Archer’s Midnight Successfully Completes Phase 1 of Flight Trial Program 

This is a very impor­tant year for Archer Avi­a­tion as the com­pa­ny needs to ramp up its Mid­night flight tri­al pro­gram for com­mer­cial FAA cer­ti­fi­ca­tion by 2025. The good news is: Phase 1 of the process has been suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed, reports a press release. This first Phase took just three months to achieve which is sig­nif­i­cant­ly faster than for its pre­vi­ous pro­to­type air­craft, The Mak­er.  

The release states, “Addi­tion­al­ly, Midnight’s bat­tery sys­tem has recent­ly been upgrad­ed to include some of the first high volt­age bat­tery packs off of Archer’s man­u­fac­tur­ing line at its San Jose, Cal­i­for­nia facil­i­ties, a sig­nif­i­cant step as the com­pa­ny push­es towards being pro­duc­tion-ready.”

It con­tin­ues, “With these advance­ments, the air­craft remains firm­ly on track to com­plete its first full wing-borne tran­si­tion flight and begin pilot­ed ‘for cred­it’ test­ing with the FAA lat­er this year.”

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Adam Gold­stein, Archer’s co-Founder and CEO, com­ment­ed, “Over the last four years of flight test­ing, our team has been able to gath­er a tremen­dous amount of data and learn­ings that enable us to advance Mid­night rapid­ly towards cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. Our focus on safe­ty and con­sis­tent exe­cu­tion will allow us to achieve what no oth­er com­pa­ny in the world has done to date — bring elec­tric air taxis to cities across the U.S and the globe.” 

Phase 1 of the eVTOL air­craft’s flight test pro­gram cov­ered an array of increas­ing­ly com­plex flight maneu­vers and data gath­er­ing mis­sions. As it moves clos­er to Phase 2, the next step involves an incre­men­tal approach to speed test­ing, mean­ing Mid­night will con­tin­ue to fly at greater and greater speeds until it achieves full wing-borne tran­si­tion. 

This par­tic­u­lar tran­si­tion is an impor­tant mile­stone for any eVTOL air­craft, as it demon­strates, in a sin­gle flight, the capa­bil­i­ty to both take­off and land ver­ti­cal­ly and cruise effi­cient­ly in wing-borne flight. Once that is com­plete, Mid­night then moves to Phase 3, entail­ing fly­ing sim­u­lat­ed com­mer­cial routes to show off the aircraft’s oper­a­tional readi­ness.

Adam Gold­stein

The release points out, “Archer’s goal is to trans­form urban trav­el, replac­ing 60–90-minute com­mutes by car with esti­mat­ed 10–20 minute elec­tric air taxi flights that are safe, sus­tain­able, low noise, and cost-com­pet­i­tive with ground trans­porta­tion. Archer’s Mid­night is a pilot­ed, four-pas­sen­ger air­craft designed to per­form rapid back-to-back flights with min­i­mal charge time between flights.”

For more infor­ma­tion

www.archer.com

(Top image: Archer Avi­a­tion)

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