Archer achieves significant milestone as its Midnight eVTOL aircraft finally takes its first test flight

Archer’s Mid­night eVTOL air­craft has final­ly tak­en flight, as the com­pa­ny announced anoth­er sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone in its test­ing pro­gramme. This lat­est announce­ments builds on four years of flight test­ing, includ­ing two years with its Mak­er pro­to­type.

In a press release issued today (Wednes­day), Archer said Midnight’s flight enve­lope is on track to rapid­ly advance from hov­er to full wing-borne flight ‘over the com­ing months’, help­ing pave the way to begin ‘for cred­it’ test­ing with the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion in 2024.

Simul­ta­ne­ous with the Mid­night flight test pro­gram, Archer intends to con­tin­ue Maker’s flight test pro­gram as well as fly­ing sim­u­lat­ed com­mer­cial routes to con­tin­ue to advance the company’s oper­a­tional readi­ness.

Archer’s founder and CEO Adam Gold­stein, said: “This next phase of Archer’s flight test pro­gram is only pos­si­ble because of the four years of flight test­ing we’ve done. Mid­night is build­ing on the suc­cess­es of its pre­de­ces­sor air­craft and rep­re­sents anoth­er sig­nif­i­cant step for­ward in Archer’s path to com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion.

“The next year and a half will be focused on con­tin­u­ing to rapid­ly advance our flight test pro­gram and Archer’s elec­tric air taxi oper­a­tions as we pre­pare to bring Mid­night to mar­ket in 2025.”

Tom Muniz, Archer’s COO, added: “Hav­ing tak­en sev­en full-size eVTOL air­craft from design to flight test dur­ing my career in the eVTOL indus­try, today’s mile­stone with Mid­night marks the most sig­nif­i­cant flight to date bring­ing Archer and the eVTOL indus­try anoth­er step clos­er to bring­ing a scal­able and com­mer­cial­ly viable air­craft to mar­ket.”

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.

Ear­li­er this month, Archer con­firmed its inten­tions to launch its air taxi ser­vice across the UAE, mak­ing the coun­try its first inter­na­tion­al launch part­ner