There is a Kitty Hawk. The jet engine was invented. On a cold Vermont morning, circling above the lake.
Christopher Caputo, a pilot, believes that each moment signals a paradigm shift in aviation.
Mr. Caputo said recently from the cockpit of a plane that he was looking at history. It banked and climbed in near silence, like a sculpture by Alexander Calder.
It is a flying battery. It represented a long-held aviation goal: an aircraft with no need for jet fuel and therefore no carbon emissions, a plane that could take off and land without a runway and quietly hop from the station to the next one.
Mr. Caputo is a flight instructor who works at Beta Technologies. A five-year-old start-up that is unusual in many respects, the company is the brainchild of Martine and Kyle Clark, the founder and former professional hockey player. It is focused on cargo rather than passengers. It is based in Burlington, Vt., which is roughly 2,500 miles from Silicon Valley.
The goal of engineers since the Wright brothers was a battery-powered aircraft. Larry Page has been funding electric plane start-ups for over a decade. Electric motors have the virtue of being smaller, which makes it easier to design systems with vertical lift. For most of the last century, the e-plane was thought to be beyond reach because of the heavy batteries, light planes, and lack of funds.
Since the 1990s, extraordinary gains in aviation technology have changed that.
I flew in a Pipistrel Alpha Electro, a sleek new two-seater designed for flight training, late last year, curious about the potential of so-called green aviation. The single propeller of the Electro makes a sound like it is beating wings, but without the roar of internal combustion.
The power supply lasts about an hour. I wondered how many people would like flying in an electric plane. That take off is enjoyable. You start to worry about the landing.
Despite the excitement about e-planes, the Federal Aviation Administration has never certified electric propulsion as safe for commercial use. In the coming years, companies expect that to change as safety concerns are worked out. New forms of aviation are likely to appear as a result of that process. There are limitations to how far and fast those planes can fly, but they will do things other planes can't.
They will help the industry that depends on fossil fuels cut down on its contribution to climate change.
Mr. Clark said that the consequences are that we will destroy the planet.
Ms.Rothblatt was interested in battery-powered aircraft. The first time a pig grown inside a human was used to make human organs, it was by United Therapeutics. She wanted an electric helicopter to deliver the organs between two mid-Atlantic cities.
The batteries were too heavy. The longest helicopter flown was 15 minutes. She was told by one group of engineers that it would take three years to design and develop.
Every single person told me it was impossible.
Kyle Clark flew alone for the first time in 1997 on a plane from Burlington to Erie, Pa. Mr. Clark decided to fight all the opposing players after being selected to the U.S.A. Hockey national team.
At 6 feet 7 inches, Mr. Clark was an extremely low scoring right wing and enforcer. He is a member of the Washington Capitals organization.
After a stint in the professional hockey league, he left the sport and received an undergraduate degree in materials science at Harvard, where he wrote a thesis on a plane piloted like a motorcycle and fueled by alternative energy. It was the engineering department's paper of the year.
He was considering a career on Wall Street in order to return to Vermont, where he wanted to be.
He said that there is a brain drain among engineers from his home state.
He attended a conference in which Ms.Rothblatt made her pitch for an e-helicopter.
There were no excited people in the room. He was the youngest person in the room. I asked him where his company was located, and he said he lived in Vermont.
After a second meeting, Mr. Clark drew a watercolor of his design and sent it to Ms. The seed capital had been wired to his bank account within hours.
He drew a nice design.
Mr. Clark piloted the prototype in eight months. The plane had to be flown away from population centers.
Mr. Clark told an audience at M.I.T. that it was fun to fly it. Mr. Clark threw it out because it was too complex. The prototype was modeled after the small, slow bird the Arctic tern.
The work force has grown from 30 to 350. The company's headquarters have expanded to several buildings around the runway at Burlington International Airport, with plans for an additional 40-acre campus.
Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, and John Abele, founder of Boston Scientific are two of the players on the board. It has $400 million of funding from the government and institutions. It is not the only company trying to bring something like this to market.
More than a dozen well-financed competitors have their own prototypes, almost all focused on what the industry calls urban air mobility, or flying taxis or privately owned flying vehicles. Skeptics don't have to worry because no major breakthrough has reached consumers in significant numbers yet.
In order to win F.A.A. approval, the company needs to focus on cargo. It believes it will do more than make aviation history if it succeeds.
In the company's grand vision, electric cargo planes replace fleets of exhaust-spewing short-haul box trucks.
With a limit of 250 nautical miles per battery charge, the vehicles would land atop solar-powered charging stations made out of shipping containers. The cabinets are made of Vermont maple. Mr. Clark said that the group is placing the stand-alone charger at airports all over the country.
The hub and spoke system could be a catalyst for decentralizing and taking dependence on shipping centers like Louisville and Memphis out of the equation.
The only way to get between two cities without air service is by taking.
The ambitions are high. Mr.Newton's claims are being substantiated by the fact that, for the time being, the company plans to buy 140 more Alias and use them as micro-feeders.
Amazon has a Climate Pledge Fund. The Air Force and the Army have signed contracts with the company. The commuter helicopter service Blade has reserved the right to buy five Alias at a price of $4 million to $5 million apiece.
The Burlington Airport's headquarters is close enough to be seen from the Terminal B waiting area to have the youthful informality of a start-up. On a December morning in the hangar, a song called "feel me flow" penetrated the din of propellers and industrial tools. Mr. Clark, whose idea of formal wear seems to be rotating his baseball cap forward, pinballed around the hangar, grabbing stray machinery and vaulting up staircases with the agility of a professional athlete.
Mr.Newton used to work in health care. Mr. Clark took him for a helicopter ride after his job interview.
He gave me the controls for the plane. Mr.Newton said to figure it out. I took a 65 percent pay cut to work for him.
The helicopter flew over Burlington, a city built largely around the University of Vermont and companies known for their progressive credentials, like Seventh Generation and Ben and Jerry's. The city has a left-leaning mayor in the past. It has a number of renewable energy start-ups.
"Vermont's clean energy is built into the DNA of the state," said Russ Scully, who raised capital for the project. The state's electricity supply is carbon free, thanks in part to higher use of nuclear power than any other state, and Burlington is close to becoming net zero. Many cars in the parking lot have charging cables.
One hundred miles north, near Montreal, is one of the largest aerospace clusters outside of Toulouse and Seattle, led by Bombardier, the Canadian business jet-maker, and CAE, the world's premier manufacturer of flight simulations.
Mr. Opsahl said that he and his husband had always wanted to come back to the area.
"I don't want to throw any of our competitors under the bus, but some folks out West are paying huge salaries to attract people." I want to be a part of this thing.
Mr. Clark said he was offered opportunities to move the company. It has become one of Burlington's marquee employers due to the population swelling with high-earning remote workers who left larger cities and brought with them a worsening housing crisis. Burlington is the kind of small city that Beta aims to serve, but it is also the kind of city where sudden growth can bring challenges to livability.
Mr. Clark began building planes with spare parts from the machine shop his father ran at the University of Vermont. His mother burned one in the backyard to prevent him from flying it.
Many recruits were treated to hair-raising airplane rides. Jake Goldman, the company's communications director, calls the company's fleet of aircraft an amusement park for aviation fanatics.
The company offers free flying lessons to all of its 350 employees, and has more than 20 flight instructors on staff, including Nick Warren, formerly a Marine One pilot for President Barack Obama. In order to promote critical thinking in aviation, it is necessary to be airborne.
"It's very Vermont, instead of just analyzing things on a computer, you actually try them out," said Lan Vu, who attended public high school with Mr. Clark.
She had worked for Mr. Clark before and he recruited her.
She said that Kyle made sure to mention that she had no prior interest in flying.
I don't have that kind of time. She said she has three kids.
After changing her mind and getting her pilot's license through the employee program, Ms. Vu began competing in aerial acrobatics. She said that flying helped her address safety concerns.
Is the world ready for wingless hovercraft that can fly through air corridors?
The consensus within the industry is that the F.A.A., which regulates half the world's aviation activity, is several years away from certifying urban air mobility.
Mr. Clark said it was a big burden of proof to bring new technology to the F.A.A. The certification process for a new plane or helicopter can take up to three years. It could be considerably longer for a new type of vehicle. The first conventionally powered aircraft that could take off and land without a runway had its first flight in 2003 It is uncertified.
She has built a career out of the long view. She believes that human beings will eventually merge with machines and upload consciousness to a digital realm. She has taken positions on issues that were considered audacious not long ago.
She and Mr. Clark make for unlikely partners. Mr. Clark is a test pilot with a similar demeanor.
She calls herself an exceedingly cautious person, both as a pilot and in general. She said her life experience was an example. When she started the radio station, she hadn't yet transitioned from male to female.
The question of who will fly a plane with a battery is a real one.
According to Dan Patt, a technology analyst, vehicles like the one Beta is building are very unlikely to make money unless they go.
Mr. Patt, who led the development of drones for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, asked what it took for their model to be competitive with ground transportation.
In the future, the vehicles will be optionally manned. Analysts such as Mr. Patt think that unpiloted commercial aviation is even farther away from getting F.A.A. approval than the electric plane is.
Do you build the vehicle first or do you go unmanned? It is clear that Beta is in the latter camp.
An Air Force colonel is not a futurist, but his job is to find and support companies doing forward- thinking, futuristic things.
The military applications of a vehicle like the Alia have gotten attention at the highest levels of the Air Force.
Last month, uniformed Air Force pilots flew a plane powered by a battery above Lake Champlain for the first time.
The democratization of air travel is one of the things Colonel Diller sees as a national security issue, in part because of its potential to reduce fuel consumption.
He was aware of the limits on where a plane can land and who can fly when he was a kid. He sees a future where everyone is a pilot, everywhere a runway.
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