Next year, BETA’s ALIA aircraft will fly the skies over New Zealand proudly wrapped in the mangōpare – Air New Zealand’s logo, a symbol representing new life, renewal, and hope for the future. It’s a fitting first commercial airline partnership for BETA.

This time last year, Air New Zealand announced the purchase of BETA’s all-electric aircraft as part of its Mission NextGen Aircraft program. In the months since, the airline identified its carrier and first route for the electric fleet: the NZ Post will use the ALIA CTOL to deliver mail across New Zealand, between Wellington and Blenheim.

While the ALIA will have humble beginnings delivering mail — it’s a big leap for electric commercial aviation, and Air New Zealand is committed to getting it right. With that, the company has added a Tech Demonstrator aircraft and multiple charging solutions to its existing order with BETA, and plans to begin familiarization practices and training programs in 2025 to ensure operational readiness for entry into service.

“Most of my career has been at an airline flying straight and level while eating sandwiches”
–Jake Snelgrove

Air New Zealand’s Energy Transition Lead Jake Snelgrove recently spent time at BETA’s HQ doing flight training on the aircraft. Snelgrove is a pilot himself, and while he admits he’s less versed on small aircraft than he is on commercial 787’s (“most of my career has been at an airline flying straight and level while eating sandwiches [laughs]”), we sat down with Snelgrove before he left Vermont to ask him a few questions, including what it’s like to receive training in an electric airplane for the first time, and what the path between Air New Zealand’s first Alia and a full commercial electric fleet might look like.

BETA: For starters, what do you do at Air New Zealand?

Jake Snelgrove: I’m responsible for Air New Zealand’s energy transition. That involves everything from flying aircraft more efficiently to sustainable aviation fuel. Of course, my real passion is alternative propulsion — whether that’s battery, hybrid, or hydrogen. You guys are our number one friends in that aspect [laughs].

Air New Zealand and BETA have been working together for the past two years. How did this partnership come about?

JS: We’re a small country which doesn’t have great roading networks, and we’ve got no high-speed rails like Europe. Aviation is essential to moving our people and products around the country. Because of that, a transition to net zero is harder for us compared with airlines in other parts of the world. So we looked at the different things we can do to get there. One of the exciting areas of decarbonization is “next gen” aircraft, right? And that’s battery powered, hydrogen powered, or hybrid powered airplanes, to better connect New Zealand.

Our average turboprop flight is 350 kilometers. With such a high number of short routes, we’ve got the ideal use case, and we figured if we didn’t do it, then there’s no one else in the country to take the lead on it.

It’s gotta feel really good to be a part of a company like that.

JS: Like all of you guys, a lot of us have a deep passion for aviation. We love it. It’s everything. Climate change is an existential threat to the thing that we love, and we want it to keep going, right?

But it does come with challenges. This is hard. And as an airline that’s driven to make money for its shareholders, there is that underlying need for us to continually demonstrate how this makes long-term sense economically and strategically for the business. It’s not just a thing that’s nice to do — it’s absolutely a must and so getting this right now means that we’re a better, stronger, more viable business 50 years to come. We certainly got into this because it was the right thing to do, but that only gets you so far and through so many board meetings. But the more we can do to ensure that we are heading down that path early mitigates those risks that are facing us long term.

“Fundamentally the airplane flies like any other airplane. It’s stable, it’s responsive, it’s a great and easy airplane to fly.”
–Jake Snelgrove

You’ve flown for decades, including on major aircraft for Air New Zealand prior to your current role. Now, you’re focused on helping BETA train your teams to fly an all-electric aircraft. Talk about going through initial ALIA flight training this week.

JS: Fundamentally the airplane flies like any other airplane. It’s stable, it’s responsive, it’s a great and easy airplane to fly. The areas where we need to sharpen our training is how electric flight shows up in all these other areas. For instance, when you’re getting down to low battery — how that’s displayed to the pilot, and things they’re monitoring in the event of an abnormality. It’s really just all of those little new details.

Learning new things as a pilot can be hard because sometimes you get stuck on one aircraft type, or you get stuck flying the same route and airplane everyday. But, the idea of learning new things and exploring new areas like this is something that our pilots are really excited about. So far, what we’re learning is that it’s all simple enough to be revolutionary [laughs]. There’s nothing scary or risky about flying an aircraft with a battery. Being able to really show that will give people a lot of confidence in the technology.

This is your second trip to BETA. What do you feel has changed or stayed the same since that first trip?

JS: I was last here in September 2022. I’ve seen so many businesses that have a great culture when they’re small, but the challenge is keeping that culture as you grow bigger. But you’ve shown that you can do it — there’s been no change to what I first saw in 2022. That’s a testament to Kyle and the others here leading the business.

Tell us more about what New Zealand and BETA are planning together, and what you’re most excited about when it comes to bringing this new technology to Air New Zealand’s fleet.

JS: We’ve devised this [Tech Demonstrator] program as a way for us to test the aircraft and prove to ourselves how we can operate it, as well as the economics. The big thing for us is this small aircraft is the catalyst for us to say [to the regulators]: we’ve ordered a plane, it’s coming in 2026, and we need you to come with us on the journey to not just get this aircraft certified in New Zealand, but also to get the operator rules and regulations and pilot training and maintenance support and aircraft infrastructure all in place for when the plane is here. And that will create the framework to then go and buy and operate bigger planes in the future. While it probably feels like a small thing for you guys that Air New Zealand’s buying one plane, it’s a big step. We’re keeping the torch at our feet rather than pointing it at the mountain in front of us. We’ll get this done, we’ll learn from it, and then we’ll start to ladder up into the future.