Bill Hanf of Green Mountain Avionics shows a private aircraft at Middlebury Airport in Middlebury on Tuesday, June 23, 2026. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger For six months, Nathan Merrill would come into work at Green Mountain Avionics, an aircraft maintenance company in Middlebury, at 3:00 a.m . and leave at 6:00 p.m.  “There wasn’t very many of me,” he recounted. With a short staff of technicians and a pile of projects to be completed, Merill clocked in the long hours to ensure the work got done.  At the time, around the spring of 2024, much of the business’ staff had left to work for a burgeoning aviation company in the state: Beta Technologies. Since the experimental electric aviation company opened the doors of its South Burlington manufacturing plant in 2023 and rapidly expanded employment, the staff at Green Mountain Avionics has shrunk by 50 percent, Bill Hanf, president and founder of the Middlebury company, estimates.  “I had spent about the last dozen years or so building up a world-class crew, and they had an opportunity that I would say a regular, normal small business just can’t compete with, so I lost probably half a dozen skilled technicians,” Hanf said.  A multibillion-dollar publicly traded company, backed by large investors such as Amazon, Beta offers unparalleled employee benefits for its now nearly 1,400 workers, including a private on-site health clinic, free lunches and free flight lessons. While state economists have touted Beta’s benefits for the local economy, including new jobs and increased tax revenue, other manufacturers and longtime aviation businesses say they’re struggling to survive, sucked for talent in an already small technician pool and unable to compete with Beta’s wealth. “We’re already at a disadvantage with the financial cost of Vermont, and then on top of that, we’re competing with a company that can pay a lot more,” said Mike Vincent, owner of JM Avionics, an aircraft maintenance company at Middlebury State Airport.  Since 2008, Vincent’s staff has shrunk from 21 employees to now just two. It’s a decline he attributes to general economic conditions that have grown in recent years — rising overhead costs and skyrocketing home prices, for example. But a “large amount” is due to Beta’s growth and an inability to compete, he said.  The market has become so competitive that Vincent, who said his family roots in Vermont go back generations, is effectively moving his business to North Carolina. There, he said, there’s a larger employee pool, more incentives for business owners and costs are generally lower, though he will still retain a small operation in Vermont where he’s been a business owner for 26 years.  “I want them to succeed, don’t get me wrong,” Vincent said, referring to Beta. “It’s just, it comes at a cost.” ‘Resources will follow’ While smaller aviation businesses have decried employment issues, economists, state officials and Beta itself sees the company’s growth as benefiting the technician pool in the long run, even if some businesses are currently squeezed.     “I think the situation we’re in is we’re just in a tight labor market, and it takes a while to re-educate and retrain the existing workforce,” said Frank Cioffi, president of Greater Burlington Industrial Corporation, an economic development organization.  A month after it debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in November 2025, Beta CEO Kyle Clark said that the company would add 1,000 more workers to its already growing staff over the next 18 months. From January 2026 to June, the company has hired 420 people, Blain Newton, Beta’s Chief Information Officer, told VTDigger.  Lyle Jepson, Commissioner of the Department of Economic Development, called the growth “exponential” for Vermont.  Amid this growth, Clark identified a challenge: “integrating experienced people from a wide range of successful aerospace companies into one common BETA standard,” he wrote in a message to shareholders before an annual meeting earlier this month, indicating that the company has employed a significant portion of its workers from local aviation companies.  “It was my understanding in the beginning that Kyle always said that he wouldn’t impact local aviator FBOs (fixed-based operators), but I think it kind of backfired,” said Daniel Gauvin, owner of Lakeview Aviation, an airplane services and instruction company in Newport.  “When you put an ad out there ‘We’re looking for mechanics, we’re hiring everywhere, and we’re offering X amount of dollars an hour,’ it’s kind of hard to compete with that.” Beta offers its employees in South Burlington an annual salary ranging from $55,000 to $185,000 per year, according to recent job openings that span a variety of roles, while the average annual salary for avionics technicians nationwide is $83,380, according to May 2025 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.  Clark, a native Vermonter, has continuously said the company is focused on investing in local Vermonters and the state’s economy. Of the 420 hires this year, 85% are from Vermont, and the company has brought 90 people into the state in the first half of this year, Newton said.  “We look at it, how do we increase the size of the pie so that everyone wins, and we start to create this really robust aerospace ecosystem,” Newton said.  For Newton, this abundance philosophy is seen in the various partnerships Beta has with schools in the state aimed at growing the younger technician population. The company is “in conversations” with all seventeen Career and Technical Education schools in Vermont, and has active partnerships with many of them, Newton said.  He pointed to their partnership with Vermont State University, which launched a local chapter of a women’s aviation group offering mentorship, scholarships and professional development opportunities, as one of many examples of the company’s investment in growing the technician pool.  Statewide, Vermont faces a lack of manufacturing jobs, though demand is high. Over the last 10 years, manufacturing jobs in Vermont have decreased by nearly 8%, according to recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and that loss has been felt so widely that those in the industry took their concerns to the statehouse in April. Meanwhile, technical schools can’t keep up with the interest from young people and are turning away applicants due to a limited number of available spots.  “We’re out of talent, like we’re out of mechanics, we’re out of avionics tech, and it’s industry-wide,” Clifford Cloy, president of Border Air, said. “It’s not just localized to Vermont.” This gap will be filled over time through Beta’s partnerships with technical schools, which will grow the workforce, Newton, Jepson and Cioffi all said.  “It becomes this kind of story of abundance where we’re creating more and more opportunities to develop aerospace businesses,” Newton said.  But for Hanf, who has lost almost all of his technical staff to Beta, “It doesn’t feel very good right now to me.”  Without many senior technicians, it’s more difficult to bring on new hires due to the amount of training required, he said. Jennifer Traver, the administrative assistant at Green Mountain Avionics, described the frequent training and employment losses as a “constant reset to being productive.”    ‘The small shops took the toll’ For Cloy, whose company provides services at Franklin County State Airport, his business has not seen any employment impact from Beta, but he has witnessed significant training activity from the company at his airport, describing Beta as a “very fast growing company.” This intense growth, he said, allows Beta to “negotiate from a different position” with municipalities and states compared to smaller businesses.  “They bring a lot to the state of Vermont in terms of employment,” Cloy said. “They’re always going to get a little bit more say of which way development goes.”  Cioffi, the president of the Burlington development corporation, pushed back against this claim. “Beta is playing by the rules, raising money and investing the same way any other company can do it.” He added, though, that it is doing so “in a very accelerated way.”  As Beta rapidly expanded into the Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport, other tenants at the airport alleged that Burlington was showing “undue favoritism” towards Beta in a way that would displace some, like longtime tenant Mansfield Heliflight, a 2025 federal lawsuit by Mansfield owner Eric Chase alleges. Chase declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.  A local auto shop also criticized Beta for its expansion, claiming earlier this year that their landlord pushed them out after the company showed interest in purchasing the property.  But Cioffi sees the expansion as a healthy sign of competition in the market.  “If anybody’s complaining, step up your game,” he said.  As this growth played out, Vincent said he and his fellow business owners “sat by for four or five years watching,” waiting for Beta to collaborate with smaller avionics businesses, such as Hanf’s business, which, according to Vincent, could have provided Beta with its Garmin dealer services. During this time, Vincent said he was told by representatives at Beta that they would sit down with him and other business owners to discuss the losses they were facing. But he said that sit-down never happened.   In response, Beta did not confirm whether or not this meeting happened, but Newton said the company partners with multiple local businesses that are “thriving through working with us.”  For example, he said, Beta employs the services of New England Air, a woman-owned HVAC company, and local farms, which it uses for the food it provides its staff.  “I think by having the work that we do with Beta, it has helped my business, because obviously that’s sales, and then it provides work for my employees, which allows me to provide better benefits,” Heather Ferrara, owner of New England Air said. “I mean, Vermont is a challenging place to work and have a business.”  But for Vincent, who will soon make his move to North Carolina, the business environment has become too challenging.  “Usually you have a benefit somewhere, and something bad happens somewhere else, and that’s where we’re at  — where the small shops took the toll,” he said. Read the story on VTDigger here: As Beta Technologies expands employment — and investors — other technical businesses struggle to survive. ...read more read less