Archer’s Maker eVTOL aircraft Receives FAA Certification of Authorisation and relocates to flight test facility

Archer’s Mak­er eVTOL demon­stra­tor air­craft has received its MIDO Cer­ti­fi­a­tion of Autho­ri­sa­tion (CoA) and Air­craft Lim­i­ta­tions from the FAA, with the com­pa­ny also mov­ing Mak­er from its devel­op­ment lab in Palo Alto to its test flight facil­i­ty.

The CoA and the Air­craft Lim­i­ta­tions are key com­po­nents of the Spe­cial Air­wor­thi­ness Cer­tifi­cate, which will be the FAA basis that per­mits the Mak­er air­craft to com­mence test flights. The move sig­nals a tran­si­tion for Archer from ground to air oper­a­tions and is the next in a series of crit­i­cal steps towards Maker’s first hov­er flight.

Brett Adcock, Archer co-founder and co-CEO, said: “The relo­ca­tion of Mak­er to our ded­i­cat­ed flight test facil­i­ty marks the next chap­ter in our jour­ney towards the future of flight. This tran­si­tion will allow our team to shift gears from our ‘ground phase’ to the ‘flight phase’ of our Mak­er roadmap.”

Final prepa­ra­tions are now under way for Mak­er’s first hov­er flight lat­er this year, as well as a thor­ough pro­gram of ongo­ing sys­tems test­ing. Pre­vi­ous­ly, the full-scale eVTOL air­craft was housed exclu­sive­ly at the devel­op­ment lab with­in Archer’s Palo Alto head­quar­ters where it was designed and built.

Archer’s flight test team is led by Matt Deal, who pre­vi­ous­ly man­aged eVTOL flight test oper­a­tions for the Air­bus Vahana pro­gram. He helms a group of engi­neers focused exclu­sive­ly on inte­grat­ing Maker’s mechan­i­cal and soft­ware ele­ments to deliv­er a suc­cess­ful first hov­er flight and over­sees the day-to-day oper­a­tions includ­ing set­ting the test flight time­line and lead­ing test flights.

While the lead up to Archer’s crit­i­cal first flight is para­mount, the inte­gra­tion and test process also allows for essen­tial two-way feed­back to the engi­neer­ing teams to refine func­tion­al­i­ty and soft­ware for both Mak­er and Archer’s pro­duc­tion air­craft, which is cur­rent­ly in its pre­lim­i­nary design stage.

Adam Gold­stein, Archer co-founder and co-CEO, added: “For the last few weeks, our team has been hard at work prepar­ing Mak­er for trans­port to the test facil­i­ty and, ulti­mate­ly, for its first hov­er flight.

“It’s been an excit­ing year for Archer, we recent­ly went pub­lic list­ing on the NYSE, we unveiled Mak­er for the first time, and now this mile­stone move puts us one step clos­er to our next goal: Mak­er tak­ing flight.”