eVTOL Maker to Establish Middle Eastern Presence

Archer Aviation Inc., the California-based designer of electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft, has entered into an agreement with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) by which the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—the Middle Eastern nation of which Abu Dhabi is the capital city—will have the distinction of being the eVTOL maker’s inaugural international launch partner.

The newly-penned agreement calls for Archer to commence air-taxi operations in Abu Dhabi in 2026.

For its own part, ADIO will incentivize Archer to establish the company’s first international headquarters and manufacturing facility in Abu Dhabi’s Smart and Autonomous Vehicle Industry (SAVI) Cluster—a nexus of state-of-the-art facilities and services individually and cumulatively dedicated to supporting the design, testing, and manufacturing of autonomous vehicles and technologies germane thereto. Headquartered in Masdar City—an enclave of Abu Dhabi—the SAVI Cluster was conceived of and actualized by the Abu Dhabi Department for Economic Development (ADDED) and the aforementioned Abu Dhabi Investment Office.

Archer plans to work with Stellantis—the multinational automotive manufacturing concern born of the merger of Italian-American Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) and the French PSA Group—and additional, local partners within the UAE to establish the Archer Center of Excellence, an Abu Dhabi installation at which the eVTOL maker will develop, test, and manufacture next-generation aviation technologies

In June 2023, Archer and Stellantis jointly announced (at the Paris Air-Show) that the two companies had entered into a “strategic manufacturing partnership.” Subject partnership leveraged the two companies’ respective strengths for purpose of facilitating the rapid scaling of the production of Archer’s eVTOL aircraft. The partnership called for Stellantis to increase its shareholding in Archer by means of a series of open-market purchases of the latter concern’s stock.

Director General of the UAE’s General Civil Aviation Authority, His Excellency Saif Mohammed Al Suwaidi, set forth: “The GCAA recently visited Archer Aviation’s global headquarters in California to inspect its Midnight aircraft and learn about their certification progress with the Federal Aviation Administration. Our goal is to approve Archer’s air taxi to fly in the UAE as soon as it is certified by the FAA, and we are very excited to collaborate with them to bring electric air taxis to the country.”

Acting Director General of the Abu Dhabi Investment Office, His Excellency Badr Al-Olama, added: “We are thrilled to work with Archer to host their first international operations in Abu Dhabi. Bringing electric aviation to the UAE will help unlock congestion with zero emissions and, in turn, bring millions in foreign direct investment and thousands of jobs to the region over the next decade.”

To date, Archer has raised north of $1.1-billion in funding, to include investments from Mubadala Capital, United Airlines, Stellantis, and Boeing.

Archer Aviation founder and CEO Adam Goldstein remarked: “We are excited to announce this joint collaboration for the United Arab Emirates to become our first international market outside of the United States. Archer plans to partner closely with ADIO and the Department of Economic Development to bring manufacturing and operations for our air taxis to the region. Together, we are positioned to be a driving force in making all-electric air taxis a reality in the skies of the UAE and beyond in the coming years.”

Head of value creation at Mubadala Investment Company, Mr. Meera Al Suwaidi, stated: “Through our asset management subsidiary, Mubadala Capital, we have been an investor in Archer for several years. We are looking forward to working alongside them for the debut of their Midnight aircraft at the Dubai Air Show later this year, and to continue discussions on further expanding our collaboration.”

Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares asserted: “We are excited to be working with Archer to begin establishing a high-volume manufacturing facility for the Midnight aircraft in the United States over the last couple of years. We hope this first production site will be a blueprint for future Archer manufacturing facilities as it expands operations to serve new regions, starting with the Middle East, where we see extraordinary potential for urban air mobility.”

In addition to its new partnership with ADIO, Archer signed Memoranda Of Understanding (MOUs) with Falcon Aviation, which will operate Archer’s air-taxis across Dubai and Abu Dhabi; and GAL-AMMROC which will provide MRO support for Archer’s UAE eVTOL fleet.

Falcon Aviation vice-chairman, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Sultan Bin Khalifa, averred: “Falcon Aviation has built an unparalleled reputation for flying passengers in helicopters across the UAE for nearly two decades. With this agreement with Archer, we look forward to continuing to provide world-class passenger transport in all-electric air taxis across Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the next decades to come.”

GAL & AMMROC CEO, Mahmood Alhay Alhameli, commented: “Based on Archer’s eVTOL technology, their plans to launch and manufacture in the UAE, coupled with our trusted experience in providing maintenance, repair, and overhaul services for our wide range of industry-leading clients, GAL & AMMROC is proud to have been chosen as the ideal launch partner for Archer.”

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 disclosed the details of its ostensible 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).

FMI: www.archer.com