Secrets of the Amazing New Beta Technologies Electric EVTOL Prototype Airplane

hey everyone eric adams here i'm a technology and transportation journalist and a photographer we're going to talk today about a new all-electric vertical takeoff and landing airplane called the aaliyah 250. it's being developed not in california or texas or florida or one of the other familiar aviation hubs but in vermont by a company called beta technologies it's part of a new generation of electric vertical lift aircraft being developed most prominently for urban air mobility that is air taxis but also for commercial and cargo applications though alia can be used in all of that beta is targeting the latter first the cargo the industrial and the military uses the airplane sleek design is inspired by one of the most aerodynamically efficient migratory birds in the world the arctic turn and it uses a custom engineered electric powertrain to reach its targeted goal 250 miles of flight at 150 miles per hour on a single battery charge the alia 250 is a visually striking airplane and one of the key frontrunners in the race to develop viable ev toll aircraft that stands for electric vertical takeoff and landing when i started covering beta in 2019 they were working on a different prototype called ava shown here which used eight tilting blades to alternate between vertical flight and horizontal that concept was intended to develop understandings of the power and aerodynamic challenges associated with electric vertical aviation before porting those insights over to the company's actual production aircraft the alia 250 this one by the way note that it is shown in these videos with a temporary landing gear array intended to facilitate early runway testing that'll be replaced with a sleeker final configuration soon also note that the top rotors are not installed during the tests shown in these videos that's because this phase of flight tests focused on understanding the airplane's performance and forward flight so no you're not in this video going to see vertical takeoff and landing that comes a little bit later probably within just a few months the company hasn't been drawing a ton of attention to itself with a lot of public proclamations and announcements and overly ambitious readiness projections but it's been instead head down quietly getting the work done that said beta has had some extremely significant news recently on march 17th test pilot cameron arlo guthrie flew aaliyah from its primary test location in plattsburgh new york across lake champlain to the company's headquarters in nearby burlington vermont this is the first time an ev toll manufacturer has been granted permission by the federal aviation administration to fly from its base airport to a different airport the agency doesn't allow experimental test aircraft to fly beyond their base airports until they're proven stable enough to do so safely so that mission represents that achievement as well as the closing of the initial phase of flight test founder ceo and chief test pilot kyle clark said the company added its own requirements along the way so um we were pretty quiet from march until june when we scooped up aaliyah with a with a helicopter and carried it over to plattsburgh to begin fixed-wing flight testing we have to prove that the aircraft is stable throughout its entire operating envelope that the performance the controllability the stability of the aircraft allows you to perform at a minimum normal procedures take off landings go rounds stalls slips and it doesn't diverge from a a controllable airplane in a way that is irrecoverable from the pilot's perspective and we took that one step further to run the entire fixed-wing gamut from a stability a control a spiral resistance a free returns um handling characteristics uh flight test campaign and then in parallel with that we we needed to validate that the performance of the aircraft so the the l over d which is the primary metric that determines how slippery an aircraft is liftover drag ratio exactly the thrust to weight ratio how much thrust we're really getting out of the system once it's completely installed and um and all of the other kind of finer points of of performance um the way it rolls on the ground the way it lands the way it rotates the way it derotates all needed to be proven uh to basically clear the envelope as a fixed-wing aircraft and one of the really important things for an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft is how the aircraft handles at or near its stall point so what are the stall characteristics so we spent a lot of time doing normal stalls power on stalls accelerated stalls where you load the wing to a higher than 1g condition and then decelerate the aircraft until it stalls the wing stalls and it's really important because you have to come near that every time you transition onto the rotors so in accordance with our test philosophy it was hover the aircraft go and fly it on a fixed wing and then make it go as slow as possible on a fixed wing in all different configurations and and weights and then we move to going as fast as possible on the hover and those meet so when those meet we've covered the entire envelope from vertical to horizontal so we painted the ends of the envelope now and we brought the fixed wing back to the slow condition and now it's time to bring alia back to our research and development center here in vermont and according to the faa we needed to clear all of those handling and stability and control questions prior to bringing it back to beta and so then we'll bring it back here and we'll fly it back and forth a few times and that'll conclude our initial flight test campaign on the fixed wing sides we've done the hover then we did the fixed swing now uh in in april and june we put on the the hover kit again and we start flying more and more maneuvering flights in hover down at the ground and up at 5000 feet um we're now comfortable operating between five and eight thousand feet routinely and that that gives us you know plenty of time at a safe altitude to paint the corners of the envelope in other news beta has also been admitted to the general aviation manufacturers association one of the first ev toll manufacturers to get in and has completed a network of its own charging stations that stretches all the way from vermont to ohio it's also finalizing agreements with new customers and supporting the goals of its first such partner united therapeutics that company founded by technology innovator martine rothblot provided beta with its initial funding it's developing man-made organs for human transplant and intends to use beta's aircraft in a state-of-the-art ultra-efficient delivery network in addition to rothblatt beta's board includes inventor dean kaiman entrepreneur eric hershberg and aerospace investor adam grosser among several others beta is also working with the u.s air force's agility prime initiative that seeks to adapt this new generation of electric aircraft for dod missions now beta is an unusual company first its vermont location is a bit of a surprise especially because the state's extreme winter weather can make consistent flight tests a challenge though on the other hand it also allows them to more readily test their battery systems across a wider variety of temperatures also its founder kyle clark is himself non-traditional at least by the standards of the current air taxi startup leadership which tends to be very silicon valley focused clark got his engineering degree from harvard university in 2004 where he received an engineering thesis of the year award for his work in flight dynamics and control algorithms and briefly flirted with a career as a professional hockey player specifically serving an unofficial role as an enforcer before pivoting into engineering and aviation since founding the company in 2017 clark has recruited dozens of leading engineers and designers as well as a team of test pilots who are helping hone the control systems for the new aircraft and ensure safety for the design and the flight test program he's also instilled a strong culture of aviation in the company offering to pay for the flight training of any employee regardless of their role at beta though the company is based in burlington actual flight test operations as i said have moved to plattsburgh new york across the lake so personnel are shuttled daily across champlain in the company's growing fleet of airplanes and helicopters all of course using internal combustion engines for now clark himself is a test pilot with a variety of both fixed wing and helicopter certifications he is in fact the company's lead test pilot this is also extremely unconventional for the industry but clark says he wouldn't have it any other way according to him having the ceo as a chief test pilot not only exhibits his faith in his team's work but it keeps that team aware of the stakes involved aviation is unforgiving and life safety is front and center now i would actually take the significance of these little details even further his role as the chief test pilot and his focus on the culture of aviation of beta gives the company a top-down awareness of the endless nuances of aircraft development and operation yes they use sub-scale prototypes and simulators just like everyone else in the ev toll industry and in fact the founder of the x-plane simulator which the company uses this guy named austin meyer who is a beta investor and a board member as well as a consultant in terms of deploying digital simulation technology to aircraft development but their immediate embrace of active daily flying of all types of aircraft and their use of human test pilots from the get-go could give them a concrete edge as time goes on after all aviation operates in an intensely analog reality governed by physics and subject to the vagaries of the mechanical world and the natural world and in the air success depends as much on instinct and intuition as it does training and procedure it's not a video game nor are evie told aircraft a mere upscaling of quadcopter drones aviation has certainly flourished as a result of the explosion of digital technology including in both the engineering and operation of all aircraft to the point where fully autonomous operation is right around the corner but the fact is we're not there yet human pilots remain critical in every aspect of aircraft conception and development the fact that future evital aircraft like aaliyah are so small and intended to eventually carry passengers from the general public makes this human presence in their development with all the insights that decades of flying have brought us all the more essential anyway i sat down with clark recently to talk about the new airplane the company and the challenges of being a startup in the aviation community first though let's find out a little bit more about aaliyah itself the 6000 pound aircraft uses a 50 foot wide wing and four fixed propellers mounted above the fuselage for vertical lift rather than deploying a tilting mechanism that pitches the prop skyward as needed the company says it chose this configuration for simplicity and reliability and to ease the certification process for the aircraft in forward flight a rear pusher prop generates enough thrust to reach that 150 mile per hour mark so the last time we spoke we talked about that aircraft ava which had eight rotors and they started pointing upward and they articulated four big gyroscopic loads articulating forward to transition from vertical flight to horizontal flight internal to that we had liquid cooled motors liquid cooled inverters and gearboxes associated with every motor we learned very quickly that those type of complexities really don't earn their way onto an aircraft and it was really difficult but necessary that we took a big step back from that program we said what didn't we like about the program and those were some of the core elements so we had a big paradigm shift in thinking we said thrust vectoring is not the right way to go forward but dedicated propulsion is so we created aliyah and aaliyah allows us to design motors and inverters and propellers that are optimized for their job so in this case we have four propellers and eight motors that are optimized for picking the aircraft up and one in the back that's optimized from an aerodynamic and electrical perspective that's optimized for long range that net net is a better design than the than the tilting rotor thrust vectoring design so we started flying that aircraft earlier this year and uh and and we've been uh we've been improving on the the basic thesis of simplicity every time we iterate on a new feature of the aircraft a new function of the aircraft as we move from our initial manned flights to autonomous flights on the smaller aircraft and to this one which is a cargo variant for air force materiel command and cargo carriers there's two longitudinal booms that weigh about 120 pounds each pretty lightweight in the corner of each boom there are these cartridges that house the axis of rotation for the lifting rotors those lifting rotors pick the aircraft up and if you look at the thickness ratio of the front middle of the wing you'll see it's very thick relative to its length and that's for the box beam torsional moment that happens when you yaw this airplane so in the in the vertical configuration you're using the four rotors here and that box beam in the middle you want to turn it to the right well you you activate motors number one and three you want to turn to the left you go two and four that counter torque turns the airplane around obviously you want to lean it forward the rear ones come up you want to go backwards the front ones come up but and the same thing for rolling the aircraft the way that it flies is it picks itself up on the rotors and immediately a pusher motor in the back turns on you start accelerating forward as you start to accelerating for accelerate forward you reduce the torque on the four corner rotors because the wing starts to develop lift and the sum of the lift generated by the top rotors and the wing always sums to the weight of the aircraft so as you accelerate forward and the wing starts to develop dynamic pressure you proportionally lower the torque on the four rotors to the point that the wing is carrying the entire load of the aircraft at that point these rotors are stowed so they're pointed directly into the wind when they're pointed directly into the wind it becomes very very aerodynamic very slippery and you're using a rotor at the back that is optimized for crews of course when you come back into land as you slow the airplane down you never stall the wing which is really interesting you never stall the wing all you do is you reduce speed the dynamic pressure drops the net lift of the wing drops and you proportionally increase the lift as the wing drops proportionally increase the lift on the four rotors to the point that you come to a near stop and you stop the aircraft and put it down the aircraft isn't designed to hover around the way a helicopter is in a search and rescue or or a long lining application it's designed to land on a pad and therefore it's a transient operation of bringing the lift rotors up so it's really a very short takeoff and landing airplane because it spends 99 of its time flying on the wing cool a couple other neat design features you probably notice the wing has a dihedral in the middle and an antihedral on the outside that provides some very very important stability um uh characteristics and that's the angle that we're talking about yeah it's the angle from horizontal exactly so the dihedral up here in the middle gives it some some um some roll stability some stability about the longitudinal axis the same thing happens with that tail that actually provides some spin recovery and resistance as well you'll see that the the vertical stabilizer is offset from these big long booms and on top of these big long booms you see rotors over there in the corner those rotors over there that sit on top they disturb the air but the cool thing is the rear rotor is in the wake of the front rotor just like a bicyclist in a peloton so the the wake of this sucker punches the rear rotor and gives it very very low drag but we don't want low energy flow hitting the vertical stabilizer so if you look straight down here you'll see that that vertical stabilizer is offset from these two so it gets clean air and you can make the vertical stabilizer smaller so there's a lot of neat little aerodynamic tricks these are also not straight they're bent up and then down and they're not vertical the places where the the vertical rotors attach and that's to enhance controllability in the hover state now i also noticed that the rotors don't look like conventional helicopter rotors yeah as we know them so show me what's going on here are these the new ones are these um those are the older ones those are the ones we first flight tested with um the yeah they they certainly don't look like uh conventional helicopter rotors here's some old ones from ava that we brought to failure um intentionally yeah um these rotors these types of rotors if you look right down it and we pick this rotor up you'll see how amazingly aerodynamic it is but the interesting thing is to have a gear box list motor we have a 26 inch diameter hub in there right and that that hub holds the motor inside the rotor so the air that comes down here goes right around the motor and then reconverges at the back so it's a very slippery aerodynamic shape to to uh to manage the frontal area of the motors and the new rotors are they substantially different from these older ones they are okay they are they're significantly quieter um they have a bigger cord and they have a couple features that allow them to operate in edgewise flight and more surety and as we release those we'll certainly tell people more about them but let me show you one other really important thing that that that goes on in this aircraft so all the batteries of this aircraft are in the belly of the aircraft and so under here we have we've got these five bays of batteries under here we've got five bays of batteries right and each of the batteries has a latch right here that allows it to be disconnected these five bays of batteries right here allow us to manage the center of gravity but they are also put low and in the center of the aircraft so we have low moments of inertia so we let get a lot of control authority in the aircraft and so if we had a battery fire they're down in the bottom they can outgas out the back and they don't affect primary structure which is a really important part of the certification of the aircraft you know everybody's seen the uh the tesla video where they did the rollover tests for um for the model s and the model x right and they effectively couldn't roll the car over by putting all the batteries down in the bottom of this at the level of the cross tubes you effectively have half the weight of the entire aircraft down below the cross tubes of the aircraft it makes for an incredibly stable aircraft that's stable for airplanes as well as for cars yeah i mean look you've got you've got the mass centered towards the center of the aircraft so if if you had if you had a lot of mass out here on the wingtips right yeah and you roll the aircraft then you want to stop the roll well you've got all that mass going in one direction you've got to stop it it means you have less control authority net to manage the aircraft when you land on this aircraft and it's gusty out it's really good to have all that mass way down towards the bottom so let's say you ran it on in an emergency configuration or in a normal landing that low center of gravity is great so it's there's some there's some pretty damn good advantages of putting the batteries in the belly of the aircraft a lot of the folks in this industry think initially and there's another secret one which is really interesting and i'll give it away right now a lot of folks take the batteries and they put them out by the motors thinking the highest currents happen between the batteries and the motors well let's put them out there so we reduce our cabling weight and let's put them out there because that's you want to put the the weight where you're lifting the weight and that seems to make sense right until you say wait a second our customers want to recharge faster than we want to discharge so if we have a two and a half hour mission and we're recharging in 50 minutes guess where the highest currents happen during recharging right so if we want to minimize cable weight we put the batteries in a centralized low position a lot of folks don't think about the non-obvious thing of how to optimize the aircraft for recharging and they only think about how to optimize the aircraft for discharging um i think without a doubt cargo medical and government applications for these vehicles is going to happen before urban air mobility and passenger markets it doesn't mean that they don't initiate you know pilot programs at the same time but the adoption and the friction to adoption for medical and cargo is just so much lower they're going into places that are either our traditional landing pads at airports or industrial parks it's simply easier to get people to approve a landing pad an industrial park than it is in downtown manhattan or dallas or la where there's a lot of opinions and a lot of people so it's not that the aircraft aren't capable of carrying people it's just easier to land them where nobody cares i i consider ourselves working within the aerospace industry but we're a power electronics and control startup we're really focused on the propulsion systems and the controls of the aircraft those are the enabling technologies for the non-enabling technologies like the structure and the avionics the interior the seats all of these things of traditional aerospace we don't pretend to create those and and make those in aerospace so what's interesting about that is that when we compare ourselves to the incumbent aerospace companies we have the same amount if not more knowledge in the enabling technologies i.e the batteries motors inverters and controls and then we leverage existing aerospace for all the fundamental technologies like the structure and the avionics and the interiors so we get the best of both worlds so a lot of folks in this industry who have thought i'm going to invent everything from scratch from the data buses to the avionics to the structure to the material processing and as far as i'm concerned that's pretty well vetted there's not a huge amount of improvement to be made there in this context there's a massive improvement to made when we move from diesel jet a burning few helicopters to electrically powered aircraft and the enabling technology embedded in that is the batteries and motors the inverters and the controls so we're really not an aerospace startup we happen to be in the aerospace space because we all love flying airplanes but we're really a power electronics startup [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: EricAdams321

Views: 172,047

Keywords: aviation, airplanes, flight, innovation, air taxi, electric, electric airplane, flying, beta technologies, evtol

Id: 7HKD5WsTqOQ

Length: 26min 0sec (1560 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021