Archer Aviation

In a major development at the nexus of military and commercial technology, Archer Aviation and Anduril Industries have announced an exclusive partnership aimed at the militarized vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) sector.

Seven years after its first test flight, German electric air taxi manufacturer Lilium has run out of funding, and filed for insolvency for its two subsidiaries. It failed to raise an emergency injection of $54 million to continue its operations.

After nailing its first full-size eVTOL transition in 2022 with the Maker, Archer Aviation has revealed that its Midnight aircraft has successfully transitioned from hover to horizontal flight, before going on to clock speeds of over 100 mph.

Three months after its first takeoff, the production-spec Midnight air taxi has finished the first phase of flight testing. With the release of a new video, Archer says it expects to fly this next-gen machine with human pilots on board this year.

The eVTOL air taxi Archer is pushing toward production has now lifted off for the first time. The handsome, five-seat Midnight aircraft is scheduled to enter service in 2025, providing clean, quiet, short-range, traffic-busting hops over urban areas.

Brett Adcock has co-founded two companies on the bleeding edges of innovation in emerging markets: Archer Aviation, in the world of eVTOL aircraft, and Figure, in humanoid robots. We look into his background, and the startup that launched it all.

In 10 years, Brett Adcock has gone from founding an online talent marketplace, to selling it for nine figures, to founding the third-ranked eVTOL aircraft company, to going after one of tech's greatest challenges: general-purpose humanoid robots.

Six months after revealing its production eVTOL air taxi design, Archer Aviation has shown off its first functional Midnight aircraft, with flight tests set to begin in the coming months – and manufacturing has already begun on a conforming prototype.

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 targeting FAA certification by the end of 2024, and its first air taxi flights in 2025. With its Maker prototype logging successful test flights, the company has now unveiled Midnight, the four-passenger aircraft it'll push toward production.

The eVTOL age is just a couple of years from dawning. We caught up with Archer's Director of Business Development, Andrew Cummins, to learn what the first steps will look like when electric air taxis begin taking to the skies in 2024-25.

Palo Alto startup Archer has started flight tests with its autonomous, two-seat Maker demonstration aircraft, fulfilling a promise it made when it popped out of stealth mode 18 months ago to start demo flights by the end of 2021.