By Ted Cohen 

The recent emergency landing of a BETA Technologies chopper in Colchester was just the latest in a string of hiccups plaguing the company.

A company helicopter had to make a “precautionary” landing on the Colchester Causeway that’s surrounded by Lake Champlain on Tuesday.

But the mishap isn’t just a one-off for the South Burlington electric-aircraft firm or its personnel.

Just this past May, a BETA helicopter also made an emergency landing, in a Williston field. The unidentified pilot said mechanical issues forced the unplanned landing.

A similar BETA helicopter’s ill-fated landing occurred four years ago, August 2021, also on the causeway. 

With smoke in the cockpit, the pilot, Nathaniel Fortin, made an emergency landing with the power cut off from the chopper’s main rotor.

Fortin managed to land the chopper on the causeway, but fire destroyed the aircraft.

That same month, a second incident happened with BETA founder and CEO Kyle Clark flying his own plane. 

Clark had to make an emergency landing on a farmer’s field in Richmond after experiencing engine trouble.

In August 2022, a BETA shipping container filled with lithium-ion batteries for its experimental aircraft caught fire, the second such similar incident involving lithium-ion batteries.

The first, in 2019, occurred when a battery had a catastrophic failure, also triggering a fire.

Meanwhile BETA, the electric aircraft manufacturer, based at the Burlington International Airport, earlier this week was notified it was one of 200 “renewable energy” projects nationwide losing major federal funding.

The U.S. Department of Energy canceled a roughly $1.8 million grant that would have gone toward developing technology to recharge batteries in environments with little or no electric infrastructure.

Besides losing an expected taxpayer-funded grant, BETA Technologies has had a rough go of it in the past few years involving either its own aircraft or pilots or both.

In the most Colchester mishap, Jeffrey Wagner, a BETA pilot, said the craft is used by BETA for training and for going back and forth between Plattsburgh, NY and Burlington.

While the chopper was flying back to Burlington, a warning light came on saying that an anomaly was detected in the gearbox, and the crew said it worked to immediately land the craft on the causeway to avoid crashing.

In 2024, a BETA systems engineer and former company test pilot, Lochie Ferrier, was killed in a plane crash off the California coast in his small, four-seat hobbyist-built plane.

As a test pilot for BETA in 2022, Ferrier helped fly the South Burlington startup’s experimental electric aircraft from Vermont to Kentucky so then-U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg could check out the prototype.

BETA was incorporated in 2017 by Clark, a Harvard-educated pilot, engineer and entrepreneur.

The company seven years ago made the first flight of its original 4,000-pound Ava XC eight-motor, eight-propeller, battery-operated proof-of-concept aircraft.

In 2021 Vermont Business Magazine’s Joyce Martel dubbed Clark “a visionary.”

“Competition in the field of electronic aviation is fierce,” Martel wrote. “From large manufacturers to small companies like BETA, the race is on to produce viable electric aircraft.”