Port Authority last year put out a call, and they said: "We wanna bring our first passenger flights into New York City Airport, JFK, specifically." And you had to get a market survey ticket, you had to apply, you had to show the safety, you have to do all this stuff. All these other companies that are talking about, "We're gonna be passenger aircraft companies," none of them got market survey tickets. We did, and I had the pleasure of flying with the first passengers into a major New York City Airport, all-electric. It was, like, on the cover of the New York Post and it was all this, like, local news.
And to take a sphere where people are saying, "Hey, you, you guys aren't focused on passenger," we're like, "We're the only ones who've ever flown a fucking passenger. You know? And we have hundreds and hundreds of people flying our airplane right now. Same thing with VTOL, where people say, "Well, you're focused on CTOL. Why aren't you on VTOL?" Turns out we were the very first company to fly manned VTOLs transitions, the very first company to do that, and we are way ahead of everybody else on this stuff. Yes, we are focused on our step in front of us, but we don't lose focus on the big picture.
Yeah. And, John, we, Kyle and I, when we were doing the IPO and on the roadshow, we took the CTOL from Vermont to Boston, Boston to New York, New York to, to Baltimore, and we had an event in Boston. We were able to have, analysts, investors come out and look at the aircraft, and we would get questions. They'd say, you know, "How'd you get here today?" "We actually flew our own aircraft down from Vermont this morning in the weather
And then they flew in the aircraft.
Yeah.
So it's a different level of safety, security, and certifications, in the case of the airworthiness certificates, in order to fly people in the aircraft. If you came up tomorrow, we can go flying in the aircraft.
Yeah. There's no question that you guys are operating the aircraft more than many of the other players. We can track that publicly.
We have access to that data, and I think you guys have done a tremendous job there. You mentioned air taxi services. Just one thing that comes up is some of the other players are vertically integrated, right? They're actually trying to, or would like to offer the services directly to customers. You're more taking the approach of supplying others with your aircraft type, and it could be used for different purposes. Can you talk about the pros and cons there, and you know, what do you think about this strategy of just being a supplier versus actually having a passenger service?
Yeah. So vertical integration is an interesting concept. You can look upward vertically, downward vertically. It's still vertical, right? I would say, unequivocally, we would be the most fit company to go out there and start an aircraft operation. I'm a CFI. I'm a commercial pilot. We run a flight school. Those are 500 people in the flight school. I have owned a ton of different airplanes and flown them both commercially and privately, and the decision was made that that is a job left for somebody else, the Republic's, the UPS's. They do this very, very well, and they hold their certificates, so they hold their 135s and their 121s, and it is a very different business than product development. If we look in the mirror and say, "High reliability, power electronics, electromagnetics, advanced controls, material science," that's what we're good at.
There's another financial reason for this. We say, "Let's stick to our niche. Let's do really good here." We are very vertically integrated. I would bet we are the most vertically integrated company in this entire space. We make our own computers, we make our own circuit boards, we go all the way down to the design assurance level, like code and all the code and all the peripheries. We write the tools to validate the code. We own all the labs to do that as well. We sell that to other people. We sell it for undersea applications, we sell it for airborne applications, we sell the motors. We make all the motors, do all the electromagnetic design. That's what gives us our classification, the DoD. Nobody else holds a classified security clearance. I, myself and 50 other engineers, hold security clearances.
Our facilities do both design, data transfer, we have a pipeline directly to the Pentagon to do data transfer, and we have facilities to build stuff that is under classified control. It is a very-- You have to be vertically integrated to do that. You can't have a single piece of code that's owned by a foreign nation in that when it goes underwater. So, so we are very vertically integrated. I don't mean to get defensive about it, but it's somebody put a name on something, but it's not real. Vertical integration is going right down to the first principle physics, right up to the product that you're developing. So the other dimension of this is the actual economics of it.
About half of all airplanes are owned by leasing companies. Leasing companies trade on residual value of airplanes. If you're selling to yourself, there is no residual value. You default on that, you don't have a use for it, you can't sell it. So UPS is like: "Yeah, go sell those damn things to FedEx and Amazon, and everybody else." You know why? B ecause then we can finance the damn aircraft. We can get spare parts and do all that other stuff. There's a very practical financial reason why we use that force multiplier of other people doing this for us, putting these aircraft out into the world. Now, you can obfuscate your backlog and say, "I'm gonna save 1 million people an hour a day," or you can say, "Hey, I've sold a bunch of aircraft."
And they're paying us a deposit and they're paying us a six months out, then a wing body join, then a pre-delivery, and then after delivery, we're fully paid. We don't have to wait 10 years of passenger seat miles to get paid.
Yeah, from a working capital point of view, cash flow, us collecting deposits and collecting 50% or more before we begin manufacturing is just a great working capital, versus building an aircraft and trying to pay for that aircraft, you know, a couple of hundred dollars at a time with an air taxi. It's a very different cash flow model as well.
Yep. Yep, I'm with you. I mean, we have a lot of very profitable aerospace companies at this conference over a few days, so I hear that. Can we talk about defense a little bit more, military applications for your technology?
Yeah. I mean, the Department of Defense has been very clear that they want lower cost, attritable assets out in the world, especially in the INDOPACOM theater. They can't afford to put out $113 million single helicopter as this bespoke, exquisite asset and a singular target. That's behind, and they can't get them anyway, right? So what they're looking for, American drone dominance, the prior executive order and the more recent one in January, are focused on companies like ours, having low-cost, attritable assets that are flexible, take off and land vertically, have low logistics tail, don't require a ton of extra spare parts and maintainers and multiple pilots. So unmanned, autonomous aircraft that are hybrid, so they meet the range and payload requirements, 2,000 lbs, about 500 mi, that can do things like contested logistics and launched effects.
Which contested logistics, moving water, medicine, and bullets, fuel, moving a mobile generator, the plane is the generator, ironically, into theater to distributed bases that are moving constantly. Flexibility, can put a runway into these things. And doing that with low logistics tails is what the Department of Defense wants. So that's the general application. The Army has been very clear with their RFIs and RFQs. The Marines has Force Design 2030, and all of them need these things. Launched Effects is a little bit different, where you put up an aircraft that can carry a couple thousand pounds, get 14, 15, 20, 25 small, single-use, one-way drones. You get up over the target, you loiter for five hours, and you release these things strategically. Those things can go 20 mi, or probably can go 500 mi.
That gives you an operational effective range that's significantly greater, take off and land vertically from the boat. So those are the types of applications. We partnered with GE, as you know. They made a very meaningful investment in our business. They continue to invest in our business around the turbo generator, which is a big piece of that puzzle. We've added some programs with them. They've been a tremendously positive partner, and we have other live programs in defense. The underwater applications I mentioned with General Dynamics and a few other ones we can't talk about yet.
And, John, one thing that I would add is we have a very accomplished military advisory board that you could read all about on our website. But we have individuals like General Jim McConville and General Ed Daly, who guide and direct us on all things related to military and military applications, which is really a force multiplier for us.
Yeah. No, no question about it. I think it's a very topical theme in defense. Ultimately, though, people want to see awards, they want to see you know, demand crystallized. Any thoughts on how that may play out over the years to come?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, the defense budget is going up. There's a focus through formal orders and also just the systemic trend for these large defense primes to partner with companies like ours. Meanwhile, we see requirements generation accelerating, both in the Army and the Marines. We had a team down in Pax River this week, working through those things. This is a process to get to the point to be able to sell this. However, there are vehicles, no pun intended, vehicles to sell these things, through combatant commanders, on specific demands, that go outside of that process.
We've landed a bunch of different small contracts on elements of this through DEVCOM and others at the Army Developmental Command, and under General Rainey, to deliver hybridization, for example, and autonomy, and to show up to operational missions. We showed up in Savannah, we showed up in Florida, we showed up in Michigan, and we ran missions with these guys, supporting F-35s and F-22s and other things. This is all part of the process to get to the point that there is a log demand. This is maybe something I probably shouldn't talk too much about, but the concept of a program of record, strict requirements, and the delivery of aircraft, something that needs congressional approval, is not the only way to get there.
These COCOs, contractor-owned, contractor-operated type services that Amentum and Dynamic and others provide, many times in cargo and logistics, you can draw the line there, are great vehicles to get into the military because these are under operational budgets. That's another target that we are focusing on. I don't think anybody else in our industry can really focus on that. And that's a cost-sensitive, move cargo, move logistics, move things in and out of theater and do it through operational contracts. So you don't even need what you just said, which is this program requirement.
Fair enough. We've talked through so many dimensions of market size and growth. We didn't, we didn't talk, I think, enough about the possibility of a large passenger variant, which is something that you guys have discussed, you know, on years down the line. I'd love just an update on the thought process there. I mean, it seems like a powerful aircraft.
It is. I think, like, the way that... People often ask us about charging networks and the parallels to vehicles, ground vehicles. But in the case of our Model 3, if you will, what type of aircraft does the common consumer fly on? It's not gonna be a one-, two-, three- or six -passenger aircraft. Not for a long time, anyway, until we totally transform the way people move. In the near term, 5 years, 10 years out, the way that people are gonna get on the advanced air mobility aircraft, electric aircraft specifically, is getting on a 30- or 60- or 70-passenger aircraft.
What's neat about that is the physics close, all the technology is the same, and we're a pragmatic company, stepwise walking into this. We have several large aircraft programs right now that are getting us exposed to all the nuances of Part 25 certification and the upper end of Part 23, so Level 3 aircraft. I believe that we will go from a pick a number in double-digit billions valuation company doing VTOL and CTOL aircraft to something that steps up in order of magnitude when we start to do what used to be called heavy metal, now we'll call it heavy carbon. Aircraft that are transporting people in the space of regional air mobility and flying back.
We're gonna fly today in a couple of hours up to Washington, D.C., and then D.C. to Burlington, this totally can be covered by this scale of aircraft, the 30-, 60-, 70-passenger aircraft. And that's gonna be our next focal point. I think it opens it up to the masses. It becomes our Model 3.
Absolutely. John, the 19-passenger that we've talked about, the portability of the existing technology, so the flight controllers, the batteries, the motors that we use in the current CTOL and VTOL and MVTL variants port into the 19-passenger. So all of the investments that we've made in those technologies port, port perfectly into that 19-passenger vehicle that we had talked about in some of our S-1 documents.
And the non-obvious things, like we spent a lot of money focused on the flight controller, the motors, and the batteries, that port directly verbatim. They're very modular elements, and that's what we've been serving to other people in this. But the thing that probably gets overlooked is that our validated structural design tools, inclusive of the dynamics and computational fluid dynamics stuff, and the material system, like, we spend tens of millions of dollars to certify, qualify, and validate new material systems. So if you're gonna say we're gonna have an IFR aircraft that is lightning strike compliant, you have to make a shit ton of test panels and hit them with lightning.
And then you have to take that and say, "Okay, well, this is a Class A, this is Class B," boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You put it out on the aircraft. Before you even start the design, you have to have your allowables done, you have to have your damage tolerance done. All that's done. We own the qualification materials. We have a bunch of people in this space, competitors coming to us and say, "Hey, talk to those guys over at Solvay," which is now Syensqo. "And, we understand you have a full allowables database. Can we buy that from you?" We're like: "No." It took years to get, and, I don't care if you offer me $100 million bucks, we're not gonna sell it to you.
Because that is a huge leg up on the development process. If you're Boeing, your material allowables, your material system stuff is already two decades old by the time you go to the next aircraft. Not with us.
Kyle, correct me if I'm wrong, the 19-passenger is certified under Part 23 just like the CTOL. So we'll have experience in doing that. So it's a natural next step in our progression.
Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Circling back to the certification process, you guys did lay out certain milestones over the next couple of years. I just wanna get an update on sort of where we stand, do we feel like we're on track, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah. Great question. On the motors, we're right on track. We've been plugging away at the four-credit cert testing. These are conforming articles, witness test, the longest duration test, the durability endurance test, about 1,000 hours on the durability. We're about 830 hours into it. That keeps going up. Last week, at a different conference, I said 800 hours, just for the record. It goes up, it turns out. It's a good way to go. About every 100 hours, you take the engine down, you inspect it, you put it into salt fog, you put it into dust, you put it into cold temperature, whatever. It's not like 24-hour a day running on average, but you do run for 24 hours a day when you're running.
So you bang out these tests. So we have a number of weeks left, and it's six to eight weeks left of that longest test, and then you compile that data, you present it to the FAA. So that puts us in the first half of this year, as planned, for the H500A certification. On the heels of that is H500B. We talked about that in our quarter three earnings call. And on the planes themselves, we're a little bit ahead on our company-conforming builds, compared to where we thought we would be, and that leads right into the certified aircraft, where we have the software, the aircraft, the test data, and and we put FAA pilots for credit. So that's on track as well, as is the VTOL, which is phase shifted by about a year. .
Which is right aligned with what we kind of presented in our IPO. We've inserted a couple things in there that weren't in there, because of the Embraer order. The Embraer order is nothing forces a product certification like a billion-dollar order from a customer. So we advanced that up, and we pulled in a couple of our military programs that are going through a similar process. So yeah, we're extremely pleased with the process of certification, and it's you know, it's like a wedding, and we show up, and the bride's gonna show up, and the FAA has been showing up.
They've gotten new resources. They get a lot of wind in their sails. Bedford just restructured and really focused on AAM. We've got the IPP program that just got a ton of attention. It's going through a lot of safety reviews right now, and that's accelerating the conversations and certification.
So, bottom line, if from your point of view, things are very much on track for the timeline that you guys always set out?
Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. And it's on track, and like, it's not without risk, but the way that the FAA is responding to this has been, like, incredibly positive compared to the prior years.
Yeah. I wanted to dig into the partnerships a little bit, a little bit more. GE comes up quite a bit. You mentioned that they're just a phenomenal partner. Can you just elaborate on what they bring to the table and how that partnership is working out?
Yeah, for sure. I mean, we've got a lot of really good partnerships. You know, the Amazon, the UPS, GE, more recently, General Dynamics. GE is unique in the sense that they aren't a customer partnership, they're truly a partner. So we're co-developing the turbo generator. They've got some of the best turbo machinery in the world. We couple the generator onto that, we put it into our aircraft, put it in other people's aircraft, and we do a number of other programs with them.
And on top of that, they put a, they put a big investment into us privately, and then they were a big investor in our IPO. They're a cornerstone investment in our IPO. And, and I've actually become in-- really close with Larry Culp, who's been a good mentor to me. We traveled a bit together, and, like, you start to kind of really understand, for me, anyway, I'm a humdrum engineer, right? We can talk tech all day long.
I'm just learning the end of business that these guys, like Larry and Bezos and others, have been studying and practicing for years. So for me personally, that's been a huge amount of, a huge amount of benefit to us. And when we talk mergers and acquisitions, when we talk about other partnerships, I rely on these guys to help me kind of navigate that. So that's been very, very powerful. And so publicly, with GE, we have the turbo generator program. Privately, we have a couple other programs, that will be revealed later on.
And how do you see this evolving over time? Is there a state of the world where GE becomes a customer, or is there a future joint venture, you know?
Yeah. I mean, they, so customer/partner, again, if we've co-developed a product that goes through validation in the military or certification in the FAA, then who's the customer, right? You're both selling the product together. I would say that GE has a slightly bigger reach than us, commercially, right? So we may be selling into them and putting that out to the world, and they have a tremendous service organization as well, which we benefit from. So yeah, there is a very, very clear version of the world where that happens.
You mentioned some other partners that are key as well. Amazon, recent investment. Curious if there are any other partners that you'd highlight as just kind of being particularly impactful recently?
Yeah. I mean, so Amazon came in a long time ago in our Series A, and then they continued to up their position through the subsequent rounds. And I think there was some really positive reception of that. And as I mentioned the other day, it's if you track our airplanes, which we only hide the ones that fly really, really long ranges, for the most part, you'll see where all of our airplanes are and doing a lot of flights down in the Pacific Northwest, doing down in CVG, and Cincinnati, and other places. You'll see that we're out really, really wringing these things out with customers.
So Amazon's been great from the beginning. UPS informed the design of the aircraft heavily. For example, the height of the floors exactly match the back of their delivery vans. The volume matches their delivery vans. The charging time matches the time it takes to put the packages on and off. Amazon, similarly, they had a couple of really insightful things adding to that. More recently, the General Dynamics and General Electric, both from a technological and partnership standpoint, have been really important to us. We've learned about some pretty amazing tools. Some of them are classified, certainly commerce-controlled, that we've worked on some of these programs on the electromagnetics with. And United Therapeutics has been consistently an amazing partner. I mean, they've probably deployed almost half of our charging network.
You know, Health and Human Services and Archer and a couple other grants, state of Michigan, Utah, like these are good partners, but United Therapeutics has consistently said: "We need to get from hospital to hospital. Here's the route we wanna go." They define it, they help pay for it. They don't own it, they take a priority access fee, and they've been a tremendous partner as well.
Yeah. You mentioned the charging network. I don't wanna run out of time before we have the chance to talk about that a little bit. A lot of investors view it as a potentially extremely powerful asset. It's obviously not generating a material amount right now, but, but it could, as the economics sort of get shaped over time. Maybe you could talk about the ultimate vision for the charging network and how you see that playing out.
Yeah. I mean, so we have about 80 chargers deployed. We've got 50+ in permit right now. Depending on how things work out next month, the IPP will select the final locations of that next tranche of chargers. We will cover the entire United States with the chargers. We have the only certified charger right now, and there'll be 800+ sites, some of them have three, four, five , 10 chargers at them. We will control the flow of energy into the future of aerospace. Whether it's hybrid or all electric, you're gonna need a charger. You wanna leave the ground with the most amount of energy. There's three useless things in aviation. You know this?
I don't.
Altitude above you, fuel left on the ground, AKA energy and runway behind you.
Okay.
So we don't take off leaving fuel on the ground, especially when it doesn't weigh anything like electricity. So people are like: "Well, what about hybrid aircraft?" You're still gonna charge the batteries up. Like, before you leave is the point. So we will own the flow of energy into the future of aviation. We will blanket the United States. We already do. We just put chargers into Abu Dhabi. So, you know, Archer and Joby over there talking about starting service, and I think we're the only one making money off of it right now.
We can track that on the app, but I can't see the ones in Abu Dhabi yet. I've got to double-check the app.
Yeah, you're blocked from that one.
Yeah. In fact.
There's a lot that aren't on the app. Some of them are exclusive. But anyway, the ones that we sell as a unit, the 30 kW and 60 kW ones, you have to own it to see it. If it's a public use one, you'll see it.
Okay, got it. And in terms of the economics of it. So I think people believe the sort of scalability and you're a first mover. How do you—what are the ways to make money on this network over time?
Yeah, so we sell the chargers. We sell a priority access fee, which means if you reserve it 24 hours in advance, you get it, hands down. Medical people love that. You know, the Archer folks, they of course don't want their flight tests interrupted, so they have a priority access fee there. And then the last part is we just charge for charging, right? That's—I mean, that's a long burn, but it's you've got an infrastructure in there. I mean, this is all built on solar-based technology, so that has a 20-year useful life.
That was mandatory in order to get the ITCs back in the day. So all the power electronics, all the systems, and we did a lot of that in our former company. So there's a long burn there, and it'll likely last significantly longer than that. But you really have established a hell of an infrastructure strategic advantage by getting to all the airports at the critical locations in the airports and getting that power allocation.
So if there's a substation and 5 MW serving a small airport, mostly used for air conditioning, and you say, "You know what? I'm gonna peel off that other 800 kW, and we're gonna put two chargers in there," guess what somebody else doesn't get to do? Put in a charger, because that substation allocation will cost them $50 million to upgrade the transmission, the distribution sub. So that is a land grab on the power company. So those interconnection agreements, which are contingent upon having a certified charger, because you're plugging a battery into the charger that can back feed and kill somebody on the line, screwed up. So IEEE 1547, this is a standard that requires to come offline when there's a perturbation on the grid, is something that we had to pass. Nobody else has done that.
Right? So we have a lot of strategic advantages of the way that we're doing the chargers.
Yeah, makes a ton of—
One of our key performance indicators is charge, and we'll talk more about that on our earnings call on March 9.
Okay.
Starting to get an audience. You have to buy tickets here now.
Let's, looking forward to it. Guys, we're almost out of time. I've just been giving the last bit of time, giving it to you guys. Any concluding thoughts, any concluding statements?
Are there any questions? We take questions?
No. No?
We're kind of out of time. We had too many, but no, let's go. We've [audio distortion]
Yeah, no, it's a great question. So for the CTOL aircraft, you don't. You need a high performance because it's a 575 hp engine over the 200 hp limit. So you need a high-performance endorsement, and you can fly the aircraft. You need a commercial license to fly it commercially. The VTOL is a little different. So right now, we have dual controls, side-by-side seating, and at BETA, we have the only pilots, myself included, that are allowed to provide training in VTOL aircraft. So that's under something called an SFAR, that was formalized last November, and that SFAR allows for alternate methods. So the Jobys and the Archers can propose alternate methods or the Fairway method, which is what we've proposed.
Of course, it's contained within the Special Federal Aviation Regulation, which lasts for 10 years, and then it'll get rewritten, of about a week-long course to learn to fly the VTOL if you walk in there with a commercial pilot certificate. Right now, we run a flight school at BETA. We have about 450 people in that, pretty much all employees. We've trained pilots from New Zealand. We had the very first pilots that ever have gotten a commercial certificate in electric aviation, do it in our aircraft. I'm taking my CFI renewal in our aircraft in about a week and a half. I shouldn't have said that, just in case I fail. Now, I'm kidding.
But no, look, we are right along lockstep with the FAA in this training, not diverting for anything, not asking for any exceptions. Dual control, side-by-side seating for the VTOL and the CTOL aircraft. We've trained a bunch of customers so far. It's a good question.
We'll try. We can squeeze in one more, I think.
You're using it as much as you want, but you recharge multiple times a day, 1,000 cycles. Do you need to have an advance in technology for this to be commercially viable?
Yeah. So to be commercially viable, the technology as it exists today is great. Like, so we get 1,500+ cycles on full depth of discharge cycles. That lasts for about a year at the cadence that, like, a UPS would use the aircraft. At that point, we take the battery back, we replace the cells and the cold plate, the two cheapest things in the battery, and we sell it back to them. Our revenue model is built around that entire principle. The economics close, and as Herman said, you have about a 42% all-in reduction of total cost of operation when you account for the battery, the energy, the pilot, the amortization cost of the aircraft, all the maintenance, when you put that into the field relative to the state-of-the-art carrying the same payload.
Batteries will continue to get better, and that will get better as well. Yeah. Everybody working on batteries wants higher cycle life, lower cost, lower impedance, higher power, and energy density. Yeah, in that 42% reduction, we plan on changing the battery once a year. Yeah. So it's all captured there. Yeah.
Great.
Thank you.
Guys, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much.
Thanks, John.
Thanks, sir.
Appreciate it.