Axios

A milestone in electric aviation took place Thursday afternoon, when Beta Technologies landed its ALIA eVTOL aircraft at Duke Field, at Eglin Air Force Base, for a deployment period with the U.S. Air Force.

The big picture: During its 2,000-mile journey from Burlington, Vermont, to Florida, the plane completed multiple short and long distance legs.

Hurricane Otis has killed at least 27 people in Acapulco, Mexico, according to the AP and other media reports. Otis was a Category 5 storm when it made a direct hit on the city of Acapulco early Wednesday.

The big picture: With electricity and communications still out in the Mexican resort city, reports are slowly coming in of the severe damage to the resort city.

More than 2,400 of you voted in the last round of Axios' bracket to crown our Final Four monsters.

• The latest: After barely securing a win over Wendigo, Chupacabra stares down the mighty Mothman.
• The other side: Fan favorite Bigfoot faces off against the enduring Jackalope.

Hurricane Otis made landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, early Wednesday with maximum sustained winds of 165 mph with and higher gusts, after rapidly intensifying from a tropical storm into a ferocious Category 5 storm in under 24 hours.

Threat level: Forecasters warned ahead of landfall that "catastrophic damage" was likely from Otis, which has since dropped to a tropical storm as it moves inland and weakens amid high terrain.

Hurricane Otis' extremely rapid intensification — so close to the Mexican coast — was one of the biggest, most high-stakes hurricane forecasting failures in years.

The big picture: The storm's leap from a tropical storm on early Tuesday to a Category 5 storm near midnight highlighted what climate change, combined with weather and climate variability, can do to a storm if conditions are right.

A new analysis finds a "strong and enduring correlation" between political ideology and U.S. electric vehicle adoption.

Driving the news: The working paper, from UC Berkeley's Energy Institute at Haas, explores county-level new car registrations from 2012-2022 and compares them to voting records in presidential races.