USAF Wraps Up Flight Testing on Electric Aircraft, Complete with Casualty Evac
Jan. 29, 2024 | By Greg Hadley
The Air Force and BETA Technologies finished a three-month stint of flight testing with its “Alia” electric aircraft at Duke Field, Fla., the contractor announced Jan. 29—which included several milestones for electric aviation within the Department of Defense.
Most prominently, the Air Force’s 96th Test Wing said that on Jan. 11, the sleek, quiet, fixed-wing aircraft flew a simulated casualty evacuation mission and communicated directly with Air Force aircraft for the first time.
The 413th Flight Test Squadron, the Air Force’s rotary wing test squadron, wrote the test and safety plan for Alia, which landed at Duke Field in late October. BETA continued to own and operate the aircraft.
In a release announcing the end of the “deployment,” BETA said Alia’s time at Duke was “the next phase of a larger developmental test and evaluation (DT&E) effort being conducted by the U.S. Air Force to assess electric aviation’s applicability for DOD missions.”
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/usaf-flight-testing-electric-aircraft-casualty-evacuation/