Cometh the Midnight Hour

Archer Aviation, the California-based designer of electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft, has secured a $215-million equity investment from Stellantis—an American-Italian-French multinational automotive manufacturing corporation—Boeing, United Airlines, and a number of financial institutions including ARK Invest. The capital infusion boosts Archer’s total to-date funding to over $1.1-billion.

Furthermore, the FAA has granted Archer approval to commence flight-testing of its Midnight eVTOL aircraft.

Additionally, Archer has reached an agreement with Boeing and Wisk by which the three concerns will enter into an autonomous flight collaboration and settle pending litigation.

Finally, Archer announced it is on track to complete what the company’s management believes will be the first ever eVTOL aircraft delivery to a customer.

The antecedent announcements came on the heels of former Acting FAA Administrator Billy Nolen leaving the agency to assume the position of Archer’s chief safety officer and the DoD awarding Archer the largest total contract value to date of any eVTOL manufacturer.

Archer founder and CEO Adam Goldstein stated: “Over the last quarter, we’ve seen the U.S. government make an unwavering commitment that America will lead the way in commercializing eVTOL aircraft; the FAA validated the timeline for eVTOL aircraft to begin operations in the U.S. in 2025, and leaders in the mobility industry, Stellantis, United Airlines, and Boeing, have come together to invest in Archer’s future.”

Mr. Goldstein added: “The pace at which our industry is advancing is unprecedented. Our team’s hard work and dedication have brought us to this exciting moment, and we can't wait to see Midnight soar.”

By virtue of investments led by long-term strategic partner Stellantis, Archer’s liquidity position has been strengthened to a robust $215-million. The investment round includes an acceleration of $70-million from Stellantis under the strategic funding agreement entered into in January 2023, with $55-million remaining available under that facility. The commitment from Stellantis, from the corporation’s foresight to provide manufacturing expertise and capital essential to the acceleration of  Archer’s business objectives, to the strategic vision and steadfast support of CEO Carlos Tavares and Chief Engineering and Technology Officer Ned Curic.

Funds from the described investment round are to be used for working capital and general corporate purposes, including Archer’s ongoing development of its aircraft and related technologies, as well as the build out of the eVTOL-maker’s manufacturing and test facilities.

Archer, Wisk, and Boeing announced a collaboration beneficial to the maturation and growth of the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) sector. The three companies also reached a settlement by which federal and state court litigation in which they’re concurrently mired is to be resolved. The development puts Archer in the unique and advantageous position of being able to source technology from a collaboration of leaders in the field of autonomous flight. Autonomy is among the capabilities broadly considered essential to the achievement of scale across AAM applications.

The strategic partnership between Archer, Wisk, and Boeing stands to ply each company’s respective strengths and competencies to the goal of accelerating the commercialization of autonomous flight. The approach is a natural extension of Archer’s overall strategy of focusing its in-house research and development on key enabling technologies that cannot be sourced from the existing aerospace supply chain, thereby helping Archer avoid, potentially, hundreds-of-millions of dollars of spending. 

The FAA recently granted Archer’s Midnight eVTOL a Special Airworthiness Certificate. The certification denotes the aircraft’s compliance with the complex regulatory prerequisites upon which flight-testing is predicated. Archer expects to have Midnight’s flight-testing campaign underway in the coming weeks with entry into service following in 2025.

On 31 July 2023, Archer announced it had broadened its working relationship with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) by means of a newly-signed contract worth up to $142-million. Subject contract obliges Archer to share data pertaining to flight-testing and pilot training, provide certification-related test reports, and help the DOD develop maintenance and repair operations under its AFWERX Agility Prime program—an expansive DOD undertaking in which Archer has participated since 2021. In addition to extending the company’s extant partnership with the DOD, the contract marks the commencement of an execution phase that will see Archer deliver up to six of its Midnight eVTOLs to the USAF.

Painted in broad strokes, Archer’s Midnight is a single-pilot, five-passenger eVTOL aircraft evolved from an antecedent Archer design known as Maker, from which Midnight inherited a flight-architecture comprising 12 electric-motor/rotor assemblies: six five-blade tilt-rotors for forward and vertical flight, and six two-blade fixed-rotors for vertical flight exclusively. The entirety of the aforementioned motor/rotor assemblies are affixed by pylons to a single, high-wing of relatively high aspect ratio. The six tilt-rotor assemblies are positioned forward of said wing, while the six fixed-rotor assemblies are positioned aft of such.

Midnight’s 12 electric motors weigh a miserly 55-pounds apiece and have peak individual power outputs of 125-kilowatts (167-horsepower).  The powerplants’ power-to-weight ratio is approximately 3.04-horsepower/pound.

The motors are supplied electrical power by a sextet of proprietary eight-hundred-volt battery-packs comprising cylindrical, type 2170 lithium-ion battery cells provided by the Taiwanese battery manufacturer Molicel. Each of the six battery-packs supplies two motor/rotor assemblies and are interconnected in such a way that load may be varied and individual battery-packs isolated. In addition to providing redundancy in the event of motor or battery failure, the described Distributed Electric Propulsion (DEP) scheme facilitates reductions in power requirements of nearly twenty-percent at the battery cell level—compared to conventional high-voltage battery designs.

So motivated, Midnight attains and advertised cruise speed of 130-knots, a single-charge range of 17 to 43-nautical-miles—dependent upon aircraft loading and flight conditions—and a cruising altitude of two-thousand feet MSL.

Midnight’s ovular-cross-section fuselage sits atop a fixed, tricycle undercarriage; the machine’s empennage is of a V-configuration evocative of Beechcraft’s S-35 Bonanza.

Loaded to its maximum takeoff weight, Midnight tips the scales at seven-thousand-pounds. The aircraft’s maximum payload is nebulously cited as “one-thousand-plus-pounds.”

To mitigate risk, Archer’s engineers provisioned Midnight with a proprietary system by which fire is prevented in the event of thermal runaway secondary to failure of the aircraft’s lithium-ion battery-cells. Archer has yet to disclose the details of its claimed thermal runaway solution, however, Alex Clarabut, Archer’s director of battery systems, averred “if we have a failure of the battery management system, we've got enough redundancy in the system to be able to continue to fly safely.”

Archer’s strategy for Midnight’s deployment is predicated upon an Urban Air Mobility (UAM) model comprising twenty-mile back-to-back routes conducted in rapid succession. As Midnight’s design targets a one-hundred-mile-per-charge range, numerous such legs could be flown by a single aircraft.

For initial UAM operations, Archer will rely on existing infrastructure, such as the Manhattan heliport, which anchors a route to and from Newark; and Vertiport Chicago, a facility that will presently serve as the hub for an air-taxi route between the Midwestern metropolis’s famed downtown Loop and O’Hare International Airport (ORD).

Archer founder and CEO Adam Goldstein opined: “Over time, we will build more infrastructure or work with companies to build more infrastructure.”

FMI: www.archer.com