Air-taxi start-up Beta Technologies debuted its new airplane Friday with a significant helicopter airlift of the streamlined white model throughout Lake Champlain from Burlington, Vermont, to Plattsburgh, New York. Code-named Alia, the electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) plane is the successor to Ava, a smaller sized prototype the business used to explore propulsion strategies and discover the tricky aerodynamics of small, amazed, vertical-lift flight.
According to business founder Kyle Clark, Alia’s striking configuration and elegant shape owes a debt to the longest-migrating bird on the planet, the Arctic tern. This consists of a twin-tail assembly supported by angled trusses, drastically arched wings, and arcing, tapered wingtips. The tern’s tail setup and wing position “showed a great standard to begin with,” Clark states.
For the tern, those