 Okay, welcome everyone. This is exciting. We've been waiting all semester for this. I'm going to do a very brief introduction because we want to spend time listening. So these people are from Beta. We have Dr. David Churchill, who is on the Beta Board of Directors. He's a mechanical design and data integration expert, former Boeing researcher and VP of engineering for Lord MicroStrain. He's also a private pilot. And then Tyler Seelzer, who's a team member, curates pilot training and workforce development at Beta. He's a retired Air Force remote pilot of the RQ-4 Global Hawk and an emergency manager. He was born and raised in Williston, our Williston, and was able to return home and stay in the aerospace industry. Thanks to Beta. Please give a warm welcome to Dr. Churchill and Tyler. Really fun to see so many people out here. I hope we do you justice. So I'm just going to launch in. I'll do a bit and then Tyler will take it up. Tyler's got a way better speaking voice than I do. So just bear with me first here. And there we go. So that's us. You don't need that again. So those of you who are coming on the tour will see this building. It's our headquarters building. It's a hangar that has been on the ground at the airport for a long time. It was slated for a demolition before we took it over and fixed it up. We also have a bunch of other sites which you can find out about on the tour or if you ask us, we'll tell you more later today. So I'm skipping some of the detail here just to get to the good stuff. So what is our mission? And we stand to do nothing less than develop aircraft and the infrastructure needed to enable carbon-free aviation. So it's a big goal and we're really excited about it. So what we've developed and some of you may have seen these airplanes flying. These are two prototype aircraft. They are both electric aircraft. They are very close looking to our production aircraft, which are going to start rolling off our line next year sometime. So look up in the sky. They're white. They're hard to see sometimes. You won't hear them. So you just got to get lucky and see them. And so we have two different aircraft. They're really the same aircraft, but one is outfitted with extra stuff. And the extra stuff is illustrated on the right hand side of this kind of split personality picture. And it's the hover lift propellers that you're seeing there. So one of our aircraft is designed to lift up like a helicopter and then transition to more like conventional airplane flight and then turn back into a hovering vehicle and set down. Our first aircraft is the plain old vanilla flavored takeoff like an airplane, fly like an airplane, land like an airplane. We call that CETOL, conventional takeoff and landing, as opposed to VETOL, which is vertical takeoff and landing. They're really the same aircraft, but one's kind of a reduced set of the gear from the other one. We're producing to start with the CETOL aircraft, not surprisingly because it's the simpler one to get done. We are also developing the infrastructure needed to charge these beasts. So these charge stations are our design. You can see one being used here. And we are placing these all over the country at airports. This is our network that we have now. Some of these are not yet in the ground. Some of them are in the ground already. The green ones are in the ground, but a bunch of them are in permitting and pre-construction. This is just the first phase of our build out. It'll go all the way across the country and across the world eventually. One of our airplanes is right here, right now. And maybe if Tyler doesn't talk about it in his part, somebody asked about it. It's a pretty cool story about why it's there. So aviation emissions. Our goal is to reduce or eliminate carbon from aviation. So what is aviation doing today? It's using fossil fuels. And this is a graph. If you can't see these numbers, this is like World War II era. Actually, this ends around 2018. And you can see the red line is carbon emissions from aviation. It's just going up and up and up. And in the several years since the end of this data here, it's just continued to go up and there's no end in sight. So it needs to be dealt with. This just for reference is a graph of all energy usage globally. In the whole world for all purposes from all sources. Aviation is pretty small, 2%. So it's not the biggest character. On the other hand, it is one of the hardest to eliminate. So transportation in general is a really hard sector to decarbonize as opposed to let's say home heating or other industrial things. Because the vehicles have to carry their fuel along with them. And aviation is even the hardest because it has to carry it into the air, which is the weight is really challenging. So it's a really challenging thing to do. And that's what we're trying to do. So what do you need? There's two things that you need in order to achieve carbon free air travel. One of them is a carbon free energy source. And we are using electricity stored in a battery. And you may say, well, is that really carbon free? And hold that thought. I'll talk about it in a minute. But it certainly can be carbon free. You can generate electricity with solar wind renewables and that electricity is carbon free. You can store it in a battery and then you can use that as your fuel source in an airplane. So the next thing you need is you need the airplane that can use that energy. So you can stack up a bunch of batteries in a conventional everyday airplane that we have now, but it won't make it work. You got to have the airplane that can make use of that energy. So those two things and only those two things, both of them are big, but still it's only two. So we're building the airplane. The airplanes we're flying already serve this mission. They're totally battery powered, 100% electric. There's zero emissions coming out of the plane when it flies. So the question is, okay, but how do you charge that battery? And that's a great question. And everybody should ask that question about every electric vehicle or every electric use case. And what I'm going to show you next is something about the grid, where that energy comes from. And this really applies not only to our airplane, but to everything that uses electricity. And I think it's actually a pretty positive story. But we do get, you know, whenever you do something new, you get all the naysayers who say, yeah, yeah, you're doing the solving thing of the airplane, but what about this other thing? And what about the other thing that we always get is, isn't the grid, the US grid, I'm going to talk mostly about the US situation, the United States grid, where our electricity comes to charge our aircraft, isn't that just supplied by dirty coal powered generating plants? And it's a great question because the answer is it used to be, isn't it supplied by dirty coal? And the answer is it used to be. It used to be really bad. So this is a plot of, this is energy sources that supply the electric grid versus time from 1950 to roughly present. And this mustard color line is the amount of energy on the grid that came from coal. And it was a lot in the early 2000s. But it's gone down very dramatically. And guess what this green line is? This green line is renewables. And today renewables exceed coal on the grid. Yes. Now, you know, so this ramp up here from like 2000 to 2020, that's that slope is because of solar and wind primarily this long tail going all the way back to the 50s. That's hydro, mostly hydro. Now, there's another thing on here that's also not renewable. We don't call it renewable, but it's also carbon free. And that's nuclear. As much as you hate nuclear, let's limit this discussion to carbon. From a carbon point of view, nuclear is awesome. So you know, this is actually a couple of years old. This is now 22% renewables, 20% carbon. So far as the bad that the grid is already 42% carbon free. And if you look at natural, so one thing you can look at is this light blue is natural gas, and it kind of took over from coal. And you might think, well, it's fossil fuel. It's just trading one for the other, but it's not natural gas is much cleaner burning than coal. It's like 70% better than coal. So even though there's kind of parity in the sense that if you add these two together, they'd be relatively level in the last decade, but the net effect on carbon is very positive, actually. Okay, so the grid right now today is not perfect by any stretch, but it's certainly not terrible either. And it's getting better. And when you put that in an airplane, well, this is just a summary. Top, top level summary, 40% carbon free 22% that it that composed of a slight majority renewals the balanced nuclear 60% fossil fuels. Here's another thing that's a little hard to anticipate until you think about it is even the fossil fuels. If you compare electricity generated with fossil fossil fuels on the grid versus putting gas in your airplane directly, instead of into the power plant is the power plants are big installations. There's no weight limit. There's like their high cost. They're very highly tuned, and they are about two to three times more efficient at using the fuel the fossil fuel that a normal airplane uses its fossil fuel. So even the fossil fuel coming from the grid is being used way better than what gets used in a conventional combustion powered airplane. So if you roll that all up and you say, I'm charging my airplane today with the grid exists today, not the perfect grid that we imagine in the future but the one that exists today. We have a 75% reduction in greenhouse gases with this seat all aircraft as compared to essentially the competing version of a conventional jet a powered aircraft is pretty darn good. It's even better with the V tall aircraft because you really if you're going to take a vertical take off airplane and compare it to what what else you would use today like conventional aircraft, you'd compare that to a helicopter. And a helicopter is terrible. So the more terrible the comparison is the better our aircraft looks. Okay, so, so here's the next question. Well, what is the grid going to do tomorrow and next year and the next year and actually a lot of states so a lot of states mandate renewable energy minimums that utility companies must meet and Vermont does this many other states do it. And these are and they and those policies so their policies and the policies change over time and the state set goals and they're mandated they're not like well try if you're if you're lucky we'll get there they're like no you got to do it somehow. And these are examples of states that have policies and these are states that have policies in the light green that then got updated in 2001 with another more aggressive one. So these a lot of states are taking this super seriously. And a lot of them are projecting out to 100% renewable in 2040 2050. So this is real it's not imagined it's these things are changing in the sense you can see right here that over time the goals got more aggressive. This is just another another selection shown very much the same thing. Here's another way to look at is by state and you see here that Vermont 75% renewables by 2032. That's policy in Vermont, New York, where is New York here 70% by 2030 100% by 2040 New York is on a tear with renewables. So, on the other hand, all these states with nothing, they're not doing anything. And they're, you know, it's so keep in mind what I was showing you earlier was the national grid average that includes the good states from a renewables point of view I'm not making a political statement versus the bad states from a renewables point of view. So one of our jobs in this country is to convince the whole country, not just right now there's 29 states in Washington DC they're kind of participating in this approach to the world. And this is just like, if you roll that all up renewables have increased. Here's about where we are expectation is they're going to increase faster. So, why is it hard to electrify aviation. My whole diatribe just ended there is an argument for we should do it because it's possible and it's going to get better. The question is why is it hard to do. This is like a cartoon that answers that it's all about the batteries. Anybody had a cell phone die. Everybody knows it's all about the batteries. And it's kind of terrible. Jet fuel. If you imagine this box is a tank in the in the one side of fuel of jet fuel and on the other side the analogous tank weighing the same amount, but an electric airplane having a battery in it instead of jet fuel. This tank has 4000 watt hours of energy for every kilogram that's in that tank. Our battery here has a paltry 200. So from a weight perspective batteries are really terrible. So that's the problem. And it's an airplane so it's got to fly so that way it actually matters. Okay, but batteries are getting better to just like the grid. This is five years. And we have a really clear path over that five years. We don't we don't make the battery cells. We integrate them into a pack, but we buy the battery cells from a supplier. We have a really good relationship. We know what they're doing. We know what their their projections are. The technology that they're going to use in five years is basically on the shelf now. We know that it's going to double in five years. What happens after that is a little speculative, but we expect that rate that is doubling every five years to continue is a little bit like Moore's law with computers. You know, Gordon Moore, Moore made this statement in 1965 and he said the density of transistors on a microchip that you can use as a computer is going to double every two years. And that makes the computer faster. And it's kind of a crazy statement. But that's held true till now from 1965 till now. Computer's density, which correlates the performance of the computer has basically doubled every two years. And I'm not saying that batteries are necessarily going to be the same. I think there's some innovations that have to happen. We don't know exactly what the rate is, but they're going to get better and they're going to continue to get better. This is three five year epics at doubling every five years. If you go one more five year epic, like 20 years total, that gets right in the range of jet fuel in terms of energy per density. So my point is it's early days in battery time for the purpose of an airplane, but the future is pretty positive. Okay, all that is future looking. What do we get now with batteries we have now and the grid we have now? This is our airplane. Actually, I just noticed I had the wrong picture. This is a V tall aircraft. I should imagine those propellers aren't there because these numbers are for a C tall with no lift. So the range is 115 nautical miles. That's like 130 something regular miles payload 1240 pounds feet 105 knots. That's about 120 miles an hour. It's not it's not great performance. This is a competitor conventional jet a burning competitor. You can put actually you can put as much as 3000 pounds in this thing. But if you put 1500 pounds, which is roughly the same as ours, you can get 600 miles out of it and not only that, but you go almost twice as fast. So there's a little downside to like. So the question is why would anybody buy this aircraft and the obvious answer is because there's plenty of companies out there that have a green mission. Like EPS, United Therapeutics, Amazon, like a lot of companies have a green mission. And the other thing is we don't need to do every mission. We only need to do or we only need to provide an airplane that can do missions that are in fact commercially valuable. It doesn't have to be the longest commercially valuable routes. It just has to be commercially valuable routes that a customer will look at and say that'll work for me. And lo and behold, we have those. Here's UPS. These are UPS routes from Manchester, New Hampshire to in one case, Burlington also Montpelier all these other cities. And this is a feeder fleet. So all those airplanes which are like that competitor airplane I showed you what they're doing now. They fly flights every day from Burlington to Manchester and back and they take cargo from Burlington to Manchester where it gets put on a big jet and then it goes to Louisville, Kentucky and then and then back. So UPS is using this feeder fleet every single day and all those routes are doable by our aircraft. UPS is one of our customers. It's a commercially valuable thing. So it serves their green mission. It serves their this is useful to us. And last slide here is is actually less expensive. We know that you can't tell people to do something green or better or eat healthier. They just don't do it. You got to have some like you got to have something you got to say it's going to save you money or it's going to make you more attractive. So fortunately this is pretty serious business. This delta, which is mainly a delta in maintenance cost. Like if you compare it like you really have to add on this. It's a Lea Seatall the top to the top one is fuel, which is de minimis. Nobody cares about that. So small compared to the Cessna caravan, which is pretty big in fuel. But the next line down, which only exists in the Seatall is battery cost. So every time you use the battery, you wear it out a little bit. So you have to eventually replace the battery. So you got to factor that in to how much your airplane costs to operate. And that's not free. So it's kind of on par, not too different. The if you call that the total fuel cost, like the actual fuel itself, which is the electric grid cost plus the battery. It's kind of kind of like your fuel cost. It's cheaper than the Cessna caravan and not that much cheaper. But the maintenance cost, look at that blue, kind of the middle darkness blue line on both. And here's the deal is an electric motor has like 20 parts in it. And there's only a there's a bunch of them that are glued together in the rotating part. And the other parts are just sitting there, their wires, you know, wound up wires. Like a Cessna caravan has a PT six Pratt and Whitney turbine engine. And every couple of years, you got to tear it apart and spend three quarters of a million dollars replacing the hot section or maintaining. It's very, very complicated. A turbine engine is one of the most amazing products. It's a glorious testament to human engineering. It's a hellacious condition that operates under and super sophisticated materials. And it's just a mess when you got to fix it. So it's cheaper to fly our aircraft. Okay, so I'm going to spend a couple of minutes here doing something totally different, which is talking about the company. And then I'll let Tyler take over for a bunch of other good stuff. And I'm going to talk about the culture because we we value this very highly. And we think we're doing pretty good at it. Company culture is kind of a weird thing. It's like a thing that nobody has quite the right idea of how to define and describe. And I decided to not try to put any slides together. I thought the best way to do this is just to show up and start talking about it and see what comes out of my mouth. So that's what I'm going to do. So I joined Beta when it was about 10 people. And in the beginning, it was just we were just doing stuff all the time trying to build stuff. And after about a year, we started getting to be big enough to kind of start acting like a bit of a company where we had. It was a little more organized. We had a little more, you know, a little bit more money, a little bit more people, definitely more people. And I started to realize that Kyle, the founder, was was embarking on what I called at the time the grand experiment, which was we're designing an airplane, which is a technical job. But at the same time, we're designing the company. And Kyle was very thoughtful, still is, and purposeful in setting up how the company behave. And this is what I call the grand experiment, which is like, how can you make a company work well and be able to grow and not kind of devolve into the bureaucratic mess that a lot of companies I'm familiar with and used to work for become. And what he so he starts off with a few things and I have no idea if he would say the same. I have no literally no idea. He doesn't really talk about it much. But what I the way I interpret it was you start off with what I call the first principles view of culture, or maybe you could say it first principles, human relations or human resources. Most companies do something different. Most companies do a version of what they see not the companies do. You know, you go to company and they're like, yeah, we have an HR department like just everybody else has one too. We have insurance just like everybody else does. We have vacation policies just like everybody else does. And I think Kyle takes the view that doesn't make sense necessarily to do all that. So let's take this from a first principles point of view, which is, okay, what do people. What what makes people productive in a workplace. And let's try to make sure they have it. And what makes people discards and not productive in a workplace let's try to not do that. And so the you start with these first principles like what makes people productive it's the class that kind of Maslow's pyramid things like people want. They want a job that's challenging but not overwhelming they want the recognition of their peers for doing a good work. They want control over their what they do. They want a sense of responsibility. You know, they want these things. The Kyle starts with the theory to start with that people are good actors. Let's not protect ourselves against people who are not good actors. Let's assume everybody's a good actor. If somebody turns out to be not a good actor, we'll figure out but let's not make policies based on the assumption that people are going to be bad actors. We assume everybody's a good actor. You give them a workplace. You give them a job. You allow them to do their work. You ask them to do their work. You ask them to figure out what are you best at you figure out and like you find the problem that best suits you. And you're the person who makes the decision about whether you need a new piece of equipment or you need to help her because you're the one doing the work. You're the one that knows better. Don't ask me like don't go to permission as permission from your supervisor. And you know what happens is a massive people kind of somewhat organically figure out how to solve a problem. And what happens is if you if you release the dog, so to speak, you will have mistakes. People will make mistakes and maybe in some theoretical world, those mistakes would have been caught if they had checked with their supervisor and their supervisor might have said, yeah, that's going to be a mistake. Don't do that. So you will have mistakes that may have been catchable. But the theory is that even so the velocity of the program will be higher than if you stop everybody at every step and say, no, no, you got to check with your boss or you got to get a, you know, some kind of approval from your chain of command or something. And so we value this independence. We place everybody as a sensually unequal contributor to the company. It doesn't mean that everybody is the same in some people are thinking about strategic things like Kyle himself is thinking about how can we make sure this company doesn't run out of money. How can we make sure we're making the right choices. Other people are thinking about what is this widget need to look like they're super narrow focused. But nevertheless, each one of them in a big picture sense has a view and they're the ones that have the best view of the thing they're working on. And they're the ones that can get it done. So that's a big part of our culture. There's another part of our culture to which is honest, which is a little more. Like, let's say how do we lead our lives. And one of the things that comes up a lot is this concept of work life balance and the premise the underlying premise behind even a statement like that a balance is that there's kind of two opposing forces that have to be managed against each other. And our view is, let's not make it a balance. Let's bring the family into the workplace. And like, why should there be a separation. And obviously that you can't take that to its logically extreme that's stupid but you know so what the things that we do are first of all we have a lot of spouses working together, not necessarily on the same job but in the same company, my spouse works in the company. We were perfectly happy with that. We have, we invite families into the company in my last aerospace company Boeing corporation no family was allowed in the building. And, and, you know, so we invite family into the into the building we invite them to all our parties we have people in the building all the time we have kids in the building all the time my kid my six month old kids in the building all the time she spends six month old daughter spends two to three days a week in the office full time with her mother. Many kids are doing that. We have dogs in the office plants if that matters. So, I'm not going to. I think that's about as much as I'm going to say I'm just going to run through these pictures just to kind of make it a little real another thing is everybody flies. We have like 30 airplanes, conventional airplanes admittedly, but their airplanes everybody can fly. And you say I don't have a pilot's license. I didn't have a pilot's license, but I do now because we have flight flight instructors to solve free to the individual company pays for everything so everybody flies. The theory is, if you're designing an airplane you better know what it's like to fly it. So that's the theory. And I think it's a really good theory and this is like this is an example of Kyle's. Let's do what makes sense rather than what other companies do. No company would have a flight school like we do because they would say their lawyers would say, yeah, you know, there's a risk that some accident could happen and somebody could sue you, and that's going to be bad. And our view is, okay, there's a risk, but let's balance that against the benefit and see which really turns out to be more meaningful to us. And right now, we're coming out on the side of let's accept some risk, because the benefit is large. We joke around, we spend stupid things like this is stupid, but we do it because it's fun. This big empty space so every day at 330 for some reason, somebody set up a start line and a finish line in this big open floor and said we're going to have a sprint every day at 330 be there. We do stuff offline together we fly together we have people crammed into a cubby I don't know why. Generally, we like to hang around with each other. Here's one of our airplanes that people use to go swimming in the summer. Lots of babies, there's so many babies are we hire a bunch of 30 year olds and there's babies coming out the closet. This is a picture of just a very small part of our of our cafeteria we have a food service that makes lunch every day. And it we did it in COVID because we want people going out and getting sick because they went out. But it turns out this is the most awesome thing because everybody comes up, they get free lunch, so they're going to come because it's free lunch. And they sit down and they randomly sit next to somebody that they might not have talked to before. We have 570 people today, 117 job wrecks out. My first slide said there was 150 you didn't notice that but that's because that slide was made up last week. So it's hard to get to know everybody. This is an awesome way to do it have lunch together. We have animals. This is a yak. I don't know why there's a yak in the office. Yeah, you do. Yeah, you do. I kind of do but I don't want to say it. Dogs again the yak. We had a bike trip one of our offices in Montreal so somebody said we should ride our bikes from Montreal across the border and come down to Burlington, which we did. More pictures of that. This is maybe the best example. So this guy here, Blaine, he's our Chief Operations Officer. His six or eight-year-old son, six, seven-year-old son, got diagnosed with leukemia. It turns out he's got a good kind that they think he's going to be really actually cured. But in doing so, he's going through chemo and he's losing his hair, really upset about losing his hair. So his dad came in. This is Kyle, by the way. His dad came in and told Kyle, hey, I'm going to shave my hair and sympathy with my son. So, you know, it's going to look a little weird and just so you know, maybe you have to explain it to some customers or something. So Kyle says, well, I'm going to do it too. And that morphed into 70 of us getting our hair cut in one big shot. This is me. I used to have hair. Well, not 100%, but I used to have hair. That's me and my baby after my getting my hair shaved. So we had 70 people just decided, well, if you're doing it, I'm doing it too. And this is all of us in the big, new, just opened manufacturing facility. So I'm going to let Tyler take over. So I think you got about another 20 minutes. Thank you. It's hard to follow Dave, especially because he was part of the start of all of this. But I'm going to try. But before I do, I really want to talk about what this is right now. And to me, this right here, what we're doing right now is the most foundational difference between what we're trying to do and what you see everybody else trying to do. What we really want is to develop a workforce right here in our hometown where we grew up that wants to stay here and still be at the precipice of innovation across the globe. And we talked a lot about who we are. We talked a little bit about why the sustainability piece. But I'd like to for a second, before you all go back to your lives, arm you with a little bit of education about the foundational things that we're doing differently. So you can go back and feel like you can speak smart about what we're doing. And then tell you about all the deliberate programming that we have to continue to develop the workforce right here in our backyard to keep engineers and make engineers that want to stay here and see a future at home. Does that sound okay? Okay. So I know we talked about it briefly, but that's kind of what happened to me. I was born and raised here in Williston, Vermont. I didn't see much opportunity when I was 18 years old to stay. I was working at Friendly's at the time. And so I joined the military and I went off and I became an emergency manager and eventually I got smart enough somebody who gave me a degree and they gave me the keys to remote planes. And I flew the RQ4 Global Hawk out of Beale, California for a few years. And they tried to send me to Grand Forks, North Dakota after I had a wife and three kids and I kind of looked at the demographic there and the education system. And I said, man, home sounds really nice right now. So I retired and I had the opportunity to retire and come right back to my hometown and thanks to beta technologies and relationships quite literally like the ones that we have in this room. I was able to stay in a professional way doing the things that I enjoy doing and that specifically is educating people about aerospace technologies. And I was doing that for the Air Force. I was an instructor pilot and evaluator pilot in the RQ4 Global Hawk that flies over 50,000 feet in the air and can fly for over 24 hours without a sole on board. And so as we talked about advanced aviation technologies, I'm really excited about the future as we bring that into commercial aviation. We talked about the stepwise approach that beta is taking in that. So we're making the aircraft and Dave talked a lot about the aircraft that we're making. We're also making the charging infrastructure and he showed you the map and he alluded that I'd better talk about why that airplane is flying on its way down on the East Coast all the way to Florida. And the short answer is because we have the capability now to deploy our aircraft and test it. And it's because of quite literally my alma mater the United States Air Force and the United States Air Force is funding flight tests that's happening down at Duke for the next three months. And pilots that we trained right here at beta that still wear the uniform are going to be operating with us down at Duke to continue to explore what electrifying aviation can do, not only from an economic and environmental sustainably smart perspective, but also in defense of our nation when we think about optionality in fuels in austere locations. I don't have jet a a austere location I better have a way to still be able to do the important work that needs to be done and there's a lot of different ways to get electricity. And so that actually is a force enabler to be able to put an aircraft that doesn't need to be fueled with traditional aviation fuels. So that charging infrastructure, the flight test program that we have going on is really instrumental in those training programs as a trifecta here is what I really want to dial into because education training and outreach is core to what we're doing what we're doing in this room right now sits in this third of the wheel on the outreach piece, quite literally community outreach and that can yield sales, if you're interested, let us know. Okay, sales of our aircraft or chargers or what have you and then ultimately we need to train the operators and the pilots that would need to fly in the maintenance maintainers that need to fix. We also yield interest in you yourselves or your family or people that you know that want to get involved with a budding industry that has the ability to quite literally reduce the impact humanity has on the world. And if that is what we're doing today and the community outreach and it can go essentially clockwise. We want to spend a little bit of time getting us together smart, and then showing those opportunities for apprenticeships and internships and programmatic training that we do with community outreach, and ultimately continue to build a team that can plug in and as Dave was talking about before he handed me that works well together in our backyard and is enabled and empowered to make decisions on their own without being in a traditional hierarchical type of organization. And so in order to do that you have to understand this. You laugh the loudest. Okay, now, this is not as scary as it looks in fact when we teach ground training to the pilots that are going to fly in Florida. This is the first thing that we teach and we say, first, don't be scared. And the reason we say don't be scared is because honestly we're talking about some very basic things that Dave already taught you, you just didn't know it. Okay, quite literally over here we're talking about how dense the fuel is that you're carrying. How much bang do I have for my buck. If you remember the cartoon that we had where we said how many watt hours were in aviation fuel and you had only the one red square in the battery today, that is going to continue to grow. You can understand that if we're trying to find things really really far this number and this factor of the five that we can manipulate will keep getting bigger. There's a fuel equation of how much I carry of that battery over how much I weigh when I carry it and every plane in the history of aviation has had to deal with that. One of the interesting things about batteries is that this number stays static the entire time we fly, because five year old understands this and we do and we try to really make this an approachable understanding. When you take off weighing 7000 pounds in an electric vehicle, you land weighing 7000 pounds in an electric vehicle. Now that's great from a standpoint of oh the math is easy, but it's even better from a standpoint of conservation of our carbon. If I took all the stuff up with me and I came back with all the stuff now quite literally I've put nothing into the atmosphere. RQ4 Global Hawk that I used to fly in the Air Force weighed 15,000 pounds when it took off dry, but I'd have to put fuel in. So I'd put another 15,000 pounds of fuel in and it would weigh 30,000 pounds at takeoff. 24 hours later it would land and it would weigh 15,000 pounds and we colloquially as a society say that's okay. Well I don't know what happened to that other 15,000 pounds of stuff, but it will never see it again. One of the things I want to do and beta hasn't let me do it yet, maybe it's the airport I'm not sure. I want to take 15,000 pounds of fuel and put it in a pool and I want to light it on fire and I want to show everybody what that looks like. Because if you do it in a jet engine at like 30,000 feet it's all fine and we hear things that we complain about at the F-35 or whatever because it's so loud. But at the end of the day there's a lot of stuff that's getting put out there that we just can't see and because we can't see we don't think about it. But it's happening. This is simple to understand. If we're going to do work we need to decide how much of what we want to do and we decided to take a volumetric approach. 200 cubic feet of space that we can put stuff in. How many boxes can you put in 200 cubic feet of space? A lot. Now if we want to put this in a car it would look about like this shape. If you want to put it in a boat it would look about like this shape. If you want to put it in a plane it looks about like this shape because aerodynamics and fluid, whether it's the fluid is in air or water, tend to close the same way to have a really streamlined shape. Now if you want to do it in the air this looks familiar. If you want to do it in the air this looks familiar. Now what's not familiar about this is that I didn't put anything in front of the wing. Now every plane you've ever seen fly, specifically the classic ones that you think of if you ask your kids to draw on a piece of paper, they put the propeller out front. And then they put the empanage and they put the rudders and the elevators and everything in the back. Now that makes sense when you're designing an airplane because you want the weight in the front and the weight in the back to largely be the same. And the reason you had to do that for the first 120 years of aviation is because the fuel would change in weight over the time that you were flying. And so the fuel had to be centered in the wing. But now I can take something heavy like a battery and I can put that heavy thing right here. And when I take off and when I land it's still pretty heavy. So I can put a heavy thing right here and it's actually usable weight, it's usable ballast. And so I can put propellers where boats have known they belong for 200 years in the back, right? Have you ever seen a boat with a propeller in the front? Well that's a silly thing, right? It doesn't make a lot of sense to take that fluid and shove it right back at your structure. It makes a lot more sense to take that fluid even if it's an air and generate it in the wake just like every boat you've ever seen. The reason we couldn't do it with aviation for 120 years is the fact that we needed combustion that required an explosion that required oxygen and lots of it to be able to precipitate over time. And also this crazy thing about balancing weight over a wing. So we can solve for all of that and what we call a white sheet aircraft and we can make a really, really cool plane. And a really, really aerodynamic and slippery plane. In fact this design that you see right here is about twice as good at glide as a Cessna 172 which is the most ubiquitous straining aircraft ever to develop. Twice better. At a thousand feet it can fly twice as far when the engine goes out than a Cessna. And that's wild when you think of it. And that's a really, really efficient plane. What is that? Is that a plane? No, but you could probably buy one that target, right? Because over the last decade maybe even two decades you see this design everywhere and it's cheap and it's repeatable and it's simple and it's an easy way using lightweight engines to get a vehicle up off the ground. Drones, right? You've heard them in drones all the time. It's a very simple control logic and I'm not going to spend too much time getting into all of the way we use differential thrust, but we see it everywhere. And it turns out if you use an electric engine it scales. And because it scales we can put it on a 7,000 pound aircraft. And then if you put that on the slippery plane our aircraft design essentially writes itself, right? You take a really slippery teardrop of a shape. You make it a really efficient plane. You make it able to take off and land without meeting 3,000 feet of prepared surface. And you've got an aircraft that can do all the things a helicopter can do, still get on the wing in a really efficient way. And then all we have to do is figure out what we have to teach the pilots that's different from every other plane that they've flown before. The first thing that we have to teach. See somebody's filming this on your phone. How much battery do you have left? Okay, but how much is that? You have no idea, do you? Anybody who looks at the battery on the computer on your phone, Travis looks at his computer right now, I say how much battery? 30% of what? I don't know. I have no idea what it's a percentage of, but I know it's a percentage. In fact, if you hold that phone two years from now, that 55% is going to be about half of the life that you have today. Isn't that wild? Dave talked about the degradation of batteries. That's a thing that we've known for a long time. Now, it's no slight to Apple or Dell or anybody who makes these things, but wouldn't it be nice if that was a usable number? Wouldn't it be nice if that was a number that you could say, okay, I've got XYZ of fuel. And I know how much of that fuel I'm using. So I have an actual realistic estimate of how long I can use it, right? We do that with cars. We know how many gallons of fuel that we have. We know how many gallons per hour we're using. And we have to, we owe it to the aviation community for safe operation to do that with our aircraft as well. So we have to, instead of telling you a percentage of your battery, you're at 5% of something. We have to tell you how many kilowatt hours you have. And we have to tell you how many kilowatts there are. So we said that this is a semester and you guys were excited about this. So you have to learn something. Okay. So the thing that you need to learn quite literally is what's a kilowatt and what's a kilowatt hour. And let's take a second to explain that. So every time you look at your phone, it used to be that you're lying to me and I don't know what this means. And so let's, let's build some foundational knowledge really, really quick. You got low pressure of a fluid, low flow you've got to drip. High pressure, low flow, you've got a pressure washer. Right? If you take high flow, low pressure, you've essentially got a culvert. And then high pressure, high flow, you've got a fire hose, which is what you're getting right now. Okay. And then we have to take a basic understanding of fluid dynamics and we need to think of it in the electric domain. And so if I talk about pressure, I increase it, that's voltage. Okay. What's a volt? Well, it's a measure of pressure. I talk about flow that's current. Okay. That's a measured in amperes. And then I talk about the size of the restriction just like that pressure washer. If you reduce the size, you increase the pressure. Isn't that weird? Kind of neat. But it's the same thing that you do with a garden hose you can do with electricity. Now, let's talk about work. Jay, you're here. I'm going to make you answer a question. Okay. Which one weighs more? They weigh the same. Which one takes more work? It's also a trick question. It's the same amount of work because the work is measured in how much energy you're using as a function of time. And that's an important physics property. As time is inclusive in work. If I wanted to take this 100,000 kilograms of rice and I want to put it up there, it's going to be the same amount of work. But one's going to be way more frustrating. Okay. What do I need a lot of if I want to do the 1,000 kilogram cake? What do I need a lot of? Somebody use the word. Power. I need a lot of power. Okay. What do I need a lot of if I want to move 1,000 kilograms of rice? Time. You laughed. And you're the one that got it right. Look at that. Lots of power. Lots of time. Okay. But guess what? We measure that in watt hours. Okay. Wats and hours. They have to be included. It's the same amount of work. And if a pilot has that foundational understanding, they can now make strong aeronautical decision making with what they can do with the vehicle that they fly. We have to literally teach this because it's a new thing that 120 years of aviation, we have to teach that what 1,000 kilograms of rice does. Okay. Now, low voltage, low current in the form of a battery, and ultimately this is the battery that we put in our plane. Each one of these is the equivalent of one Tesla, effectively five Teslas in the belly of your plane. Okay. Lots of power measured in watt hours. Right. How many watt hours do I have available to work? And this, if you stare at it for 30 seconds, is how we tell a pilot what their engine is doing with all of that power. Okay. I'm going to run out of time and somebody's going to yell at me. It's probably going to be Travis, but I got to take this second to explain this internal combustion is explosions. Okay. If internal combustion requires explosions, electric motors require magnets. Okay. And just trust me when I say that if you flow electricity, it is a magnetic flow. It's going 90 degrees opposite effectively. And there's a lot of physics properties that take advantage of this. And the electric motor has been around for almost 200 years and optimizing that is one of the things beta has endeavored to do. If I make a stronger electric flow, I make a stronger magnet and the rotor that's connected to the propeller turns faster. That makes sense. Strong magnet, weak magnet, stronger magnet, faster propeller, weaker magnet, slower propeller. And then we take this out into our community. We have all these tools that we've been developing, not just gifts, all these tools we've been developing to tell these stories. We've got mobile simulators. We've got our tangible, like hands-on motor demonstrations. And we take these into our community to start to generate that spark. We do it at the grade school level, at the middle school level, at the high school level. And just tomorrow, we're going to be doing it at Tech Jam to try to take some of the brightest engineers, quite literally in that mobile simulator that we have in an air stream, and say, maybe you want to work here. Well, what do we do once we've done that? We go out into our community and we say, hey, we're work-based learning coordinators. We know you're engaging with kids at all age. And we say, come to us or we'll come to you. And this year we've engaged with over 3,000 students with programmatic delivery. What does that look like? Well, it can look like an internship with everything that you see over here. I'm glad it's being recorded so people can actually go back and read some of this stuff over time. And we just opened our internships for 2024. We had 70 paid internships this past summer. And it was a wonderful experience, not just for them, but for our team to be able to leverage all of that young talent. Our high school job shadow program happens every summer. We're quite literally those work-based learning coordinators say the best and the brightest in high school need to be able to take an opportunity to have some kind of engagement with the workforce before they make their collegiate decisions. So they'll come out to us. And we had almost 20 students that came out this last summer. And the four things that they learned, we did this workshop after, and it was really four basic things. They assumed when they got there that everybody's engineering discipline was done in a stove pipe. And they found out that it wasn't at all, that everybody's engineering discipline needed to pull from somebody else's to get work done. And they learned it required collaboration. And if it requires collaboration, no amount of engineering or mathematic prowess is going to overcome the need for effective communication. So they found out that if they do that well, that the work itself can be like a present. And they made this 12-second video if we can take 12 seconds. Is that all right? Thank you. To take it one step further, and we're doing this right now, we're in week nine. We are in our first collaboration with Vermont State University right here in the Williston campus. Myself and Sarah Deschar adjunct professors with Vermont State University. And we're teaching college, awarding three credit hours and an intro to electric aviation course. And this guy right here is literally the founder and CEO of X-Plane, the most used simulator software in the world teaching in the Williston campus because he's on the board with Beta and has moved his family here because he believes in it. And we could talk about that for a full other hour. Beta Lab and our Makerspace with Generators is quite literally grabbing these kids and bringing them out to Makerspaces and encouraging them to explore those core technologies with their own skills and taking that design concept of design it, build it, fly it, break it, then design it again. And they're quite literally doing it in a lab with our subject matter experts behind them. And that leaves absolutely no time on CCD TV for questions. But I hope it was worth it. So, Pathy, do we have any Zoom questions? Okay, good. No Zoom questions? Wow. Part of that we have ones here. Someone has a question, please raise your hand. Okay. We are not. No. And that's one of the things that it allows us to be as dynamic as we are because we don't have to quarterly prove to somebody that they're getting a return on their investment. We just have to look each other in the eyes and ask if this is smart. And then Dave said, no, it wasn't. And so we do something different. Now it allows us really nimble capability. You want the mic, Dave? Okay. Go ahead. I was just going to ask two things quick. Where do you stand with FAA certifications? And do you have a projection for when you'll be in the black? In terms of production. Can I, I'll answer the first one. You answered the second one. That's not fair. So FAA certifications, I would say we are quite literally leading the pack in the FAA work that needs to be done. There is no electric certified aircraft because there's no regulation defining it. And I spent last week two days with the managers at the FAA quite literally working through the next stage of our issue papers to help to define what those certification requirements are going to be for electric propulsion. And then ultimately for vertical takeoff and land vehicles. Powered lift is the category of aircraft that we have to work through. And so we're working to how to certify the airframe, how to certify the airmen to fly that vehicle. And we are helping to write the guidance. The proposal came out and then almost the very next day they were like, are you going to respond? And then once we've responded, we're continuing to work with them as the author, the final rule. And there's about five of us going to Dallas to have a workshop with them in November for exactly that purpose. Are we making money? So we are not in the black. We are a classic startup. That is we're surviving on investor dollars. In beginning it was investment from people who worked in the company. You know, there was, I wrote checks to the company to make payroll several times. But fortunately we've got real high horsepower, private equity investors backing us up right now. So, you know, we expect to build our first aircraft of the production flavor next year starting this year, but it won't be finished till next year. And then we'll be ramping up our rate of production. And we expect to be able to make money starting pretty quickly after we can start to build them. They will be technically experimental aircraft at that point rather than certified aircraft. It will take us some time to get to certified aircraft. But I think we're a couple years out before we reach the black. Where do you buy your batteries? So we use very conventional looking cells. They're called 21700. It's a dimension. It's 21 millimeters by 70 millimeters. So it looks like a large AA battery, but they're rechargeable. There's a lot of these around. Samsung makes them, LG makes them, Tesla makes them for their car. But we're using a company called Molly Cell. And Molly Cell is a company founded in British Columbia. They were subsequently bought by a Taiwanese company. Get this Taiwan cement company. So that's their parent company, but they're very... So the reason we're using them is because they're very interested in super high performing cells. As distinct from what the automotive market wants, which is mainly good cells but cheap. And so Molly Cell serves, I think a lot of their market actually is in right now. Their commercial market is in Dyson cordless vacuum cleaners and other power tools. But they also do some crazy ass business in F1 racing that uses batteries. Just like insanely high performing batteries. So that's our supplier we're working with now. They're really awesome. We have a research facility in St. Albans to continue to help with that selection process. And I think the way you ask the question is perfect because all the things that we're doing are hard enough. We shouldn't also be trying to make new batteries. So let's let other people do that and then partner with them. And so we continue to work that selection process. And one of the things Dave alluded to, as you looked at the chart of energy density going in over time, what we buy for today's batteries in our very first certifiable pack and what's going to be in tomorrow's batteries are going to be very different things. And we continue to do that research. Thank you. What sort of market do you envision as your initial marketplace? Is it short, relatively short range freight passenger or both? And have you identified your main competition in that area? Yeah, so so there's if if you bother to look in the news about electric aviation, you'll see that there's a number of competitors that I think the two that we track most are a company called Joby and a company called Archer, both in operating out of Silicon Valley. And both of them have started started their life essentially with the mission of moving passengers. And people this just may seem strange to you, but Uber, you know, the ride hailing company was a big driver of the EV tall electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, basically business essentially. So a lot of these companies got into business because Uber was saying we want these to fly people around. You know, Uber's model is somebody else make the vehicle, somebody else own the vehicle, somebody else fly the vehicle. But we Uber are going to make the money by hooking up the people with the vehicles. And the only thing they didn't have was the vehicle or the people to fly the vehicle or the people to build the vehicle. So they were really like stirring the works there. And that all fell apart after COVID hit. But nevertheless, most of these companies were were seeking this market and they still are Joby and Archer are still like their mission is to move passengers around. And I think there's a. So I think one of the reasons that we believe we've done well at beta is really Kyle Clark's kind of directional decision making. Has been really spot on over the years. Then one of the things he did early on was to say, you know, we should focus on a cargo market. Because cargo is where you can find fleet customers. We don't want to, first of all, we want to sell our aircraft. We don't want to operate the aircraft like archers. Their business model is we're going to build the aircraft after we design it and certify it. We're going to build it and then basically rent it to ourselves. And we're going to make the money by going to pick up the passengers. And that stinks as a business model in our view. Because for a couple of reasons, first of all, because when does your money show up? It's like you spend all this money like building airplanes is enormously capital intensive. I'm talking hundreds of millions of dollars for the tooling and everything required to build an aircraft. And then you spend all that money and then you spend all the money per aircraft to build a thing. Then you got to send it into service for 10 years to make all that back. Hopefully it's crazy. And also there's a regulatory side. The regulators, that is FAA, does not like the idea that the operator is the same as the designer. There's a reason why Boeing doesn't operate airplanes or why United Airlines doesn't design airplanes. There needs to be this kind of check. The operator will be pretty happy to tell FAA if something's wrong with their airplane. And this check and balance is missing. So Kyle's real insight was, first of all, let's sell the aircraft. That means we got to find customers. Let's go find fleet customers. A couple big customers is way better than 100 dentists buying airplanes. So that's really important. Other thing is fleet customers or cargo customers, sorry, like EPS and maybe Amazon and others, they want to fly from what they're doing now. They're flying from an airport to another airport. Their ambition is to fly vertical takeoff and landing so they can go to more places. But still, those places are like some industrial park to some other industrial park carrying no people. So when you get to the regulators, the FAA, and you say, hey, I got this thing. It's a brand new airplane using brand new technology that nobody's ever seen before using a whole different schema for how this airplane maintains control of its flight. And by the way, we want to do that by carrying people. Not only that, we want to land on top of tall buildings in downtown cities. And so our view is let's carry some worthless boxes to a distribution, first of all, to an airport to start with, like they do now, but eventually to some industrial park where it's a prepared area. It's just a way different thing. So to answer your question somewhat long, our customers are fleet customers carrying cargo. We're not blind to the fact that carrying customers like passengers would be great at some point. But it's a second step for us, not the first step. Great. I think we've done one more. This is the last question. Okay. My question is just a general information regarding a news clip I saw about a startup company. And it has to do with lithium ion batteries and what happens to them at end of life. And this startup company actually is they're tearing down these batteries and they say that they can reuse 98% of the material and generate new batteries out of that. So that's pretty good news on the battery front. I don't know if you can talk to that at all Dave or not, but I know people are pretty concerned about what happens to the batteries at their end of life. Well, it's a very good and wise question to say you're a sustainability company. One part of sustainability is not just the energy consumed but the life cycle of your product. One question that the production of batteries is not spectacular from an energy point of view right now, the mining of the minerals and all the rest. And then the use case after the batteries are consumed is also just being kind of figured out. We have battery recyclers that we have lined up to recycle our batteries, but it's still early days. Keep in mind, you know, if you look at the situation we're in now with the oil and gas industry and fossil fuels, it took the whole world 100 years to get us into this problem. The oil and gas industry is like the fifth largest on the planet as a business sector. But my point is that we shouldn't say to ourselves, well there's a hard job ahead of us, we should just back away. My point is that energy as a thing that humanity has decided we need has required the devotion of generations of people, lots and lots of people. And if we're going to replace all that with something new, we shouldn't expect it to be easy. And these challenges like recycling batteries or how to do better mining of the materials and better battery. Like these are hard problems. We're not working on those right now as beta. We're doing our part. But let's face it, like if we're going to fix the problem that the whole world has got us into, it's going to take the whole world to get us out of it. And we need all these parties and there are people working on it. JJ Straub, I think he was one of the founders of Tesla, has got a battery recycling thing that he's doing that I think is going to be probably great. So my point is that you got to start the momentum. Like nobody started out trying to figure out how to design an ocean going oil tanker before there was really enough use case to justify that major effort. And we're going to see that those kind of things being done. But let's not get hung up by the fact that they're not done yet. Can I build on that real quick? Everything that we're enjoying right now in this room, the projection, the zoom call, the microphone that's allowing you to hear Dave, you don't need one to hear me. All of it is electric. Electricity on Dave's chart when we were talking about coal and natural gas and nuclear and renewable was what we're solving for. Right, we're solving for electricity because everything that we're doing is electrified. And so the electrification of a mode of transportation means that as we continue to solve for electricity in doing these type of engagements and getting here and flying to the next place in the Manchester. Allows for that optionality to grow with us as we continue to improve. Because the motor in that light doesn't care what flavor the electricity is, whether it's coal flavored or nuclear flavored, it's still electricity. And the motor in the back of the vehicle is the same way. So the lithium ion battery we're using today that we'll use for another decade as grid energy storage, which I'm going to yell that if I go too deep. It is a means to a more sustainable end that the airframe and the motor that we're building to utilize today will be able to grow with as we continue to get more sustainable and renewable means of energy storage and maybe even energy creation on board. And there's a lot of research going into that space as well. Thank you.