A press release from the electric aerospace company said Beta made the first flight of its Alia conventional take-off and landing (CTOL) aircraft manufactured at the 200,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in South Burlington, Vermont, on Wednesday.

Kyle Clark, founder and CEO of Beta, conducted the aircraft’s first flight, which lasted nearly an hour. During the flight, the aircraft took off and climbed to 7,000 feet and made several approaches before a normal landing.

“This start of our production CX300 flight test campaign is the result of years of hard work and focus on studying customer requirements, engineering, manufacturing, production, quality and testing,” said Clark. “It represents a significant milestone for Beta and is the start of an exciting new phase for the business. With this, we are one step closer to putting this technology in the hands of our customers.”

Prior to the test, Beta received a special certificate of airworthiness from the FAA, launching the start of production flight testing for the company.

“I learned a lot from this first production version,” Clark said. “We weren’t just building an aircraft company. We have built and refined a system to efficiently build high quality aircraft. This first build allowed the team to collect data and information about the production force, tooling design, processes, yields and sequences, all of which were used to refine our production systems.”

With its production test flight campaign in full swing, Beta will continue to fly the aircraft for the standard 50 hours, at which point it will be certified to move on to a market study or crew training certificate. This will allow the company to fly out of Burlington and Plattsburgh and continue to train additional pilots on the aircraft.

Test flight to come the close of the Beta Series C last monthwhich added $318 million in equity financing to the company’s balance sheet. Those funds are directed toward continued certification and production activities for the Beta electric aircraft, the company said.

Alia CTOL construction and subsequent flight comes just over a year after Beta opened the doors to its manufacturing plant in South Burlington in October 2023. Beta’s press release stated that in the meantime the company has equipped the facility with aerospace-grade tools for the assembly of aircraft and ground support equipment, as well as the production of propulsion, batteries and other support systems.

Next, Beta said production will continue on several configurations of Alia CTOL and Alia vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft.