Instead, they envision Alia flying directly from one UPS warehouse to another – cutting out truck trips as well as plane flights - and eventually straight to large customers. That will require a radical reshaping of delivery networks away from the longtime hub and spoke pattern under which cargo planes typically make just one roundtrip per day, funneling packages from a local airport to a sorting center. Clark expects FAA reserve requirements to restrict flights to 125 miles.īut given Alia’s high price – roughly double a similarly sized new Cessna Grand Caravan and up to five times the used planes that dominate small cargo fleets – Beta and UPS know Alia will only make economic sense if it flies a lot. In May, Alia became the first electric aircraft to win airworthiness approval from the Air Force for manned flight.īeta says Alia’s bulbous cabin will be able to carry 600 pounds of payload, including the pilot, a maximum 250 nautical miles - at least 100 miles farther than any competitors that have prototypes in the air - or up to 1,250 pounds for 200 miles with one of the five battery packs removed. Air Force could end up fielding Alia first: Beta has won contracts worth $43.6 million to test out Alia for military use.
Beta executives are hoping that an order will be forthcoming from Amazon, too, with both the giants looking for ways to make good on pledges to slash carbon emissions from their package delivery operations.īeta aims to start delivering UPS’ first 10 aircraft in 2024 – assuming it wins safety certification for Alia by then from the Federal Aviation Administration. Big Brown inked a letter of intent to buy up to 150 Alia aircraft, whose price is expected to fall between $4 million and $5 million apiece. The cash infusion came a month after Beta won a big endorsement from UPS. Forbes estimates Beta’s revenue over the past 12 months at $15 million, mostly from U.S.
PIPERS GREASE MONKEY COUPONS SERIES
“They see a lot of parallels between Beta and Rivian,” says Edward Eppler, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who joined Beta as CFO after working on its Series A round, which raised $368 million in May at a $1.4 billion valuation. “The aircraft is the sexy part but we’re going to make big money off batteries,” says Clark.īeta investors Fidelity Management and Amazon are hoping the company will repeat the success of another electric vehicle startup they’ve bankrolled whose market cap recently topped $100 billion.
Clark says it won’t take much to adapt Alia for passenger service: The same rails used to secure cargo can be fitted with five seats. At UPS' request, Beta is stretching the fuselage 15 inches so that a fourth will fit when autonomous flight is allowed and the pilot's seat is removed. The electric aircraft Alia has about 200 cubic feet of interior space - around the same as a Cessna Grand Caravan - enough for three standard cargo pallets.
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