Feting and Fawning: Obsequity in Salinas

Archer Aviation, the California-based designer of electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft, hosted the Federal Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) Interagency Working Group (FAAMIWG) at its Salinas, California flight-test installation.

The delegation of federal bureaucrats featured upwards of seventy apparatchiks, martinets, and stooges representing the Department of Transportation (DOT), the White House, the FAA, NASA, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), and other federal agencies.

The assemblage met with Archer’s upper-management for the stated purpose of learning more about the company’s approach to aircraft design, safety, and certification. Event attendees also witnessed a live flight-test of Archer’s Midnight—a piloted, five-occupant eVTOL evolved from an antecedent Archer design known as Maker, from which the former aircraft inherited its 12-total/tilt-6 rotor configuration.

Convened to meet the requirements of October 2022’s Congressional Advanced Air Mobility Coordination and Leadership Act, the Federal AAM Interagency Working Group supports, ostensibly, the goal of safely integrating inchoate Advanced Air Mobility vehicles and infrastructure into the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS). Additionally, the Group is tasked with ensuring the United States maintains its global leadership position in the aerospace industry.

By dint of its oversight and regulatory agency, the FAAMIWG is intended to foster new transportation options; promote economic investment, activity, and the jobs resultant of such; advance the development of technologies germane to environmental sustainability; and support both competition and emergency preparedness.

Archer founder and CEO Adam Goldstein somewhat naively stated: “It was inspiring to see the level of support from across the federal government focused on ensuring the safe entry of eVTOL aircraft into the U.S. market in 2025. For many of our guests, this was the first time they’ve been able to witness an eVTOL aircraft flight in person. Our showcase emphasized just how far along we are, and demonstrated the safety and low-noise advantages of eVTOL aircraft.”

Archer, in a general sense, seeks to transform urban travel by replacing extant, sixty-to-ninety-minute terrestrial commutes with safe, sustainable, low-noise, ten-to-twenty-minute aerial jaunts. Mr. Goldstein and his boffins intend to achieve their utopian ideal by way of Archer’s Midnight eVTOL, the deployment strategy of which 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—so states Archer.

For initial UAM operations, Archer sets forth it 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 crumbling metropolis’s downtown Loop warzone and O’Hare International Airport (ORD).

Mr. Goldstein concluded: “Over time, we will build more infrastructure or work with companies to build more infrastructure.”

FMI: www.archer.com