You're right, some other entrants in the eVTOL community seem to have strategies that rely on some kind of regulatory magic. The company I'm working for, Beta, is taking a very different strategic approach, with much less reliance on "then some regulatory magic happens;" we are focusing on cargo first, and a passenger variant later. We are not particularly concerned with the change to 21.17b, we're willing to work with the FAA on that rather than fighting it. And because our initial target is cargo, such as transporting organs between hospitals with existing helipad infrastructure or cargo from airport to distribution center, there are a lot fewer regulatory hurdles about where we operate than the air taxi market.

We are following ARP4754A and 4761, yes. We are still in the process of doing our safety assessments at the aircraft and systems levels and finalizing our type certified design, so I can't say which systems are going to be required to be DAL-A, but I expect that the pilot inputs, flight controller, battery systems, high voltage distribution system, low voltage distribution system, lift motors, and control surface servos will be designed to that level. Our strategy is to build ourselves the critical components for an electric aircraft, so we are doing the battery, high voltage distribution, and electric motors, while we are buying the other components (pilot inputs, flight control computer, control surface servos, primary flight displays, etc) from existing suppliers who already have experience in this space.

In the meantime, we are also learning a lot from flight test of our experimental proof-of-concept airframes, which we can feed into this process. We've already built one experimental eVTOL under a previous design, and then two proof of concept airframes with a design much closer to the type certified design that we're now working on; so while we go through the process of breaking down the requirements per 4754A and doing safety assessments per 4761 and working on our final type certified design, we're also learning a lot about operational concerns and refining our design on our experimental proof of concept airframes.

As for the V22 line, well, our aircraft can't autorotate, but it's not bad as a glider. That was a primary design criterion; it should mostly be a glider that happens to have electric power. We recently did a cross-country trip halfway across the country on our PoC aircraft in CTOL configuration (https://evtol.news/news/beta-alia-250-prototype-flies-cross-...), with a number of stops on the way, of course, our range is limited by physics, and the majority of that trip was done such that there was an airport within the glide cone of our aircraft; we did allow for a few legs in which that wasn't always the case, and we would need to ditch in the event of power failure, but for most of the trip there was an airport within our glide cone if we had a power off event.