ARCHER AVIATION: “AND THEN THERE WAS ONE!”

Archer Avi­a­tion appeared from nowhere in late May, 2020. The com­pa­ny had qui­et­ly moved from A to Z with­out even pass­ing ‘GO’. Archer was already on par with the lead­ing eVTOL pio­neers and had bless­ings from the busi­ness elite.

Yet, the com­pa­ny was an enig­ma. evtolnews.com enlight­ened the pub­lic with an arti­cle head­ed: Archer (Unnamed five seat eVTOL).

https://evtol.news/archer/

We learned the Cal­i­forn­ian-based com­pa­ny had launched on May 21st, 2020; was devel­op­ing mul­ti­ple mod­els of eVTOL air­craft includ­ing one (unnamed) car­ry­ing four pas­sen­gers and one pilot for up to 60 miles at speeds close to 150 mph.

The mar­ket­ing of Archer focused around the co-founders, two young, good-look­ing and high­ly intel­li­gent and suc­cess­ful men called Brett Adcock and Adam Gold­stein who, we dis­cov­ered, were ser­i­al entre­pre­neurs and had recent­ly sold mar­ket­place start-up Vet­tery to The Adec­co Group for over USD100 mil­lion.

From then on, Archer and these pro­ject­ed gold­en boys of the emerg­ing eVTOL indus­try were mar­ket­ed as one. You couldn’t read an arti­cle or view a video about the com­pa­ny with­out quotes from the two. They appeared joined at the hip; came over as best bud­dies; looked great and pro­fes­sion­al on screen; were high­ly ambi­tious and ded­i­cat­ed to their cause.

And so this pro­jec­tion hap­pi­ly con­tin­ued until last month, when out of the blue, news emerged that Adcock was step­ping down as co-CEO.

He tweet­ed:

The Archer mar­ket­ing machine went into over­drive. evtol.news picked up the ini­tial sto­ry. “Brett Adcock is step­ping down from his role as co-CEO of the com­pa­ny, leav­ing Adam Gold­stein as the sole CEO of Archer. The com­pa­ny said this deci­sion was made to ‘help sim­pli­fy its oper­at­ing struc­ture,’ but most impor­tant­ly, Adcock would remain as one of the company’s board of direc­tors. “He is ful­ly com­mit­ted to the suc­cess of Archer,” stat­ed the com­pa­ny press release.

Inter­est­ing­ly, the for­mer co-CEO would not pro­vide fur­ther com­ments on his depar­ture or what his next ven­ture might be.

Then, the inevitable hap­pened. News lat­er broke that Adcock had also stepped down from the Board, tak­ing his Archer shares with him, while leav­ing behind an ongo­ing com­pa­ny legal bat­tle with com­peti­tor Wisk. Some media reports quot­ed a tweet post­ed on May 9th from Adcock men­tion­ing diverg­ing visions with oth­er Archer board mem­bers on where to steer the eVTOL start­up. The tweet was lat­er delet­ed.

dronedj.com wrote, “(This) invites spec­u­la­tion that Adcock may have felt Archer, and its pace mov­ing the eVTOL craft toward cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and oper­a­tion under United’s (Air­lines) wing, may have been push­ing too fast for its own long-term good.”

The web­site then con­tact­ed an Archer rep­re­sen­ta­tive who said, “We are dis­ap­point­ed that Brett used social media to announce his deci­sion to resign from Archer’s Board of Direc­tors instead of coor­di­nat­ing with the com­pa­ny. Under the lead­er­ship of CEO Adam Gold­stein and his expe­ri­enced man­age­ment team, Archer remains com­mit­ted to its vision of bring­ing urban air mobil­i­ty to mar­ket…”

On March 31st, Archer report­ed a net loss of USD59.2 mil­lion, based on total oper­at­ing expens­es of USD63.5 mil­lion, which had grown com­pared with the last quar­ter of 2021, as invest­ments in per­son­nel and equip­ment have increased. At that time, it held cash totalling USD704.2 mil­lion. 

The com­pa­ny fore­cast that oper­at­ing expens­es for the sec­ond quar­ter of this year will fur­ther grow to between USD80 mil­lion and USD86 mil­lion. It point­ed to some uncer­tain­ty over costs asso­ci­at­ed with stock-based com­pen­sa­tion in a pos­si­ble ref­er­ence to a sep­a­ra­tion agree­ment with the depart­ing Adcock.

Mean­while, Archer says it will soon resume test flights with its Mak­er eVTOL demon­stra­tor after a gap of close to six months and its first hov­er flight on Decem­ber 16th, 2021. The com­pa­ny told finan­cial ana­lysts at a brief­ing on May 12th, it will grad­u­al­ly increase tri­als to sev­er­al per week until it is ready to make a full tran­si­tion from ver­ti­cal to hor­i­zon­tal flight by the end of this year.

And like Joby, Archer does not antic­i­pate delays to its goal of being ready to start com­mer­cial air taxi ser­vices by the end of 2024, despite recent reports that the FAA is seek­ing to revise the eVTOL cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process. CEO Adam Gold­stein has described this poten­tial pol­i­cy shift as a ‘minor change’ and that he does not expect ‘it will have a mate­r­i­al impact on our cer­ti­fi­ca­tion time­line’.

(Pics: Archer Avi­a­tion)