FeaturedNews

Q&A: Archer’s Tom Muniz and Geoff Bower talk about its eVTOL aircraft design

Fol­low­ing Archer’s excit­ing announce­ment in going pub­lic as part of a joint SPAC merg­er with Atlas Crest Invest­ment Corp, we spoke to Tom Muniz and Geoff Bow­er — Archer’s VP of Engi­neer­ing and Chief Engi­neer respec­tive­ly — about its eVTOL air­craft.

Archer’s engi­neer­ing team has amassed an incred­i­ble amount of expe­ri­ence in the eVTOL space — more than 200 years — after pre­vi­ous roles at com­pa­nies such as Air­bus, Joby Avi­a­tion and Wisk. Archer’s air­craft will trav­el at 60 miles at speeds of 150mph — with no sin­gle point of fail­ure — and a full-scale ver­sion is set to be revealed lat­er this year.

eVTOL Insights spoke with both Tom and Geoff to get an idea about the com­pa­ny’s work so far.

Q: With so many eVTOL air­craft devel­op­ers already in the mar­ket, can you tell me more about Archer’s design and where you think it can have the great­est val­ue?

Tom Muniz: “It’s a real­ly inter­est­ing sto­ry where a lot of us have been work­ing on these vehi­cles for a while. I think, both in Geof­f’s case and mine, we’ve built five dif­fer­ent full-scale vehi­cles in the past so there’s this great oppor­tu­ni­ty to lever­age the lessons learned at a high lev­el.

“The oth­er real­ly unique and pow­er­ful thing about Archer is that the com­pa­ny has a unique cul­ture where every­thing is focused on build­ing the right prod­uct, to go do some­thing real­ly mean­ing­ful and add val­ue to peo­ple’s lives and not just push tech­nol­o­gy for tech­nol­o­gy’s sake. We’re build­ing a real­ly cool prod­uct with a great busi­ness case around it.

“So when it comes to aero­plane design, we were very prag­mat­ic. We laid out all of the poten­tial con­fig­u­ra­tion pros and cons and did a rel­a­tive­ly detailed, mul­ti-dis­ci­pli­nary analy­sis. And I think what we’ve zeroed in on is some­thing that has good per­for­mance, but will have a rel­a­tive­ly straight­for­ward path through cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, lever­ag­ing tra­di­tion­al man­u­fac­tur­ing process­es and tech­niques. Every­thing is just about get­ting an aero­plane out of the door and cer­ti­fied.”

Geoff Bow­er: “On the vehi­cle design side, I don’t think there’s an obvi­ous ‘best con­fig­u­ra­tion’. There are prob­a­bly quite a few that will work. We have one we real­ly like and know from past expe­ri­ence which fea­tures are chal­leng­ing and that we want to avoid.

“There are a lot of designs that obvi­ous­ly don’t work. Although maybe not so obvi­ous­ly because there are still peo­ple out there pur­su­ing them. We’re real­ly tak­ing a prag­mat­ic approach, focused on the right bal­ance, and sim­plic­i­ty to get through cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

Q: You men­tioned about lever­ag­ing lessons learnt in the past. Are you able to dis­close what they were in par­tic­u­lar, from your time at oth­er com­pa­nies in the eVTOL space?

GB: “There’s def­i­nite­ly the right trade off between disk load­ing and wing load­ing, that’s a real­ly impor­tant one. But I think that gets back one step to the busi­ness case. And what’s real­ly required in terms of pay­load, range and speed.

“We believe that you need a rea­son­able range, say 40 to 60 miles to address real­ly inter­est­ing trips. Most of your flights will prob­a­bly be a lit­tle bit short­er than that, some­where in the 20 to 30-mile range, but you don’t want to nec­es­sar­i­ly be using the full bat­tery every flight.

“And then speed is impor­tant. Because ulti­mate­ly what we’re doing is sell­ing peo­ple their time back, the goal is to reduce trans­porta­tion times. So you need to fly rea­son­ably fast. There’s a ques­tion of exact­ly how fast, but it’s pret­ty obvi­ous that if you’re fly­ing the speeds of cars, it does­n’t make sense. If you’re try­ing to push it to 200–300 miles per hour there’s dimin­ish­ing returns.”

TM: “The oth­er les­son learned from the past is that it’s much more effi­cient to engage with the reg­u­la­tor from the very begin­ning, and have the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion path com­ing togeth­er as your aero­plane design can still adapt and come togeth­er with it.

“Try­ing to take an aero­plane and shove it into a box with a reg­u­la­tor is a pret­ty chal­leng­ing thing to do. So, our approach has been like Geoff said, to real­ly think about the busi­ness case and why we’re mak­ing the trades that we’re mak­ing.

“But then also think about it in terms of what the reg­u­la­to­ry con­straints are going to be, and make sure we’re not doing some­thing that we’ll end up need­ing to undo or mod­i­fy lat­er. I think that’s a key thing here.”

Q: We’re enter­ing the start of a real­ly excit­ing time for elec­tric avi­a­tion. How excit­ed are you, giv­en all your pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence, to be with Archer and build­ing an air­craft that will play a key role in the future of mobil­i­ty?

GB: “Yeah, it’s super excit­ing. As Tom said we’ve both been doing this for about 10 years now, so to be on the cusp of actu­al­ly hav­ing a prod­uct that we can get into peo­ple’s hands is real­ly excit­ing. And the team we’ve put togeth­er at Archer is prob­a­bly the part that I’m most excit­ed about.

“Work­ing with all these super expe­ri­enced and knowl­edge­able folks every day, try­ing to bring peo­ple in from diverse back­grounds to real­ly show us the best design and the best way to get to mar­ket.”

TM: “I think the oth­er thing that comes to mind is that the pub­lic has­n’t real­ly seen a lot of the devel­op­ment work that’s hap­pened over the last decade, so look­ing for­ward to the next five or 10 years it should be real­ly excit­ing see­ing pro­grammes turned from tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment into, hope­ful­ly in the near future, cer­ti­fied air­craft that peo­ple can engage with and use. It’s a super excit­ing point in the indus­try.”

Q: On the top­ic of the pub­lic, how impor­tant is it that we get this pub­lic accep­tance right from the start?

GB: “I think it is vital. Safe­ty is an obvi­ous point, but the oth­er one is the acoustic sig­na­ture and foot­print. One of the major imped­i­ments to heli­copter oper­a­tions in urban areas today is the noise impact, so both are things we’re obvi­ous­ly very heav­i­ly focused on.”

TM: “And then I’d add cost as anoth­er sig­nif­i­cant fac­tor. If these vehi­cles are so expen­sive that they’re not acces­si­ble to the major­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion, then I think it’s going to be tough to get a wide accep­tance. We’ve all prob­a­bly flown on a heli­copter one or two times in our entire life. Why? Because they’re out­ra­geous­ly expen­sive. So I think it’s real­ly impor­tant that it is afford­able to fly in these vehi­cles, and I think they can be oper­at­ed at very rea­son­able costs long term.”

Q: How are devel­op­ments com­ing along with your Archer’s air­craft, and do you have a planned cer­ti­fi­ca­tion route?

TM: “We’re in the final inte­gra­tion stage of our full scale demon­stra­tor air­craft, which will be unveiled in a pub­lic event com­ing up in a few months. Then we’ll fly that vehi­cle for the first time lat­er this year.

“In par­al­lel with that, we’re work­ing real­ly close­ly with the FAA [Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion] to finalise the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion basis for our prod­uct vehi­cle. We’re plan­ning to cer­ti­fy as a Part 23 aero­plane under Amend­ment 64 and then we’ll launch into the detailed design effort for that lat­er in the year as well. So there is a lot going on.”

Q: When com­ing togeth­er to build Archer’s air­craft, what were the main ideas that want­ed to achieve?

GB: “In addi­tion to the per­for­mance, we think it’s impor­tant to have a real­ly strong cus­tomer focus. So we’ve been think­ing hard about things like ingress and egress and the cab­in inte­ri­or.

“If you look at some of the con­cepts out there, these are things where there prob­a­bly has­n’t been a ton of effort and they are going to be vital in gain­ing pub­lic accep­tance and hav­ing peo­ple be real­ly com­fort­able around these air­craft. We’ve put quite a lot of work into the aes­thet­ic design and under­stand­ing the ergonom­ics of being in and around the air­craft.”

TM: “From a pure air­plane design per­spec­tive, we talked about some of the trades i.e. you need enough range to make the mis­sion use­ful, enough air­speed speed to save peo­ple time and it has to be done at a rel­a­tive­ly low cost, which means your plane needs to be rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple.

“And then when we lay out all of the con­fig­u­ra­tion options, it’s real­ly a mat­ter of design­ing a vehi­cle that’s effi­cient in all phas­es of flight. So as Geoff said ear­li­er, hav­ing enough disk area for rea­son­able hov­er and take-off and land­ing per­for­mance. But then low enough drag in cruise so you can get rea­son­able range, so that push­es you in a par­tic­u­lar way in the design space and makes cer­tain designs more chal­leng­ing.”

GB: “The fun­da­men­tal chal­lenge of eVTOL design in my mind is that you need enough disk area for hov­er, and then you either need to use it in cruise or get it into a low drag state and out of the way. I think we have the right bal­ance of those.”

Q: It’s bril­liant that you’re build­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of air­craft and you’re clear­ly very pas­sion­ate about what you do. What do you enjoy the most about it?

TM: “I think aero­planes are very inter­est­ing because it’s this mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary opti­mi­sa­tion prob­lem, where to make good aero­planes lots of com­pet­ing pri­or­i­ties need to be bal­anced in order to get an opti­mal solu­tion.

“And in our case, since the vehi­cle is elec­tric, that means you now have to add in the bat­tery and pow­er­train trades — in addi­tion to the aero per­for­mance  and struc­ture trades. Noise is anoth­er trade, so if you want to be able to go qui­eter it’s going to be heav­ier and have worse per­for­mance.

“So you have all these knobs which you can turn to explore the infi­nite num­ber of solu­tions. Think­ing about it holis­ti­cal­ly and cou­pling it with the right use case, it’s this real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing design prob­lem. As Geoff said, I don’t think there’s any one answer. And it’s up to peo­ple to make good deci­sions and help iden­ti­fy where we should be.”

Q: And final­ly, are you able to expand on the safe­ty case for Archer’s eVTOL air­craft?

GB: “We’ve put on an intense amount of effort into the archi­tec­ture of the aero­plane and the sys­tems to meet a high lev­el of safe­ty. It’s real­ly not as sim­ple as adding redun­dan­cy; hav­ing extra motors does­n’t equal safer, nec­es­sar­i­ly. So there are a lot of details in the design that if you’re not look­ing for them, you may not know why they’re there.

“A lot of design deci­sions are real­ly dri­ven by the safe­ty case. For exam­ple, the details of the fly-by-wire flight con­trol sys­tem, the high volt­age sys­tem, the elec­tric propul­sion sys­tem archi­tec­ture — there’s a lot of real­ly inter­est­ing stuff in there. I won’t go into too much detail on it oth­er than to say those are real­ly where we focus a lot of our efforts.”

Avatar photo

Jason Pritchard

Jason Pritchard is the Editor of eVTOL Insights. He holds a BA from Leicester's De Montfort University and has worked in Journalism and Public Relations for more than a decade. Outside of work, Jason enjoys playing and watching football and golf. He also has a keen interest in Ancient Egypt.

eVTOL Insights is part of the Industry Insights Group. Registered in the UK. Company No: 14395769