Archer rolls out first Midnight aircraft as it prepares for planned flight later this year

Archer has today (Thurs­day) announced it has com­plet­ed the final assem­bly of its first Mid­night air­craft. It will now under­go a series of ground tests, lead­ing up to its planned first flight this sum­mer.

With final assem­bly and ini­tial test­ing com­plete, last week the air­craft was shipped from Archer’s Palo Alto facil­i­ty in Cal­i­for­nia to its flight test facil­i­ty in Sali­nas and reassem­bled.

This Mid­night air­craft will enable Archer to per­form crit­i­cal ‘com­pa­ny test­ing’ to accel­er­ate and reduce risk on its cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gram with the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (FAA) in advance of ‘for cred­it’ cer­ti­fi­ca­tion test­ing that the com­pa­ny plans to begin ear­ly next year with pilot­ed Mid­night air­craft.

Adam Gold­stein, Archer’s Founder and CEO, said: “Today we announced our excit­ing progress that the final assem­bly of our first Mid­night air­craft is now com­plete and it is prepar­ing for its flight test pro­gram.

“This air­craft will accel­er­ate and reduce risk on our cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gram paving the way for our team to focus on build­ing and con­duct­ing pilot­ed oper­a­tions with con­form­ing air­craft to sup­port the goal of enter­ing into ser­vice in 2025.”

With a range of up to 100 miles, Archer’s Mid­night air­craft is designed to per­form rapid back-to-back flights with min­i­mal charge time in between. Archer’s goal is to trans­form inter-city trav­el, replac­ing 60–90 minute com­mutes by car that can take over an hour in traf­fic with  ~10–20 minute elec­tric air taxi flights that are safe, sus­tain­able, low noise and cost com­pet­i­tive with ground trans­porta­tion.

Archer’s strat­e­gy with this air­craft is to allow it to fly many of the same test points that will be need­ed dur­ing pilot­ed “for cred­it” flight test­ing in order to fur­ther val­i­date the air­craft before the FAA wit­ness­es and par­tic­i­pates in the test­ing — a cus­tom­ary prac­tice in many air­craft cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­grams.

Com­po­nent man­u­fac­tur­ing is already under­way for Archer’s con­form­ing Mid­night air­craft. Archer is tar­get­ing the com­ple­tion of final assem­bly of its ini­tial con­form­ing Mid­night air­craft in Q4 2023 and to begin pilot­ed flight test oper­a­tions in ear­ly 2024. 

Archer’s indus­try-lead­ing team, along­side its key strate­gic part­ners, Stel­lan­tis and Unit­ed Air­lines, con­tin­ues to advance its air­craft devel­op­ment and com­mer­cial oper­a­tions with impres­sive speed and effi­cien­cy.

The com­pa­ny has also estab­lished man­u­fac­tur­ing and com­mer­cial oper­a­tions with the build out of its high-vol­ume man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ty in Cov­ing­ton, Geor­gia. It has also announced key strate­gic elec­tric air taxi routes in New York and Chica­go.

The Mid­night air­craft has recent­ly gar­nered sig­nif­i­cant atten­tion from the U.S. Depart­ment of Defense giv­en its pay­load capa­bil­i­ties.