“Archer Achieves Piloted Flight, Advances To Next Phase Of Flight Trial Program”

Archer announced this week, it has start­ed the next phase of Midnight’s flight tri­al pro­gram show­cas­ing pilot­ed avi­a­tion, reports a press release. 

This next stage builds on safe, autonomous flight test­ing across its var­i­ous air­craft plat­forms, which val­i­dates the pro­pri­etary twelve tilt-six VTOL con­fig­u­ra­tion. Mid­night cruised at speeds of up to 125 mph and reached a max­i­mum alti­tude of over 1,500 ft above ground lev­el.

This fea­tured a con­ven­tion­al take-off and land­ing demon­strat­ing the strength of Midnight’s land­ing gear, capa­ble of per­form­ing both forms (ver­ti­cal and con­ven­tion­al) take-off and land­ing oper­a­tions. 

Through its design and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process, Archer has iden­ti­fied the impor­tance of being able to con­duct both, as CTOL pro­vides oper­a­tional flex­i­bil­i­ty and enhanced safe­ty.

Dur­ing this flight tri­al pro­gram, “Archer’s pilots will con­tin­ue to test key ele­ments of the air­craft, such as flight con­trol respon­sive­ness, sta­bil­i­ty and aero­dy­nam­ic and con­trol mod­el val­i­da­tion in addi­tion to gath­er­ing data to sup­port its cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion efforts in both the U.S and UAE,” explains the release.

Adam Gold­stein, Founder and CEO of Archer, com­ment­ed, “Put sim­ply, the per­for­mance of Mid­night con­tin­ues to demon­strate the strengths of our design. Both its VTOL and CTOL capa­bil­i­ties are a strong dif­fer­en­tia­tor for us, being crit­i­cal for deliv­er­ing an air­craft that can inte­grate into a wide range of oper­a­tional sce­nar­ios, while also pro­vid­ing enhanced safe­ty.”

The flight was flown by Archer Chief Test Pilot, Jeff Green­wood, who joined the com­pa­ny in 2021. “This pro­vid­ed invalu­able insight while focus­ing on cock­pit design, includ­ing ven­dor selec­tion for the dis­play and oth­er equip­ment,” con­tin­ues the release. 

Before Archer, Green­wood served as a test pilot for Bell Tex­tron, where he helped devel­op, test and cer­ti­fy lead­ing indus­try rotor­craft. Green­wood also served as a pilot in the U.S Marine Corps for 13 years. He then devel­oped an inter­est for test pilot­ing and became a grad­u­ate of the U.S Naval Test Pilot School.

Green­wood remarked, “Fly­ing Mid­night felt just like fly­ing the sim­u­la­tor, where every­thing respond­ed exact­ly as we trained for. That lev­el of con­sis­ten­cy is no sur­prise. It’s a tes­ta­ment to the engi­neer­ing and oper­a­tional excel­lence of our team, whose atten­tion to detail and ded­i­ca­tion to safe­ty made this mile­stone pos­si­ble.”

For more infor­ma­tion

www.archer.com

(Top image: Recent flight of Archer’s Mid­night air­craft show­cas­ing pilot­ed oper­a­tions)

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