Blain Newton, chief information officer at BETA Technologies, explains a detail of the cockpit of an electric aircraft at a manufacturing facility in South Burlington on Thursday, Feb. 12. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger SOUTH BURLINGTON — Beta Technologies opened its nearly 200,000-square-foo t aircraft manufacturing facility less than three years ago, but the company is already bursting at the seams and planning to knock down walls.  The building is literally running out of desks — its finance team has been relocated to a balcony overlooking the production floor, amid snaking metal pipes and some carefully placed house plants. And in the next 18 months, the company plans to roughly double its Vermont workforce, adding 1,000 new positions in its bid to become a dominant player in the nascent electric plane industry.  In a recent private tour of the facility with VTDigger, Blain Newton, Beta’s chief information officer, gestured toward a wall that will soon come down in order to make room for the firm’s burgeoning staff. Leadership also plans to more than double the number of planes the company can produce by the early 2030s.  READ MORE Beta, Newton said, wants to make Vermont a “superpower” in the expanding electric flight industry.  Newton said Beta has been offered “hundreds of millions” in incentives to move its operations elsewhere, but has declined. The company isn’t going anywhere, he said, and won’t be a flash in the pan. Vermont-born CEO Kyle Clark has long cited personal commitment to the state, in addition to Beta’s advantageous access to airport facilities and support from Vermont officials, as a primary reason for staying put for the long haul. “This is a 100-year company,” Newton said.  State leaders are hopeful that Beta’s expansion will further strengthen Vermont’s workforce and economy.  A team meets on the floor of a BETA Technologies manufacturing facility in South Burlington on Thursday, Feb. 12. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger “Beta Technologies’ growth has already been transformative,” said Lindsay Kurrle, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development. “This is potentially another IBM success story.” IBM, a technology company that became the largest private employer in Vermont during the second half of the 20th century, left the state in 2015. Despite significant job losses associated with the transition, semiconductor maker GlobalFoundries still employs nearly 2,000 Vermonters in the firm’s former facility. Beta’s billion-dollar arrival on the stock market in November made it one of a small handful of publicly traded companies in Vermont. It’s also one of a few main frontrunners in a competitive niche of aviation, vying for public, private and military development contracts. The company, founded by Clark in 2017, is working toward one primary technological goal: making an electric plane that can take off vertically. Having already test-flown versions of the aircraft over 100,000 miles, the company is readying itself to begin selling planes to the public. Ramping up production to meet rising demand is central to the company’s plans, though experts say the facility at the edge of the Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport tarmac is already ahead of the competitive curve.  Yet the company faces stiff headwinds. Beta has still not received the Federal Aviation Administration’s approval for most of its designs, and competitors are racing to snap up major contracts first. And operating costs combined with a number of financial transitions saw the company report a net loss of $452 million in its most recent quarterly release.  The jury is out on Wall Street, too, about whether the newly public company can pull off its ambitious vision. Investors have grown skittish lately about the risks of cutting-edge aerospace technology, according to Chris Pierce, the primary analyst covering Beta for Needham and Company, which was among the underwriters for the company’s IPO. The company’s stock has fallen by over 20% in the last month and nearly 50% since November, hitting a new low in early February. Beta also took a potential reputational hit after the U.S. Department of Justice released files appearing to link company board member Dean Kamen with Jeffrey Epstein. Kamen has vigorously denied wrongdoing but resigned from his position at the company last week “to avoid potential distractions.” But there are lights on the horizon. The company worked with officials in Vermont and several other states to apply for a new federal pilot program announced by the Trump administration last year. If Beta is one of the companies selected in March, the company will be able to bypass certain FAA certification steps, and use its aircraft for some commercial and medical cargo sooner than expected. Some big players have also made bets on the company, including asset management behemoth BlackRock, General Electric and Amazon’s climate fund, which holds 11.7 million shares in the company. ‘Built for scale’ Analysts say that Beta has taken a somewhat different tack compared with its competition as it seeks to get off the ground. The company “built for scale right away,” Pierce said in an interview last week, a strategy which is “unusual” for this niche of the economy. Similar companies have ordinarily tended to concentrate their resources into achieving a near-final design in a smaller workshop setting. “You could say that Beta is ahead, because they’re building planes, right now, in their high capacity factory,” Pierce said. While competitors in the electric aircraft industry like Joby Aviation, Archer Aviation and Vertical Aerospace are expanding rapidly too, Pierce said they have yet to prove their facilities are equal to Beta in terms of capacity and readiness. None have begun producing aircraft from their primary large-scale facility yet except the Vermont company, Pierce said. For Newton, getting planes built as soon as possible was non-negotiable. “I think they’re missing a trick in a couple of ways,” he said of competitors.  Newton said Beta’s early assembly work on the production floor has allowed engineers to address more practical problems sooner. Walking past a plane under construction, he indicated several places on the body where red tape had been placed as a message to the design team: “somebody come look at this, and tell us if it’s okay.” And since the vast majority of the company’s engineers live and work in Vermont, he said, that’s an easy conversation to have. “We chose (the) strategic value (of) having the person who designed the part a mile down the road,” he said. Though Newton said the company’s current supply chain has left Beta “good for the first couple of years of production,” parts of that network are “expanding very significantly.” He hopes to bring more components closer to, or even into, Vermont. The company already runs a battery facility in St. Albans, which allows testing and development to occur just miles from the business’s main campus. In the initial years of Beta’s expansion, Newton said it’s been “huge to have that so close.” The company wants to build on its advantage. Right now, the production floor’s size allows for a maximum output of about 300 planes per year, with a short-term goal of six per month by the end of this year. After the expansion, construction for which could begin this spring, the facility should be able to complete about 700 aircraft each year, Newton said. In a December earnings call, Clark said the company had received 891 aircraft orders — many of which come from commercial airlines and charter companies — valued in total at around $3.5 billion.  Company leadership has said the airplanes may in part be used as short-distance private “air taxis” but are also intended to transport medical personnel and cargo. Pierce said he believes a best-case scenario for Beta in coming years would also include significant orders from various military customers. The company has positioned itself to try to cash in on such opportunities in a number of areas, and already has a small contract with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. military’s emerging technologies agency. Beta released a military-focused rendering of its flagship aircraft design, “ALIA,” in the lead-up to its stock exchange debut. A “Defense” page on the company’s website includes profiles of five retired U.S. generals that make up Beta’s Defense Advisory Board. “We expect multiple military branches to use ALIA defense (aircraft) in their operations,” company leadership said in filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last fall. Clark also met with European NATO leadership recently, he said in the earnings call. “We are right there in the conversation,” he said of potential contracts emerging from that relationship. ‘The first dollar’ Meanwhile, Beta has become one of the largest and fastest-growing private employers in Vermont, which experts say could have ripple effects across the state’s economy. Frank Cioffi, president of the Burlington area regional development corporation, said the company’s impact on the region’s economy has already been “tremendously significant.” Beta’s growth might pave the way for a partial resurgence of the state’s manufacturing sector, which has shrunk by more than 50% statewide (though not in excess of national trends) since IBM’s heyday in the 1990s, Cioffi said. Kurrle, who is also the state’s former labor commissioner, said Vermont jobs in transportation manufacturing tend to pay roughly one-third better than the statewide average salary. It is a difference that will trickle through to entire communities, she said, as employees begin “turning around and spending their money.” “These are significant jobs for Vermonters,” she said.  An entry-level employee at Beta could expect to start at between $26 and $32 hourly, while engineers can earn an annual salary of well over $100,000. No portion of Beta’s staff is unionized, a company spokesperson said. Cioffi added that manufacturing employers like Beta that export goods play another major role: They connect Vermont’s finances with cash flow outside the state. “They bring the first dollar into the Vermont economy before it starts to multiply,” Cioffi said of such outfits. And importantly, he said, Beta is also “leading the way” in connecting with the next generation of Vermont’s workforce. Roughly 75% of the 300 hires Beta has made over the last three months have been Vermonters, a company spokesperson said. Newton added that one of the company’s goals is to “capture” the “brain drain” that sees highly qualified Vermonters leave the state for work. Beta Workforce Development Specialist Sarah Deshaw, who is herself a graduate of the University of Vermont, said the company has done outreach across the state that focuses on pre-professional programs. Beta operates an academic “co-op” with UVM’s Grossman School of Business that allows students to gain work experience at the company as part of their degree, Deshaw said. The company has also retained 92 of its interns, Deshaw said, of whom about 35 are UVM graduates and roughly 45 are Vermont-born young professionals who attended college elsewhere.  The company participates in the U.S. Department of Defense’s Skillbridge program, which gives people nearing an exit from the military an option to develop skills elsewhere in the workforce.  “That’s enabled a lot of Vermonters who’d been in the service to come back,” Deshaw said. Younger students have remained a focus, too. Last year, Beta took its mobile flight simulator to all 17 Vermont high school technical education centers, according to Deshaw. A number of schools have also participated in curricula Beta created around composite metal manufacturing, one of the company’s primary points of focus. Kits for teachers included scrap materials from the South Burlington production floor. Such exposure is particularly helpful for students who want to join the workforce immediately after high school, which Deshaw emphasized is a legitimate pathway for those seeking an entry-level position at Beta. “They have carbon fiber and composites experience on their resume,” Deshaw said of the many students who have applied for internships after passing through such programs. “They’re going to the top of the stack.” Kurrle underlined how much is at stake for Vermont in Beta’s ability to execute its plans.  “If their plans come to fruition the way they’ve laid them out … we’re going to see transformation,” she said. Read the story on VTDigger here: An inside look at Beta Technologies’ big plans for Vermont . ...read more read less