Archer’s eVTOL aircraft, Maker, makes its debut in company’s first public event

Archer has pub­licly unveiled its eVTOL air­craft in an event host­ed by co-founders Adam Gold­stein and Brett Adcock in Los Ange­les.

The pair used the hour-long ses­sion on June 10th, which was held at Hawthorne Hang­er Oper­a­tions and also live streamed to a glob­al audi­ence, to talk more about the tech­ni­cal aspects of the com­pa­ny’s air­craft — called Mak­er.

When reveal­ing the air­craft, Gold­stein said Mak­er ‘will serve as a cer­ti­fi­ca­tion test­bed to also keep push­ing our key enabling tech­nolo­gies’. The first flights are expect­ed to begin in Q4 2021, with man­u­fac­tur­ing to begin in 2022 ahead of a 2024 launch.

In an indus­try first, Archer utilised movie pro­duc­tion tech­nol­o­gy to bring its air­craft to life. The com­pa­ny built a 2,400 sq ft XR vol­ume space that sim­u­lat­ed a com­mer­cial flight and allowed those attend­ing to take a vir­tu­al jour­ney in Mak­er, which will be ful­ly autonomous and fly 60 miles at speeds of 150 miles per hour.

Archer’s new Chief Cre­ative Offi­cer, Ken­ny Taht, was at the helm of the event’s cre­ative direc­tion, draw­ing on over three decades of expe­ri­en­tial design and tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tion to bring Mak­er to life.

He said: “True inno­va­tion requires inspi­ra­tion, which is why the team at Archer put great empha­sis on cre­at­ing a ground­break­ing, high­ly engag­ing moment for Maker’s unveil. In order to progress UAM, con­tin­u­ous edu­ca­tion is need­ed and, with this expe­ri­ence, we’ve helped intro­duce trav­el­ers to this new real­i­ty.”

Archer says it will enable trips which are 10 times faster than a car and when cruis­ing at 2,000ft above ground, Mak­er will be 100 times qui­eter than a heli­copter gen­er­at­ing only 45 dB of sound.

In terms of the tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tions, Mak­er has a 40ft wingspan and weighs about 3,300lbs (about 1,496kg). While tra­di­tion­al heli­copter rotors have a tip speed of Mach 0.7, Mak­er’s are down in the less than .4 range. It has 12 rotors, with six tilt­ing rotors in front of the wing and six fixed rotors used for the tran­si­tion phase only used for hov­er and cruise. There are six inde­pen­dent bat­tery packs.

Dur­ing the event, Adcock and Gold­stein talked about the peo­ple who would use this ser­vice. A trip using Archer’s eVTOL air­craft from Fort Laun­derdale in Flori­da to Mia­mi can take just 14 min­utes, as opposed to more than an hour by car. And in Los Ange­les, a jour­ney in the eVTOL air­craft from down­town to San­ta Mon­i­ca is even short­er — eight min­utes — when com­pared to a 45-minute dri­ve.

Gold­stein added the com­pa­ny can do this route for under $40, adding: “There are mil­lions of trips like this; peo­ple are tak­ing them every sin­gle day. We can move those trips to the air and do it in a ful­ly sus­tain­able way.”

Adcock then pre­sent­ed a visu­al of trip data that is hap­pen­ing in Los Ange­les, say­ing over 50 mil­lion dai­ly trips are made every day. Of these, about five mil­lion take more than one hour, result­ing in LA com­muters los­ing 100 hours each year stuck in traf­fic.

Archer has inter­nal data sci­ence project, called Prime Radi­ant, which uses the trip data to bet­ter under­stand how to build the most ide­al Archer net­work and make the ser­vice avail­able to every­one. For take-off and land­ing sites, Archer is using exist­ing real estate with light retro­fitting. This include heli­pads, rooftops, land parcels and park­ing lots.

“We use Prime Radi­ant to bet­ter under­stand where to put take-off and land­ing sites, what to charge for the ser­vice and ulti­mate­ly how to save peo­ple time in their com­mute,” Adcock said.

When reveal­ing the air­craft, Gold­stein said Mak­er ‘will serve as a ‘cer­ti­fi­ca­tion test­bed also keep push­ing our key enabling tech­nolo­gies.’

Gold­stein and Adcock also spoke to eVTOL Insights before the event, where they gave more detail about the com­pa­ny’s work so far in what has already been a busy year. Archer was the first eVTOL air­craft devel­op­er to go pub­lic in a joint SPAC merg­er with Atlas Crest Invest­ment Corp, and has announced sig­nif­i­cant part­ner­ships with Stel­lan­tis and Unit­ed Air­lines.

Q: A lot of hard work and effort has gone in from both of you and the rest of the Archer team to get to this moment. How does it feel to final­ly unveil your air­craft to the pub­lic for the first time?

Adam Gold­stein: “It’s a real­ly excit­ing time for us. As you said there’s been a lot of work that’s gone into this across all kind of the key areas we’ve focused on, from aero­dy­nam­ics to avion­ics and struc­tures and in hard­ware and flight con­trols. We’ve spent a lot of time get­ting us to where we are today and we’re real­ly excit­ed to show that to the mass­es.

“I think what’s real­ly impor­tant is that the pub­lic sees these vehi­cles and starts to under­stand the tech­nol­o­gy is here and ready. Not only it is excit­ing, it’s safe, reli­able and can real­ly bring to the mar­ket a low-cost and afford­able price so peo­ple will be excit­ed to take these vehi­cles for a ride.”

Q: Pub­lic accep­tance is a real­ly cru­cial part of the ecosys­tem, and an event like this will enable peo­ple to get up close to these air­craft at this event. What can those attend­ing expect?

Brett Adcock: “The goal for us was to be able to show the world what we’ve been work­ing on the last few years. There’s very dif­fi­cult areas such as vehi­cle design and flight con­trols, as well all the work we’ve done on the busi­ness mod­el side to get the air­craft to the right size in terms of dis­tance, speed and noise.

It is real­ly to talk about why we’re doing this at Archer and why we think this tech­nol­o­gy will have an impor­tant impact on the world, as it relates to con­ges­tion sus­tain­abil­i­ty. And then ulti­mate­ly show every­one the vehi­cle and talk about what we did and how we engi­neered it; what the vehi­cle is capa­ble of doing and real­ly start to build that pub­lic trust in edu­ca­tion with every­thing we’ve been up to and every­thing we hope­ful­ly will con­tin­ue to build with the rest of gen­er­al pub­lic.”

Q: This event will be great for Los Ange­les, but are there plans to poten­tial­ly organ­ise sim­i­lar events in oth­er cities so more peo­ple can see Archer’s air­craft and under­stand the tech­nol­o­gy?

AG: “I think there cer­tain­ly is the poten­tial to do that. This event was real­ly foun­da­tion­al in the sense that we want to real­ly solid­i­fy its [Mak­er] place in world and help intro­duce the con­cept to the mass mar­ket, by show­ing it off to the investors so they can sit in the air­craft, ask ques­tions and get involved.

I don’t think there has been an event in the whole space, with the real air­craft and the one that will fly. I think it’s pret­ty great from an indus­try per­spec­tive to do this, but then ulti­mate­ly, to start find­ing ways to have a broad­er con­sumer base real­ly under­stand that.”

Q: Do you think we’re start­ing to see a shift in under­stand­ing of elec­tric avi­a­tion and that an event like this can help bring it to the front of peo­ple’s minds?

BA: “I hope so and think it’s going to be impor­tant. They see a tonne of investor inter­est and a lot of big part­ners with us like Stel­lan­tis and Unit­ed [Air­lines]. We’ve had a tonne of signups to the event and we’re excit­ed to start build­ing that pub­lic trust and nar­ra­tive with the gen­er­al world.

“But this tech­nol­o­gy is also in the ear­ly innings too, so it’s get­ting peo­ple pre­pared for what this can do and what we can do over here inter­nal­ly. Peo­ple are still learn­ing about how it’s going to work, how fast pas­sen­gers can take it, where it will land and how it will trav­el in the air­space. All of those things are what we’re going to keep try­ing to address and work towards, and I think it will be good to talk about things oth­er than the air­craft for an hour, like how it is going to oper­ate.”

Q: Are you able to dis­close what else you have been doing this year in terms of the man­u­fac­tur­ing side of things, is that on course to be ready by 2024?

AG: “We have two big phas­es of man­u­fac­tur­ing we’re going through and the first phase is what we call more of our tra­di­tion­al aero­space vol­ume, where we will be build­ing hun­dreds of air­craft on an annu­al basis. We haven’t made any pub­lic announce­ments about this, but we will, because we’re work­ing with Stel­lan­tis and in process there.

And then the sec­ond base, which is real­ly the more high scale man­u­fac­tur­ing where you can be build­ing 1000’s of air­craft per year. We’re also work­ing with Stel­lan­tis on that in terms of thi on that we still want­ed to in terms of think­ing about these fac­to­ries of the future and how to intro­duce more of robot­ic automa­tion in a process. His­tor­i­cal­ly, it’s been more labour and man­u­al inten­sive.

So we have all that stuff we’re work­ing on right now. Stel­lan­tis has been a great part­ner to us with a lot of exper­tise; they have an entire team ded­i­cat­ed to stand­ing up man­u­fac­tur­ing plants, site selec­tion and all that kind of stuff, real­ly help­ing us scout out our loca­tions and future plans.”

Q: As well as Stel­lan­tis, how much of an impact can Unit­ed Air­lines have on your oper­a­tions?

BA: We’re dead set on oper­at­ing our air­craft our­selves and Unit­ed were very inter­est­ed in urban air mobil­i­ty and push­ing for sus­tain­able forms of trans­port. And we now have a big rela­tion­ship with them where they’re buy­ing air­craft from us com­mer­cial­ly.

“You’re look­ing at one of the biggest air­line groups in the world that does pilot train­ing, main­te­nance and over­all oper­a­tions, so to be able to lever­age that with them is a tremen­dous asset for us. Unit­ed was one of the first big oper­a­tors to make a real­ly big bet on this space and with Archer, so it’s real­ly impact­ful for the whole indus­try and for con­sumer con­fi­dence.

“We’re get­ting clos­er to mar­ket and work­ing with a rep­utable oper­a­tor like Unit­ed is real­ly good from a busi­ness per­spec­tive, as well as hav­ing a big com­mer­cial agree­ment with them to spin up man­u­fac­tur­ing vol­umes and ulti­mate­ly get the cost down for end con­sumers.”

Q: Is it too ear­ly to dis­close your esti­mat­ed price point per mile for future pas­sen­gers?

AG: “We’ve been tar­get­ing around $3 to $4. It’s try­ing to fig­ure out how to make it afford­able to the mass­es and our goal is, over time, to push those prices down even fur­ther and help have a real impact on sus­tain­abil­i­ty. We need to make sure it is a pro­duce that is afford­able to the mass­es and that’s been a big part of our solu­tion.

“In the begin­ning, as you can see from our pro­duc­tion esti­mates it will be hun­dreds of air­craft, it’s not on the lev­els of auto­mo­biles which are pro­duc­ing mil­lions. But we can get to the point where we can sig­nif­i­cant­ly push the price down or there’s much more to scale to that.

And even at some­thing sim­i­lar to Uber X price; if you look at a trip from JFK to Man­hat­tan which is about 15 to 17 miles and costs $60–70. That’s rough­ly a $4 per pas­sen­ger mile. I know dif­fer­ent cities will have dif­fer­ent prices, for exam­ple Lon­don to Heathrow Air­port is a bru­tal dri­ve as it’s not that far but just takes a real­ly long time.

“But I think at that price point we can real­ly start to intro­duce this air­craft to a large seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion and push that down over time to real­ly gain mass mar­ket adop­tion.”

Q: As well as Los Ange­les and Mia­mi, does Archer plan to cre­ate urban air mobil­i­ty net­work in oth­er cities?

BA: “Yes, for sure. The goal is to be in every major city in the world and the com­pa­ny which will be able to do that will have a big man­u­fac­tur­ing focus and dri­ving down price for the con­sumer. We’ve cho­sen to cer­ti­fy here in the Unit­ed States first and real­ly take that process very seri­ous­ly with the FAA.

“We’re mak­ing con­sid­er­able head­way and feel real­ly great about our progress so far. We announced these two cities, and there will be more on the roadmap in future, but there are two of the best in the US. There are a lot of real estate for us to use, a lot of land, heli­pads and air­ports. It’s very dif­fi­cult to move around those cities with a lot of traf­fic, but there’s a lot of inter­est to bring in new sus­tain­able forms of aer­i­al trans­port; they want eVTOLs and urban air mobil­i­ty to work and flour­ish.

“There will be more cities in the US where we plan to launch, so I think it’s only a mat­ter of time and we’ve got two good part­ners who we’ll be launch­ing with to look­ing to expand onto.”

Q: What is Archer up to for the rest of this year and into 2022?

AG: “We’re real­ly focused on cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and work­ing with the FAA to cer­ti­fy the air­craft. vehi­cle. That’s a big focus right now. We’re also real­ly scal­ing up the team as we get deep­er into the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process and I think in 2022 we’ll con­tin­ue on that path. The goal is to have a cer­ti­fied plan to bring the air­craft to mar­ket as soon as pos­si­ble, which is safe, afford­able and low noise, so we can real­ly scale up the indus­try and make it a mass mar­ket sus­tain­able solu­tion.”

If you missed the June 10th unveil, you can watch it again on Archer’s YouTube chan­nel by click­ing here.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•