“Take a Bow Midnight”: Archer Unveils its Production Aircraft

Archer Avi­a­tion has today pub­licly unveiled its pro­duc­tion air­craft, Mid­night, a pilot-plus-four-pas­sen­ger eVTOL air­craft dur­ing an Open House event in Palo Alto, Cal­i­for­nia, reports a press release. Mid­night is a devel­op­ment of Archer’s demon­stra­tor air­craft, Mak­er.

Mid­night has been con­struct­ed for short dis­tance trips of around 20-miles, with a charg­ing time of approx­i­mate­ly 10 min­utes in-between. Present­ly, Archer is work­ing to cer­ti­fy Mid­night with the FAA for late 2024 and will then employ the craft as part of its UAM net­work, which, says Archer, it aims to launch in 2025.

Adam Gold­stein, Archer’s co-Founder and CEO, com­ment­ed, “From day one Archer’s strat­e­gy has always been about find­ing the most effi­cient path to com­mer­cial­is­ing eVTOL air­craft. We believe our strat­e­gy and team’s abil­i­ty has allowed us to estab­lish a lead­er­ship posi­tion in the mar­ket, and is why we are con­fi­dent we will be the first com­pa­ny to cer­ti­fy an eVTOL air­craft in the US with the FAA.”

Archer’s approach to design­ing Mid­night focus­es on var­i­ous cut­ting-edge and state-of-the-art key areas. 

Safe­ty: High redun­dan­cy and sim­pli­fied propul­sion sys­tems make for a sig­nif­i­cant­ly safer air­craft com­pared to a heli­copter. Mid­night has no sin­gle crit­i­cal points of fail­ure, mean­ing that should any sin­gle com­po­nent fail, the air­craft can still safe­ly com­plete its flight. In addi­tion, the elec­tric motors used in Mid­night have sig­nif­i­cant­ly less mov­ing parts than those found in a gas tur­bine or pis­ton engine, allow­ing it to oper­ate with less main­te­nance and low­er over­all risk.

Low noise: Designed to cruise at approx­i­mate­ly 2,000 feet, the design of Mid­night is such that the noise which reach­es the ground, is expect­ed to mea­sure around 45 A‑weighted deci­bels (dBA), almost 1,000 times qui­eter than that of a heli­copter. Dur­ing for­ward flight, the aircraft’s tilt pro­pellers spin on axes that are aligned with the oncom­ing air flow, rather than edge-wise to the flow, as is the case with tra­di­tion­al heli­copters — fur­ther decreas­ing noise lev­els. Since Archer’s air­craft is spin­ning 12 small pro­pellers rather than one large rotor, it can also spin them at sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er tip speeds, result­ing in much low­er noise lev­els.

Sus­tain­able: Mid­night is all elec­tric, result­ing in zero oper­at­ing emis­sions. Archer is com­mit­ted to sourc­ing renew­able ener­gy wher­ev­er pos­si­ble to pow­er its air­craft. Archer’s design and engi­neer­ing teams have worked to inte­grate mate­ri­als into this air­craft that have their own unique sus­tain­abil­i­ty. For exam­ple, Midnight’s seats are con­struct­ed out of “flax” fibre, a nat­ur­al plant which requires very lit­tle irri­ga­tion and is high­ly absorbent of CO2. In addi­tion, Archer’s design uses fab­ric made from recy­cled con­tents like plas­tic bot­tles.

Mark Mesler

Mark Mesler, Archer’s CFO, remarked, “We con­tin­ue the push towards com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion, with a major­i­ty of our resources focused on com­plet­ing the devel­op­ment and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Mid­night, build­ing out our man­u­fac­tur­ing and sup­ply chain capa­bil­i­ties and hard­en­ing our go-to-mar­ket plans.”

Archer is mak­ing rapid air­craft progress and is on sched­ule to com­plete a full tran­si­tion flight in the com­ing weeks, just twelve months after its first Mak­er hov­er flight.

The release states, “Achiev­ing this mile­stone will fur­ther val­i­date the flight physics of Archer’s pro­pri­etary twelve-tilt-six con­fig­u­ra­tion that it uses on both Mak­er and Mid­night, as well as a num­ber of the key enabling tech­nolo­gies, such as the air­craft flight con­trol sys­tem.” It adds, “The Mak­er flight test pro­gram has gen­er­at­ed invalu­able data that Archer has lever­aged in the devel­op­ment and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion path of Mid­night.” 

News and infor­ma­tion sur­round­ing the Open House event is avail­able at:

https://investors.archer.com/overview/default.aspx

https://twitter.com/ArcherAviation?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.archer.com/

Pic­ture cred­its: Archer.