Vertical Flight Society: Archer Aviation Achieves Gold Membership Status

The Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety (VFS) recent­ly announced that not only has the organ­i­sa­tion topped 180 Mem­bers, a 13 per­cent increase from a year ago and a dou­bling over 6 years, but Archer Avi­a­tion has risen from small busi­ness mem­ber to Gold Mem­ber­ship sta­tus — only the fourth to achieve this. The oth­er three are Lil­i­um, GE Aero­space and Joby.

The Gold Mem­ber­ship Class is sec­ond only to that of the five major heli­copter man­u­fac­tur­ers: Air­bus, Bell, Boe­ing, Leonar­do and Siko­rsky which are VFS Plat­inum Mem­bers.

Mike Hirschberg (image: AIN­on­line)

Since VFS began sup­port­ing the “Elec­tric VTOL Rev­o­lu­tion” in 2013, the Soci­ety has been the lead­ing voice for the eVTOL com­mu­ni­ty in indus­try, acad­e­mia and gov­ern­ment.

Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, Mike Hirschberg, com­ment­ed, “We are see­ing a remark­able expan­sion of R&D activ­i­ty across the entire ver­ti­cal flight indus­try, lead­ing to many break­through rotor­craft and eVTOL air­craft designs.”

He con­tin­ued, “Over the past decade, more than USD10 bil­lion has been invest­ed in eVTOL air­craft devel­op­ments and the asso­ci­at­ed tech­nol­o­gy, and VFS is extreme­ly proud of the promise and progress of our mem­ber­ship, which includes every major eVTOL devel­op­er around the world.”

Descrip­tions of each com­pa­ny, includ­ing links to web­sites and con­tact infor­ma­tion, can be found below:-

Infor­ma­tion on the ben­e­fits and rates for Cor­po­rate Mem­ber­ship is post­ed here:-

Mean­while, Cal­i­forn­ian-based Archer states it aims to pro­duce around 250 eVTOL fly­ing taxis in 2025. From there, the com­pa­ny says it will ramp up pro­duc­tion, after gain­ing full cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

Adam Gold­stein, CEO of Archer, said in a Reuters inter­view this week, “In our first year, we will build 250 air­craft, our sec­ond year 500, our third 650, and then we’ll scale it up to around 2,000 air­craft per year.”

Ear­li­er this month, Archer announced it would unveil Mid­night, its first pro­duc­tion eVTOL Air­craft, at an Open House event on Novem­ber 16th. Besides reveal­ing the air­craft, Archer com­ment­ed it would pro­vide details on the craft’s spec­i­fi­ca­tions, capa­bil­i­ties and progress toward FAA cer­ti­fi­ca­tion which it hopes to have approval by the end of 2024.

Archer to unveil its pro­duc­tion air­craft Mid­night at Open House Event in Cal­i­for­nia next month

Gold­stein con­tin­ued, ”From day one, Archer’s goal has been to build a com­mer­cial­ly viable busi­ness that will rev­o­lu­tionise intra-city trav­el. We’ve made phe­nom­e­nal progress in the devel­op­ment of our eVTOL air­craft tech­nol­o­gy.”

Mean­while, the Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety is hold­ing its 10th annu­al elec­tric VTOL Sym­po­sium next year in Mesa, Ari­zona between Jan­u­ary 24th and 26th. More than 500 atten­dees are expect­ed.

Details About The Sym­po­sium

(top pic: Archer)