Aircraft

Awful video celebrates Archer's first full-transition eVTOL flight

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Archer is celebrating its first full eVTOL transition to wingborne flight
Archer
Archer is celebrating its first full eVTOL transition to wingborne flight
Archer
The Maker on the wing, with the front props fully horizontal and the rear props stopped
Archer
The complex airflows around the transition zone, here shown in simulation, make this a difficult part of the flight
Archer
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There are very few full-size aircraft capable of transitioning between vertical takeoff and landing and wing-borne horizontal cruise flight, so it's a big deal when a company manages the feat, as Archer has now claimed. But the video is a shocker.

Archer is going full speed ahead on expanding its flight envelope, hoping to achieve FAA type certification for its striking five-seat Midnight air taxi by 2024, and to enter service in 2025. Its two-seat Maker prototype has been flying since last December, nutting out the intricacies of multirotor-style takeoff, landing and hover maneuvers.

And now, it's celebrating its first full transition to cruise flight. Archer's design uses a kind of hybrid between vectored thrust and lift-and-cruise style approaches; the Maker's front six props are able to tilt from vertical to horizontal, while its rear six props simply stop when the aircraft is flying fast enough to generate lift from its wings alone. This is crucial to maximizing range out of a battery pack, since winged flight uses only about a third of the energy of multicopter-style flight.

The Maker on the wing, with the front props fully horizontal and the rear props stopped
Archer

According to Chief Engineer Dr Geoff Bower, the first transition flight was made on Tuesday November 29. This follows several months of inching through the transition phase, increasing airspeed by 10 knots each time and taking lots of measurements to understand the complex aerodynamics in play as the front props change angle, and the resulting airflow interacts with the wing and the rear props.

You can get a sense of the challenge in the simulated image below – these aircraft have to manage dynamic thrust changes through a range of changing airspeeds. It's not a trivial exercise!

The complex airflows around the transition zone, here shown in simulation, make this a difficult part of the flight
Archer

For Tuesday's full transition flight, the Maker climbed to around 240 ft (73 m), then accelerated through the transition phase to a fully wing-borne top speed of 91 knots (105 mph/169 km/h), before flying a circuit, then decelerating back through the transition to hover flight, and executing a vertical landing.

"The airspeed at which the tilts reach the cruise position," writes Dr. Bower, "was deliberately designed to be around 90 kts to provide 30% margin above the power off stall speed of 70 kts (minimum airspeed for wingborne flight). Margin from stall speed is required to allow for maneuvering and gusts. This is similar to the typical approach speed of about 1.3 times the stall speed for a conventional airplane."

Archer has celebrated the transition flight with a short video. And frankly, I'm worried it does more harm than good, since it's been edited in pretty much the sketchiest way possible. While several cameras were clearly filming the Maker for the flight, the only shots of the transition portion of the flight look like they were taken with a hand-held phone camera in the cabin, with the wobbly camera pointing upwards such that the shots could well've been taken on the ground. I'm not exaggerating, look:

Good grief. The music, the cutaways to still photos, the angles, everything just screams "we've got something to hide." We asked Archer why it'd release a video like this, and why we couldn't see the whole flight, but were told the team has no comment on the matter at this stage.

To be clear, we've got no reason to think Archer hasn't flown a transition flight, and the video clearly shows the Maker in wing-borne cruise flight. But Archer is approaching a billion dollars in funding, and taking a leadership position in a fledgeling emerging market that's got no shortage of naysayers and short-sellers sniffing around for reasons to doubt that the eVTOL air taxi revolution will take place. I think it's crazy that this video has been released at all.

Please guys, fly it again and release a full video like Lilium has!

Editor's note: The Archer team has told us it has no plan to release additional footage at this time, and explained that this video edit was "intended to make the relatively uninteresting tail cam footage look a little more interesting for our followers at large." The moment that's significant to the engineering team is when all props lock in a fully horizontal orientation. "This moment signifies full transition," says Archer, "and is clearly visible on the film."

Source: Archer

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11 comments
Chris__
Yes, I agree completely. Why release a video to draw attention to the fact you've overcome the single most difficult technical aspect of development and purposefully edit out any actual evidence of it? You should be gloating to all the competition! I can only assume the transition phase is sketchy as hell and won't be fixed anytime soon (or before you need another cash injection) or you'd just hold off until you had it looking good on video.
WB
Hate to break it to the team, this video doesn't prove anything.. maybe the plane was parked on the ground filming the transition... sorry there's something fishy going on. If I'd be an investor I'd be concerned! very concerned.. that's the type of stuff that killed multi billion dollar companies.. just ask Nikola!
Uys Fick
Would anyone trust them after seeing this video?
kwalispecial
The video shows it can fly up, it can fly forward, and it can tilt it's props. It doesn't show a transition at all. If all I saw was the video I would just think maybe they are better engineers than video editors, but that "No comment" strikes me as the sketchy bit.
P51d007
Waste of money. But, it isn't MY money.
Username
For all we know the horizontal flight might have been achieved by a conventional runway takeoff.
Seasherm
Yeah, very lame video.
Aladdin Connolly
That sucks. I am glad you are a good and sceptical journalist. The MSM will just run big headlines touting it as a great accomplishment. They assumed no one would notice.
ljaques
"Well, I'm a brand new videographer, but nobody will notice that I shot directly into the sun during a third of this video."
Nix the noisy background, the bad videographer, and the cutesy stuff. Just show us your beautiful new birds FLYING.
Jim B
Metro Hop STOL approach seems much more practical, unless you are a military you don't really need vertical takeoff and landing anywhere.