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With hometown pride, Bernie touts a progressive company on the leading edge of green innovation [1]

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Date: 2023-10-26  

Nowadays when the Green Mountain Boys, the nickname of the 158th Fighter Wing, occasionally soar overhead here in northern Vermont, it’s loud F-35’s we’re hearing (and feeling the vibrations of) instead of the somewhat less loud F-16’s they used to fly. While some progressive residents of Burlington and surrounding towns, who are no great fans of the military industrial complex, opposed having the thundering F-35‘s based at the Vermont Air National Guard adjacent to Burlington’s airport, our senior senator, Bernie Sanders, whose home is in Burlington and who is also no big fan of the MIC, did not join in that opposition. Sanders, a pragmatist as well a progressive, reasoned that the Pentagon’s newest, crazily expensive hi-tech fighter planes were going to be based somewhere in America, so given that the military had picked Vermont’s Air National Guard unit as the first in the country to fly F-35’s, our state benefits from the jobs associated with that assignment. (Not to mention our airmen are a source of local pride.)

But now an entirely different variety of hi-tech aircraft — and the green jobs and local pride associated with them — has Bernie’s city once again in the news. A fast-growing Vermont start-up company called Beta Technologies has developed two environmentally-friendly, all-electric aircraft. One of them is a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) design that looks like something a comic book superhero might fly (see photos in this VTDigger article). The company, whose headquarters and manufacturing facility is based near the newly renamed Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport, started out with a handful of employees in 2017 and now has about 600. Here’s a video Bernie’s team put together which highlights not only this promising new technology but how this community- and worker-friendly company exemplifies progressive values:

x YouTube Video

The grand opening of Beta’s net-zero emissions manufacturing plant earlier this month was attended by Sanders and our junior senator, Peter Welch, former senator Pat Leahy (who now has an airport named after him!), Burlington mayor Miro Weinberger, and Gov. Phil Scott, who has a pilot’s license and says he hopes one day to fly a Beta plane, which company founder Kyle Clark says is “about 10 times quieter” than conventional airplanes. Attendees watched (and heard) a demonstration flight, while coincidentally F-35’s also streaked across the sky. Bernie couldn’t resist the irony, quipping (perhaps to the chagrin of some of his neighbors) that the Beta plane is “slightly quieter than the F-35’s.”

Not only are these electric planes heralding a future of greener technology, so is the manufacturing plant:

The new facility is equipped with 260 geothermal wells to provide energy for temperature control within the building, and nearly three acres of roof-mounted solar panels, the company said. The structural sub-base supports concrete foundations and is made by a glass aggregate of 99% recycled glass and 1% binder, replacing nearly 100,000 cubic feet of styrofoam insulation.

The company’s planes have logged 26,000 miles of test flights and are currently awaiting FAA approval for commercial usage. Clark says Beta already has a backlog of orders for 600 planes and their new Vermont facility will have the capacity to manufacture 300 per year by 2027.

Here’s a Vertical Magazine article about Beta which discusses how, in addition to the environmental benefits, the cost savings in maintenance and fuel make electric aircraft very appealing as a replacement for gas turbine aircraft in many applications.

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