Great. Good morning, everyone. I'm Kristine Liwag, Morgan Stanley's Aerospace and Defense Research Analyst. Kinda fun to be at the TMT conference. Today I'm joined by BETA. Super excited to have Kyle and Herman come here and be part of our fireside chat this morning. Before that, I have to read these disclosures. I'm sure you have it memorized. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. With that, you know, Kyle, Herman, you know, the IPO was November 4, 2025. I mean, it's crazy, it's already been four months. Can you talk about what the IPO has let you be able to accomplish and what's it been like to be a publicly traded company?
I think, the anxiety around transforming a very, very tight cultural company into a public company was greater than what materialized.
Mm-hmm.
The IPO went extremely well. Not to blow Morgan Stanley's horn too much, but they really took the time to deeply understand the business, tell the story, and understand the deltas between us, other people in the industry, and the reality of developing a high-reliability aircraft that needs to go out into the world. When we got back to the team, the way in which we went through the IPO, where we had a very simple process, simply talk about the things that we've done, take credit for those, describe a business model that makes sense, foundational technologies, and have a very simple marketing strategy. The thing that surprised me most, actually, was that we went back to Vermont, we got back to work, we did exactly what we said we were gonna do.
We delivered what we delivered at the end of the year that Herman's going to report on next week. We hit all our milestones, we continued doing it, and people were like, "Hey, what's going on up there?" I'm like, "I told you we weren't going to tell you anything until we had a type certification. We set a world record. We got a major deal with a deposit back on it." What surprised me the most was that the market wanted more information, so we decided to just open the curtains a little wider consistently. We didn't obfuscate the glass. We said, "Come on and look into the business." We had to change a little bit on the way we talked to the world with just a more consistent drumbeat of what's going on.
I mean, just little things like the number of miles flown, the success of the stuff we've done in Norway, the success in New Zealand. Although I thought that that was just par for the course or table stakes that we said we were gonna do and we were consistently delivering on it, people were saying, "Hey, we need to hear about that proactively." That was one big change. On what it's allowed us to do, the quantum of money that we got out of the IPO has allowed us to accelerate some really key programs. It was a good question by a gentleman we just met with about our defense program. It allowed us to pull six months in on a major defense program that we didn't expect to.
It allowed us to up our capital investment in vertical integration. That's resulted in a couple of our military programs moving from phase I to phase II kind of ahead of schedule. Those are the underwater programs. We've seen some real results in the flexibility to move those resources in, and the team growth has been, you know, as we expected. I think we just hit 1,200 people. We were at the IPO at 900. That's 300 people added since then of very high-quality people. We had a bit of a bow wave of unconsumed resumes and technical talent just with a little bit of uncertainty.
You know, when you go out to raise $500 million and you end up with $1.2 billion, it can change the way you look forward to the, to the next year or so. Largely, it's accelerated our military programs. You know, we have a saying that Devin hates it when I say it, "Nine women, one month, no baby." Some things take time. Certification testing, motor testing, those things, they just need the hours, they need the reps, and they need the feedback, and they need the compulsory timelines that the FAA works on to materialize, so we don't get to advance those. Those are the two big kind of advancements. One, surprise, communication, and two, advancements.
That's a great point.
Yeah, no, I agree. I would've pointed to the balance sheet flexibility that it gave us. The strategy was always there. It just gave us the flexibility to really pull things in. It's the capital we've been talking about. It just really gave us the flexibility to think about when we actually deploy that capital. That was one of the biggest successes in the IPO.
Wonderful. You know, maybe, Kyle, you know, from your relationship with the FAA, they've been very laudatory about you and, you know, the progress Beta has made in terms of electrification of aircraft. At the end of January, we've seen a reorganization within the FAA and the creation of the Office of Advanced Aviation Technologies. Can you talk about what this is? I mean, you've been very passionate and very present within the FAA. What does this mean for the industry?
Yeah. To create an entirely new class of aircraft, entirely new pilot license, an entirely new operational schema, low altitude IFR routing, all these things that have to go in to really commercialize electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft and Advanced Air Mobility is something, I mean, I've been working on since 2002. First it was the aircraft, then it was all the peripheral things, and now I chair the industry trade group within GAMA on innovation policy and electrification, which gives me the ability to work directly with the FAA Administrator, the Department of Transportation, Sean Duffy, to set the national strategy around AAM. I've spent a lot of time with them personally one-on-one, even before Bedford was announced as the next Administrator to be confirmed.
He was up at Vermont. We spent a lot of time walking through this. He was keenly interested as the CEO of Republic Airways. There's a long history of that. After two, three years of working through those committees to get these regulatory policies in place, the dominoes started to fall. We got the SFAR done, which defines pilot training and entry into service. We get the Advisory Circular done, which defines all the cert bases for powered-lift aircraft. That was in June of last year. Came the EIPP program on the heels of the Executive Order. We have a subsequent Executive Order, and now the EIPP program is materializing, and we've gotten massive delegation as a business. I'll just give you one example.
Two weeks ago, excuse me, we went from 20 delegations on our aircraft program, and they added 82 delegations of finding a compliance. They've given us the ability to control our destiny in a certification program because of the trust and credibility that we've achieved by certifying the propeller with Hartzell and going on and getting into conforming motor running and getting four credit testing done. Most recently, all of the human factors FAA pilots came up and flew the aircraft, and they came back after flying the first fly-by-wire Part 23 airplane in certification right now, and they said it's shockingly normal. That's a really good thing for the FAA because it fits within a realm that they understand.
What they don't know is behind the scenes in the fly-by-wire system, that fly-by-wire system is designed to make it totally easy and passive to fly. They did two days of training, and they're out flying our aircraft. Those types of relationships have been really pivotal when we walk into the FAA and we have the hard conversations. One of the big hard ones we had recently was around lightning strike tolerance. There was a lot of concern in the FAA. I have an electric aircraft. Should we up the lightning levels? Should we go to military? Military is 300,000 amps, transport category 300,000 amps, and for Part 23, it's 100,000 amps.
I went down there, and they said, "Why don't you come on in and talk to us about this?" I explained the physics of a lightning strike, and it turns out that a battery is a massive Transorb. It's one of the best ways to mitigate the spikes associated with a lightning strike. A aluminum can full of fuel is not so much, right? The idea of changing the lightning, the net result was, let's leave it as it is, but logically, we should be reducing the lightning level, right? Because the secondary effects of lightning, which is really what you're worried about, the secondary effects of affecting a flight control computer, a servo, an avionics set or whatever, are way lower when you have that massive Transorb online.
We went through this with Patriot missile as well because they were running diesel generators, and we made them all solid state power electronics with massive capacitance, 3,000 microfarads per inverter module, massive Transorbs. Anyway, the point is that once you earn the credibility of having safe, reliable flight test, solid technologists, very, very thoughtful entry into service, going cargo first, they invite you in to be the voice of reason when their subject matter experts and the policymakers kind of disagree on things. That's happened over and over and over again. Battery state of charge estimate, it was a very public one. Knowing how much fuel's in the tank on a battery is a nonlinear challenge. You have degradation of the battery. You've got current coming in and out of the batteries. You can't just measure open circuit voltage.
You're counting coulombs not that accurately, and you have some unknown capacity in your battery, and how you want to get to 1% to 2% accuracy of how much energy you have left, it's a hard problem. With thousands and thousands of samples and millions and millions of cycles, you can actually create statistically relevant data to prove that. That's where the FAA has also relied on us.
You know, Kristine, a year ago, I think the big thing was, you know, how long would it take for this industry to really develop? I think under this administration, they have kicked the door open, it's now a matter of when. Even, you know, BETA aside, you know, it's a matter of when. There's great companies out there doing all these things. The question that we often get asked now, because I think all of that is behind us, is who are the players that are ready to scale? We get a lot more of a different question now. When are you guys gonna be ready to manufacture? As you know, our facility in Vermont is online, capable of making 300 aircraft a year.
All of those investments that we have made early on will start to pay dividends, especially as we head into the EIPP program, which Kyle and I are really excited to talk about.
Yeah. As far as the restructuring goes, having a dedicated office whose only job is the integration.
Yeah
of advanced air mobility and having a voice at the table is a really big deal. It's under a tremendously, like, respected Associate Administrator, Chris Rocheleau. His influence and history here is just gonna be really good for the industry.
Great. You know, you guys have referred to the EIPP a few times. I'd love to touch on that. Before that, I will say, I did fly on the aircraft.
Yes.
It was very exciting. I don't fly on all experimental aircraft I'm invited to fly. I made a promise to my husband. We have a young child now. I can't just hop in whatever plane I get invited on. It was a beautiful experience.
Oh.
You know, EIPP, and, you know, we have another thing we'll do, hopefully, talk to Devin about that flight. This EIPP, I mean, I think when I talk to general investors, this is not something that's really on their radar, right? There's a pretty fast acceleration. You're gonna see these things fly this summer. Can you talk about, you know, what is a EIPP with this, you know, it's through the FAA and Department of Transportation, states are actually leading the charge. Where are like, which states are you participating with? What kind of missions can you do this summer? I feel like this is, you know, similar to I don't know, the few summers ago, the billionaire space summer, where you have a concept proving out for the sector.
It seems like for the eVTOL, the eVTOL industry, it could be similar in magnitude regarding public attention for a space that, you know, seems like so far away. You're gonna have real flights this summer in certain routes. Can you talk about that?
Yeah. look, I think the term that Herman used a minute ago, kicking the door open in the industry, is exactly right in the case of the eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, which started last May with the Trump administration saying, "We're going to... We're not gonna fall behind China or Abu Dhabi or anybody in advanced air mobility." they mandated the Department of Transportation to create this integration pilot program for all advanced air mobility aircraft, autonomous aircraft, electric aircraft, VTOL aircraft. In September, they wrote the rules for it. The states would be the point.
The states would apply and say, "Here are the aircraft that we're using, here's the charging network, and here's the applications." Naturally, we worked with many, many states, more than 10 of them, that were leading the charge on these things, you know, Texas, Ohio, Florida, states where they're really quite progressive on this, provided them all the technical data and a whole lot of operational insight. Why? Because we have the most operational insight in the entire world on this. We had been flying in New Zealand, flying in Norway. It's funny that you say this. One of my proudest things is when I go and I see some random buddy from high school, they say, "I saw three of your airplanes today when I was playing golf." I thought...
We're flying all over New York and Vermont all the time, and we have a fleet of aircraft out there flying, that are flying hundreds of thousands of miles. That's gonna happen all across the country, and people are gonna start to see the economies of these aircraft. Delivering packages first, cargo, medical, logistics is our entry into service, and then passenger, CTOL, then VTOL. Our applications include CTOL and VTOL aircraft, starting with cargo, medical, and logistics, and moving to passenger. What's interesting is the FAA has opined on who's allowed to do revenue-generating flights, and they've said, "Cargo and logistics, yes.
Passenger, not so much." Now BETA's in a tremendous position with an aircraft that has 200 cu ft of cargo, has payload and payload margin, and we can go out and start doing revenue-generating flights with these aircraft a year in advance of what we told everybody in the IPO. That's like, I mean, you said it's like underappreciated by investors. Shit, if anybody came to you and said, "I just advanced my business model by a year at some small incremental cost of increasing our production throughput," you'd be like, "What? That doesn't make any sense. It's crazy." The Trump administration kicked open the door, and that's happened. So I mean, if you read the AAM National Strategy, if you flip through it, which EIPP is a big part of, like, half the photos in that National Strategy are of BETA aircraft.
Our business model is outlined in that. It is like we are front and center on this. We are not a great marketing company, but we're good at putting ourselves in the right position in this industry.
Yeah. Kristine, the intangible, like pulling the business in by a year, just around manufacturing, whenever you try to scale anything, it's hard to do. Kyle and I spent large portions of our careers in manufacturing, and we've always had a stepwise approach into it. This gives us the ability to build somewhere between 20 and 30 aircraft this year to deploy towards EIPP. If you think about the manufacturing ramp where, you know, we're building six aircraft, then 20, it gives you a nice glide path into, you know, 60 and 80 and 100.
What Herman says is really, really important here, it's that it is fundamentally illogical for anybody to say that, "I'm making toothbrushes. I'm making zero today. I'm going to flip the switch, and we're going to make a million tomorrow, 'cause everything's going to work flawlessly." It's not how manufacturing works. There's a ton of production engineering, a ton of quality systems, ton of material processing, ERP systems, all the people that have to be trained. That doesn't go like this, right? So the EIPP allows us to ramp, you know, a couple aircraft a month, four or five aircraft a month, getting to rate when we're going to do 30 aircraft a month in our current facility and break ground on our next facility right on the heels of that. EIPP provides a logical ramp into production.
Absolutely.
I think that's a good segue to manufacturing capacity then. You know, with your existing facility in Vermont, I think you have capacity to do 300 per year. Can you talk about, you know, variable investments you have to do? Where are you in terms of raw material sourcing? When can you get to that 300 per year run-r ate? Then with the proceeds from the IPO, how did that change, you know, your previous expectation for that acceleration?
Yeah. I'll answer your first question, and Herman can follow through on the balance, which is, the manufacturing engineering and the manufacturing turn-on strategy is really interesting. Our Chief of Operations, named Sean Donovan, he came from Tesla. Before there, it was at Electroimpact, which is a supplier to Boeing. Manufacturing in electric vehicles and in aerospace and testing systems at a high rate was the philosophy he walked in. He's a damn good engineer as well. The way he's designed our manufacturing turn-on strategy is that we started with the battery line. We ran the battery line at full rate for about four days, and then we shut it down for three weeks. We said, "Now we're gonna change all the things that we learned in those four days." This is a pulse introduction.
Then he went over to the tail, then he went to the wing, then he went to the fuselage. As you run these things at rate, you start to find the bottleneck. In the old leaning adage, you've got one person writing letters, one person licking stamps, one person writing the address, and one person sending the letter. You're like, "God, we need more people writing letters." You realize that your bandwidth is constrained by something, and that's what we needed to expose in these pulse lines. Sean's done a fabulous job of it. When we look at rate, it's more important than total quantum of aircraft because it's the way in which you demonstrate the rate of the aircraft. That's what we've been focused on.
How many wing tips can we make? You know, how many batteries, how many motors? You know, a big kind of, a big benefit of getting, of certifying the motors first was not only getting to rate, but getting to rate in a conforming way, FAA conforming, capital C conforming way. You know, just by way of example, all the way through November of last year, prior to our last earnings call, we had produced two conforming propulsion systems. We built probably 200 at that time. In the next month, we got up to 11. You had to break through and then start producing FAA conforming. Now we're, you know, as you know, we're in the Embraer job, we're doing our own conforming aircraft.
There's a designed entry into manufacturing that I think has to be really thoughtful. On numbers, you can kind of walk through.
I would start with Kristine, when we were working through the original business model, the IPO, we were thinking somewhere around $500 million we would raise, raising $1.2 billion changes things. When we were thinking about $500 million, the model closed, by the way, with that. We were staggering things, thinking about the timing of CapEx. When you raise $1.2 billion, the things that you were pausing on, you know, staging, it gives you the ability to rethink some of those decisions. You know, it's 300 aircraft per year in the existing footprint, this is going to be a supply-constrained environment. You just look at the backlog, the backlog is already there.
If we can make 300, 400, 500, the market is there ready to consume those units. There are decisions that we'll do a little bit differently than that financial model because the cash is just greater than what we originally planned for. It, it puts us in a really strong balance.
We were previously making about half the parts composite on our aircraft, we're trending towards making every single part.
Yeah.
That one of those constraints was we have spars, for example, that are 48 ft long. We don't have a 50-ft autoclave.
it can-
We do now after CapEx committee.
Yeah, exactly. It does exactly that. It gives us a lot more flexibility, one of the big things that Kyle and I talk about pretty often is the customer and making sure Beta has a great business model. It has to pencil for the customer. making sure that we could get at the cost as quickly as possible, the $1.2 billion certainly opens up a lot of flexibility on that item.
Yeah. Look, the just in the vertical integration of composites, there are two major things that happen. Obviously, we take the margin out of our supplier, but we also improve the design for manufacturability loop, little radius changes, whatever, and on those parts that we took out of supply chain and brought in-house, we had between a 50% and a 70% reduction of cost.
Yeah.
It wasn't because we're smarter or make things better, it's because the closed loop between our design engineer and manufacturing engineers are better. We can change tolerances, we can change radii, we can change things like that change the way we lay up parts.
You know, we have a pretty intimate room, which is, you know, good and bad, but we want it to be good. I encourage you guys to ask a question, raise your hand, be interactive. It's wonderful to have, Kyle and Herman here. We'll just wait for a mic.
Yeah
hear you.
Great.
Don't be shy, ask whatever you want.
Yeah.
Well, not whatever you want.
Good that you mentioned that because I was going somewhere.
Mm.
Hey, on the EIPP, just how to understand, you know, when you say revenue-generating, logistics and cargo, I don't understand EIPP very well and I'm going to now that you guys are bringing it up.
I have a note on it. It's okay.
Okay, good. I was understanding that there'd be kind of lots of flights, people would see them, there'd be demos, you know. You have your backlog and customers, and they're waiting for, you know, TC at some point, and, you know, we're going to ramp with UPS and Bristow, these people. Is that changing that dynamic? Are we just gonna sell planes during EIPP and, customers are gonna fly them? Or are we flying stuff and we're gonna charge cargo and-
I'm glad you said we because now we're on the same team.
Oh, yeah.
Look, I'm not going to avoid the question. I'm going to tell you where the gray is and where the certainty is. The EIPP, as many things in the current administrations, there's things we love about the White House right now, one of the things is not certainty, clarity, and kind of. It's been an evolving thing, an evolving target. What we do know is that those states will facilitate the use of our aircraft with an operator, and that operator can charge. When I say revenue-generating flight, it means UPS says, "I need this group of packages every morning at 8:00 A.M. to end up here." They say, "Okay, that's going to be $500 a flight." They just start flying the thing like this. That's revenue-generating for the operator.
That gives the ability for the operator to buy our aircraft, lease our aircraft, rent our aircraft. We're not sure. The reason we're not sure is that it'll be like next week when they announce the winners. We go into probably a 90-day OTA negotiation, Outside Transaction Authority contract with the government, that they provide the oversight through the FAA to allow us to do revenue-generating flights. However, during the application process, they gave us the ability to ask a ton of questions. Everybody asked questions. One of the questions they asked is, "Can we make revenue doing these flights?" They said, "For cargo, you can. For passengers, it's unlikely." That's where that comes from. Now, there's a big difference. I want to pick up on something you said.
There's a difference between an operation and a demonstration. In many cases, and you can count the number of aircraft allocated to this, and you can figure it out very quickly, a manufacturer may show up in Ohio or Texas or Florida and do a demonstration, fly for two weeks, fly for a month, do 10 flights, whatever. There are other operators, or sorry, other manufacturers, BETA being one of them, where we're saying it's a three-year program, here's 20 aircraft, fly them consistently every day, all weather with your pilots. That's an operation, right? I think that what's going to be a really interesting differentiator between us and other people in the EIPP is that we are not, I, and these guys know this, I've said this to team many times, one aircraft is not an operation. A demonstration is not an operation.
When you go out there and we just did this Republic Airways, they came up to BETA, and they said, "We're not gonna buy that aircraft until our pilots fly it." I said, "What do you mean by that?" 24/7, they want to fly it. They did. I said, "Have at it, take the aircraft." They flew, and if you look at these tracks, there was somebody who wrote an article...
72 hours.
72 hours without shutting the aircraft off.
Yeah, yeah.
Charge, fly, charge, fly, charge, fly, charge, fly. That's a very different thing than, "Hey, everybody, come and watch me fly over this mountain and land." We're doing the equivalent of that with the EIPP, which is pervasive, consistent, high rate, high cadence flights. That means they keep the aircraft, they have a spares program, they have a service and maintenance program, they do a training program for the pilots. It's not us flying it's them flying it, and there's a big maturity step. Anytime you release the baby, like, it's scary. But we have a belief in aerospace, and this has been proven by Airbus, been proven by Embraer, they don't give the baby back when they like it. Yes, it does lead to revenue for BETA because they keep the aircraft.
The revenue for BETA is selling an aircraft.
or leasing it.
or leasing it.
Yeah.
today-
We leased the aircraft.
Today, we have an aircraft with Bristow flying around Europe, and we also have one with Air New Zealand flying around, and we're paid for those aircraft. How EIPP generates revenue, we're working through those details, but we do have precedence on how we could. Just last thing on that, I'll pass it on. When we're engaging with the EIPP, the customer is engaging. Is it the customers we had in backlog that are familiar with what we're doing?
It exactly is, yeah.
New customer.
No, when this gets published, you'll see that the folks that are in our backlog are all of our EIPP partners.
Yeah.
A 100%.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
You're building the, kind of a risk build on the aircraft or, you know, do you have some kind of assurance from them?
No, no, that's a good-
Yeah.
There's no-
Yeah.
Nobody has any surety here, and it's a very good question, and Herman will report on this next week as well. Our instruction to our team is do not do anything that precludes us from building those aircraft. However, don't get over your skis with material purchase and hiring labor yet. It's a tricky balance because only companies that have the ability to turn this on within 90 days of OTA I had to sign a letter of attestation to the Department of Transportation saying, within 90 days of winning this through the OTA process, we can be in operation. No airplane is sourced, tooled, and built in 90 days. It just doesn't happen, right? You have to set the tooling, the tooling plans, the quality systems, all that stuff.
We put that foundation in place. When we flip the switch, it's an incremental cost. It does cost us a lot right now, and you said at risk. It is at our risk. What's interesting is that it's a risk that we were gonna either take this year or next year.
Yeah.
All we did is move that money in.
Yeah. That's it.
[audio distortion]
That's right. That's right. Now, inventory is a little bit of a funny word because-
[audio distortion] .
There are certain things like long lead time materials, bearings, magnets, stuff like that, you are building inventory for those. We are comfortable in issuing purchase orders. They don't have a shelf life, whatever, right? We stop short of, let's say, a final layout, gluing this to that piece, buying consumables that are short lead time. We're building the inventory in a smart way, I would say, of the things that would keep us, when we-
[audio distortion]
Exactly. The long lead time, some things like, just another stupid example, some things you batch. In a machine shop, you'll make 25 hinges at once, but composites are historically serial because you have two tools, and they go through a cycle like this. You have to have a smart way of saying, "Okay, we need to release 10 wing skins right now, even though we don't need them yet." There's certain things that are, even in manufacturing, not just material, have to be released.
More of a macro question. Many catalysts coming out, such a good story to tell. Like, don't care or where do you think the investors are?
Yeah.
[audio distortion].
Yeah. No, I'll thread those two together, interestingly enough. I think the miss is that many investors want a short-term return, a sugar high. They want some maple syrup in their coffee.
They want to see what they're buying today. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. When we got engaged with Amazon, one of the things that Jeff Bezos said to me very early, spent a lot of time together, just kinda walked through the business model, talked about what we were doing, and he said, "Kyle, I think what's gonna make you win in this industry is you have the ability to defer gratification." If every time we did something, we ran out to the world and said, "We did it then we're gonna spend more time telling people what we're doing versus doing the thing that's gonna get us to the end game. Just shut your mouth, get the stuff done, deliver what you say, it will come out in the end. It's non-glorious work. Standing up a quality management system, standing up a calibration, a configuration system, these are all required.
It's not sexy, it's not interesting, but ultimately what the outcome is sexy and interesting. That's what we're aiming for. That means that in many cases, I have to say, "You know what? I don't care today. I don't care what the stock price does today. I care what it does in a year, and I care what it does in a decade. Today, that's okay by me because I know here that I've done everything I said I was gonna do, and I'm pointed at certification, I'm pointed at deployment, I'm pointed at service, I'm pointed at the customer. I'm not pointed at doing a quick little thing that's gonna jump up and get the top headlines." That's what I think the miss is, to be blunt.
I apologize if I come across a little bit too forward on that, but it is, it's an honest answer to your question.
A few things, you know, we didn't talk about is your battery footprint. Can you talk about, you know, the role of that for EIPP and also, you know, that as an enabler even for some of your competitors?
Yeah. I think charging, battery charging. We built a charging network that is a better part of the country now. All the way down the East Coast. We've got them right here in town in San Francisco, just south of here. Multiple chargers actually bought by our friends at Archer, and over at the Salinas Airport, I should say. Across the Southeast down into Florida, we've got 84 sites right now that are charging. We do, I don't know, 14,000, 15,000 charging sessions a year right now. We're using them for our aircraft. We're using them for tests. Other people are using them for their aircraft, and a ground-based charging fleet is using them right now. That charging network. Again, it's different than a car charger.
It's modularized, so it has higher reliability and goes to higher voltages and very, very high currents, about 1.5 x a Tesla Supercharger, in order to hit the charge rates that UPS, Amazon, and others expect of this type of charger. We designed, built, and then certified that charger. We have the only certified charger that you can go into the utility, get an interconnection agreement, go to the airports division, which takes almost a year to do, get a permit to put this thing in, make sure it doesn't screw up the ILS approaches, and get that on an airport where an airplane can taxi right up and charge what they're doing. By the way, when that's done, you can unplug it, and you can plug it into a Rivian truck or any vehicle on the ground.
It'll recognize a vehicle ID, set the voltage, set the current, and charge that vehicle as well. That's where the package handoff happens. I believe that that foundational thing, which again isn't super interesting. Nobody sends a picture around of a charger. They send them of an airplane. Nobody rides in a charger, right? It's very important. It's an important part of the overall business model. I think that's gonna be a good portion of our ultimate enterprise value, and it continues to expand. Now, EIPP is interesting because in almost every EIPP application, whether it was ours or our competitors, we were the cited charger. We got insight into all the different applications because we have the only certified charger. Now I expect our charging network to grow between 20 and 50 sites with EIPP.
Again, I'm giving a range because in, like, two weeks we'll find out where they're going. They may be where our chargers already are, and we may have to deploy them into Dallas or into Houston or wherever.
What would be a must-have now here at conference? What would be?
Well, it would be a disappointment if the Department of Transportation and/or the FAA doesn't stay on the front foot of this globally, recognizing that there is no progress without a small amount of risk. You know, they ebb and flow with this. Right now it is, you know, what the investors call risk on attitude. It's like, hey, you don't get any benefit unless you're willing to put yourself out there. Now, I'll say that. It'd be a disappointment if. You know, we have a saying in aviation, it takes two to go, one to say no. That means the default is you don't fly, right? Because the three out of four of those matrix squares are covered with a no. It's the same way in the FAA. Now we have safety assessment.
We have type certification or authorization of the aircraft. You have flight standards for training pilots. Any one of those says, "I'm not comfortable with this," kaput. That's Polish for doesn't happen. On the other side of this, if it comes out and you see X, Y, and Z company get awarded these things, it means that the FAA believes in the safety and the maturity and the pilot training and the service of those folks who win the EIPP. I, you know, I appreciate the worst case scenario question, but I don't think that's gonna happen, not with the intel that we have at this point and the time that we've spent with these guys.
Guys, maybe to wrap up, our session, you know, investors love Catalyst. We already talked about EIPP, but what about certification? Is the motor still scheduled for the first half of 2026 for certification? Is ALIA CTOL still expected for end of year 2026 certification?
Yes on the motor, no on the CTOL, but that's not what we told you.
This is 2027.
Just to be clear. I don't know if.
It was end 2026, end of 2027.
That was an attempted gotcha question. No, yes, the motor's still on track, and that testing is going extremely well. This fits into that category of nine women, one month, no baby. These tests, they take thousands of hours of endurance, durability, and whatever. Just by way of example, in our durability test, which is one of the hardest tests to pass, where you run the motor for a few 100 hours, you take it down, inspect it, put it in a salt fog environment, take it down, take off and landing, take it down, rain, sleet, snow, take it down. Of those 1,000 hours that have to get done with those inspections and tear downs in between, we're at just over 800 hours of it. We're 80% through the longest duration durability test.
You just gotta put the hours in. There's only 24 hours in a day while you're running, right? It's going extremely well. The FAA has showed up to play. We've gotten a bunch of new delegations. We've worked through the challenges. We've got our test plans approved on the hardest ones first, and the simpler ones are still in work right now, but those are really, really low risk. This is like an old adage, like, if you got a wheel to take off the car when you blow a tire, find the bolts that's the nut that's the hardest first.
Get that rusty one off, because if you take all the other ones off, it's only gonna be harder to get that last one off because you've increased the pressure on that one bolt. We chose durability, EMI, what they call continued rotation, which is emergency descent after a failure, and endurance testing as the ones we started with, and those are going well.
Great.
[audio distortion]
Yes. It's not a hope, but it's where we're tracking to.
The CTOL.
For the CTOL. Our entire methodology was we phase shift everything by a year. We did our propeller last June. It ultimately, because there were some signatures, got certified in July. The motor, a year after that. The CTOL, a year after that, and the VTOL, a year after that. I know that there's a lot of fanciful dates being thrown around by other people, but this is a logical, pragmatic, FAA's-bought-into-the-program-plan type schedule.
Well, great. This concludes our session on BETA. Kyle, Herman, thank you very much for being here with us.
Thank you for having us.
Thank you. Appreciate it.