An experimental electric-plane manufacturer that chose a midcoast Maine airport to debut cutting-edge technology is falling on hard times both financially and mechanically.
BETA Technologies, based at the Burlington, Vermont International Airport, two years ago selected the Knox County Airport as the first in the state with battery chargers in anticipation of ramping up use of electric planes to service the nearby islands.
The airport envisioned electric planes as positioning the facility to become a “green energy” hub along Maine’s midcoast.
“The installation of these chargers is going to change dramatically the relationship between the airport and our surrounding communities,” a hopeful Jeremy Shaw, the-then manager of Knox Airport, said two years ago.
Shaw hoped the chargers, and the aircraft that will eventually accompany them, could play a critical role in servicing the needs of residents who live off the coast.
“Having the ability to have quiet aircraft delivering freight, groceries and passengers to Maine’s island community really opens the door for operations we can’t do now,” he said at the time.
Alan Lambert, director of aviation at the Maine Department of Transportation, envisioned the EV aircraft as a way to feed passengers to larger airports from smaller areas. “You could go to a small general aviation airport, get on the EV, and fly to Logan in 45 minutes. And you’re on your way to Florida on your vacation,” Lambert said.
Easier said than done.
BETA was recently notified it was one of 200 “renewable energy” projects nationwide losing major federal funding.
The U.S. Department of Energy canceled a roughly $1.8 million grant that would have gone toward developing technology to recharge batteries in environments with little or no electric infrastructure.
The company has been desperately seeking to be the first in the country to get FAA certification for battery-powered planes that can take off and land vertically.
With the competition intensely fierce to become the modern-day version of the Wright Brothers even one hiccup is enough to ground the dream, and BETA has had a string of mishaps, let alone just one.
The company less than a month ago filed papers ahead of an initial public stock offering.
BETA has raised more than a billion dollars in private funding in recent years to finance its experimental battery-powered plane technology.
Its leaders claim they are well positioned to become the first FAA certified company for using electric airplanes, despite a number of setbacks.
The company’s hopes are counterbalanced by some troubling finances, besides the loss of the federal grant.
BETA reported net losses of $176 million the same year it supplied Owls Head with the battery chargers and it reported losing $276 million last year.
During the first six months of this year, it lost another $159 million.
Besides losing an expected taxpayer-funded grant and difficult finances in general, BETA has had a rough go of it in the past few years involving either its own aircraft or pilots or both.
The recent emergency landing of a BETA Technologies chopper in Colchester, Vermont was just the latest in a string of incidents plaguing the company.
But the mishap isn’t just a one-off for the electric-aircraft firm or its personnel.
Just this past May, a BETA helicopter also made an emergency landing, in a Williston, Vermont field due to mechanical issues.
A similar BETA helicopter’s ill-fated landing occurred four years ago, August 2021, also in Colchester, when smoke filled the cockpit. An ensuing fire destroyed the aircraft.
That same month, a second incident happened when BETA founder and CEO Kyle Clark, flying his own plane, had to make an emergency landing on a farmer’s field in Richmond, Vermont after engine trouble.
In August 2022, a BETA shipping container filled with lithium-ion batteries for its experimental aircraft caught fire at its airport facility, the second such similar incident involving lithium-ion batteries.
The first, in 2019, occurred when a battery had a catastrophic failure, also triggering a fire.
In 2024, a BETA systems engineer and former company test pilot, Lochie Ferrier, was killed in a plane crash off the California coast in his small, four-seat hobbyist-built plane.
As a test pilot for BETA in 2022, Ferrier helped fly the company’s experimental electric aircraft from Vermont to Kentucky so then-U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg could check out the prototype.
BETA was incorporated in 2017 by Clark, a Harvard-educated pilot, engineer and entrepreneur.
The company seven years ago made the first flight of its original 4,000-pound Ava XC eight-motor, eight-propeller, battery-operated proof-of-concept aircraft.
