Within a few short years, if Adam Goldstein has his way, the skyline over America’s great cities could look very different.
Goldstein is the CEO of Archer Aviation, a California-based company that produces electrical vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. Commonly known as flying cars, though they can’t actually drive on the road, eVTOLs serve the function of a helicopter while more closely resembling giant electric drones. Capable of carrying passengers or cargo over short to mid-distances, advocates say they will be ideal for moving swiftly around congested cities.
EVTOLs have been making headlines for more than a decade, but with multiple companies preparing for commercial launches, and regulators granting greater approval, they appear poised for the prime time.
EVTOLs Vs Helicopters
Goldstein told Newsweek that eVTOLs have three big advantages over conventional helicopters, which he summarized as “cost, safety and noise.”
Even a small helicopter can produce 80-100 decibels, making it impractical for them to operate over urban areas in large numbers, and sparking hostile campaigns from local residents such as “Stop the Chop” in New York and New Jersey, which aims to “eliminate nonessential flights” over the New York City metropolitan area.
By contrast, eVTOLs are much quieter, with Goldstein saying during a recent display of Archer’s four passenger Midnight aircraft at California’s Salinas Airshow “they basically fly by, and they don’t make any noise,” with the announcer showing he could produce more noise by whispering during the performance.
Goldstein added that “the safety side of eVTOLs is probably the biggest benefit,” as they have multi-propeller engines and are “designed to have very few or zero single points of failure.” By contrast, helicopters rely on a single main rotor blade meaning they have “many, in some cases hundreds, of single points of failure.”
In the long-term, Goldstein said eVTOLs have a major cost advantage over helicopters as “the uptime is much higher because they’re electric, the costs are much lower.”
Archer’s Midnight
Archer produces Midnight, a 6,500-pound eVTOL designed to carry one pilot and up to four passengers with “rapid back-to-back flights of 20-50 miles with minimal charge time in between.” According to the company, Midnight is “up to 100 times quieter than a helicopter” and can reach speeds of up to 150 miles per hour.
Earlier this month, Aviation Week reported Archer had nearly completed internal testing of Midnight and expects to begin Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Type Inspection Authorization, the final certification stage, in the coming months.
While the initial plan is for Midnight eVTOLs to operate with a pilot, Goldstein expects them to become fully autonomous in the near future.
“I actually think flying in the air is easier autonomously than flying on the ground, simply because there’s not a lot of stuff in the air…I think the technology is there today for the airplanes to do it,” he said.
According to Goldstein, the current issues with eVTOLs operating without pilots are a mixture of regulatory, infrastructure in terms of communicating with other aircraft and controllers on the ground, and consumer acceptance.
Over time, as battery technology improves, Goldstein also thinks eVTOLs could become bigger.
“Batteries are only so good today, where you can only build so much. It’s the reason why everyone’s doing pilot plus four instead of, like, pilot plus eight or whatever. It’s just because the payload considerations are so challenging. So, I think over time you can do that,” he said.
In terms of uses for Midnight, Goldstein said “anything where a helicopter is used, this is great platform.” Along with urban transportation, he cited medical emergencies and law enforcement as obvious use cases for Midnight, while the company has already delivered aircraft to the U.S. military.
Commercial Launch
Archer has partnered with Abu Dhabi Aviation, which plans to launch a commercial eVTOL service in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)’s second city in the near future. Midnight eVTOLs have already been delivered to Abu Dhabi were testing began in July to ensure local conditions are taken into account.
Archer isn’t the only eVTOL company focusing on the UAE with Joby, one of its main competitors, hoping to launch in Dubai next year, with launch facilities currently under construction as sites including Dubai International Airport, according to Aviation Week.
At some point in the next two years Archer is also hoping to launch Midnight services in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, with maps produced by the company showing proposed stops at key locations including SoFi Stadium, Long Beach, the University of Southern California, and Hollywood Burbank Airport.
In terms of advancing eVTOLs in the U.S., Goldstein singled out President Donald Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for praise.
“I think Secretary Duffy has been a huge part of the kind of push here, and President Trump, too has been a huge part of it,” he said. “I mean, even in one of his campaign speeches, he talked about eVTOL he wanted [it] to be built in America. And so that was something the administration has focused on.”
The 2028 Olympics
Earlier this year, Archer Aviation became the exclusive air taxi partner for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, a move Goldstein hopes will demonstrate Midnight’s capabilities on a global stage.
The move has already paid dividends in terms of media coverage, with Goldstein appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon earlier this year where he presented Fallon with one of Archer’s flying jackets.
There had been hopes in eVTOL circles that the Paris 2024 Olympics would be a key moment in terms of public awareness, with eVTOL maker Volocopter hoping to operate its aircraft at the event, but in the end it failed to get the necessary regulator certification.
Future of eVTOLs
In the longer term, Goldstein sees a future where eVTOLs are ubiquitous in the skies above American cities, flying in designated, but invisible, sky highways to ensure safety.
Regarding Archer’s future, he said: “I’d start with the Olympics, where you could have 10s of aircrafts hopefully flying around that city, servicing that the games as a good model for the future cities, and then we start really kind of rolling that out broader and broader…”
Goldstein continued: “We’d probably start with the bigger cities in the world and go there. That’s probably the easiest. We probably partner with a lot of the airlines in those cities to get it going. But my hope is that we’re well on our way on autonomy. We’ve got a lot of the stuff deployed, we’ve got a lot of consumer acceptance, and we’re starting to get into the scaling phase where we can really put a lot of this stuff out there.”
Fulfilling Goldstein’s vision would require a dramatic scaling of current production capabilities, with the CEO noting the U.S. only makes around 5,000 aircraft of all types each year.
Archer already has a factory in Georgia which is designed to build 650 eVTOLs per year, though Goldstein said this could be tripled in the future.
“The right question to ask is not when, or rules or all that stuff. The right question is, how many can you build? And how you [are] going to get to scale? Because that’s the hardest thing here. So, the goal would have multiple factors that are all building at very large scales. We think a lot about the scaling side of this, for sure, but the goal is to be building 10s of 1,000s per year,” Goldstein said.
Go Deeper: Q&A with Adam Goldstein
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Newsweek: The place I wanted to start was the Trump administration put out this executive order in June, which I thought was really interesting, because the Trump administration has been pretty down on electric cars. They’ve been slashing electric car subsidies, but it’s been very helpful to eVTOLS. I was wondering why that was and to what extent you found the Trump administration different to the Biden administration?
Goldstein: In 2022, the former administration, they created a new category, which they call power to lift. This was the new category that the Archer aircraft would be certified under. And that was a really big deal, because that was the first new category in, like many decades. And so being out—it was one thing that the technology could exist, but this isn’t a helicopter. It isn’t an airplane. Like, what is it? It was this new category. So, the FAA created that, and I think they created it because they wanted to make sure the U.S. could lead in aviation. They wanted to make sure, from a geopolitical perspective, that the U.S. could lead on both the civil and on the defense side. And so helping to create these new industries was a big deal. And so I think it’s bipartisan…I think in general, like, Americans agreed with statement.
Newsweek: If I’m not mistaken, was there a plan to launch an EV at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Volocopter, or something, and that fell through for some reason. I was kind of just wondering if you knew why that was?
Goldstein: I think European politics are a little bit different than U.S. politics. I think that was a little tricky, but I don’t I mean, Volocopter, I think had financial troubles too. I think had recently filed for bankruptcy and trying to, like, resurge. But I don’t know the exact ins-and-outs, but I know that’s sort of a unique situation over there for a couple different reasons.
Newsweek: Do you think that most people, the general public, don’t really realize what’s coming? It kind of feels like we’re on the verge of something quite big. And you need there’ll be a Sputnik moment, at which point people go, ‘My God, these things are actually real’ in the same way there was with like Waymo, perhaps a year ago, two years ago. And if so, what do you think it will be?
Goldstein: Two weekends ago, we flew at the air show right near our headquarters, at an airport called Salinas, the Salinas Airshow. And you know there was, like the P 51 Mustangs, like World War II fighter jets fly by really fast…like really fast, low, super loud, and then the Archer Midnight aircraft flew by, and the announcer starts like, whisper. And he’s like, you can even hear my voice, you know, whispering. You can still hear that over this aircraft, because it’s so quiet. They basically fly by and they don’t make any noise. And so that is always like the crowd pleaser. It’s different air shows. People want the zooms, like you go to F1 right? They want the loud things. But we do that at the air shows because it’s a way to show people the contrast, how quiet these are. I think it’s definitely a sneaky thing that’s like coming, meaning people don’t really realize it, but it is actually like showing up more in pop culture. I think you are starting to see that more because a lot of people think it’s cool. And so you start to see that more kind of out there. Usher did a thing with us a year ago. He put out a thing; I did that thing on Jimmy Fallon. We had the Olympics—is pretty heavily promoting us. I do think there are things that you’re gonna see it because it’s cool product. I think the plane looks really great. But I do think also you’re right. I think a lot of people don’t really realize that this will be a product that people have access to.
Newsweek: You talk about sound, which, as I understand, is probably the biggest single advantage of eVTOLs. Presumably, if helicopters were as quiet as eVTOLs, would our cities currently have hundreds or thousands of helicopters flying around? Is the sound the reason that’s not already happening?
Goldstein: I think it’s three reasons. It’s cost, safety and noise. So, think about how you personally make a choice around your aviation solutions. So, if I said, ‘Hey, you know James, you can fly.’
…So I’m like, good news, James, you can go from London to New York for $40 you’d be like, what am I flying on? What is this like? How can you do that? You’d feel a little sketchy from a safety perspective. You like, what kind of plane is a plane from the 30s? Like, it’ll be fun World War II plane or whatever. No joke. You care about safety. I think that’s probably how people buy. The second thing you care about is price. And if I was like, hey, I got the safest plane in the world, it’ll cost you, like 30 grand to fly from London to New York. You’d be like, that’s a little pricey. I don’t really know if I want to do that. That’s how people buy aviation—safety and cost. It’s the two things they really care about.
“The noise is a scaling factor. So, the challenge of helicopters is they’re just banned from a lot of cities because they make too much noise. They’re just distracting. New York has a group called Stop the Chop as an example to try to stop that from happening just because they make so much noise. The safety side of eVTOLs is probably the biggest benefit, which is, these are multi-propeller engines. There’s backups. They’re designed to have very few or zero single points of failure. You have different than a helicopter, which has many, in some cases, hundreds, of single points of failure. So, these critical component parts that if one of them breaks the whole, you know, a catastrophic event. So, the safety side is a really big deal. The second one is cost, because that they’re electric, the uptime is much higher because they’re electric, the costs are much lower. The maintenance is much lower. It allows you to then just kind of pass through that cost to the consumer. So this can be a product that a lot of people can use because if it still was really safe and really quiet, but it costs too much, like not you would still be a product people didn’t really get the chance to use. So, I think cost, safety, noise are the things that allow this to actually be out there, with safety probably being the biggest one.
Newsweek: My understanding is your plan to launch. Is it this year in the UAE or is it early next year?
Goldstein: Yeah. Archer sells aircraft, and so we will do some operations ourselves. So, in the UAE, we’re partnered with Abu Dhabi, and there’s two funds that have invested Mubadala, which is one of the sovereign wealth funds and IHC, another one of the sovereign wealth funds. And then we’re partnering with Abu Dhabi Aviation, which is the state-owned helicopter company. I think it’s the largest helicopter company in the Middle East. And so we’ve delivered an aircraft there. We plan to deliver more aircraft there. They’ve been a great partner to us, and then they’ll start flying these aircrafts around here, I think soon.
Newsweek: And by soon, do you think it’ll be this year or kind of looking early next year?
Goldstein: We’ve already started doing test flights out there and so that’ll just kind of keep ramping up into a heavier cadence.
Newsweek: So after you’ve done the UAE, you’re launching next year in California, in Los Angeles, specifically, I believe I saw a map I think your people put out where you stop at the Rams stadium and one of the airports and Long Beach.
Goldstein: We have a network that we’ve built in California. We have also a network we’ve announced in New York. And so when the EIPP [Integration Pilot Program] launches next year, it depends on what cities get picked, where we’ll start flying. It’ll start from kind of point-to-point routes where we’re going. But of course, we’ll work with the governments to make sure that we do it in a safe, appropriate way. But they’ve been, again, the government’s been very supportive of this, both state, local and kind of federal level. So, we’ll see where the EIPP actually comes out to where we’ll start flying.
Newsweek: Just on safety. I was going to ask you about battery fires, and just before I looked up the figures, and it turns out, the batteries are already much safer than internal combustion engines in cars. The number of fires is significantly lower, but I think there’s still public perception. I mean, in the sense I used to think this, that there’s an association between electric batteries and fires, which, by sound of things, is no longer accurate. But do you think there’s more that can be done to challenge this false misconception?
Goldstein: I think a couple things. One is, it’s not Archer telling you it’s safe, it’s the FAA. It’s a regulator telling you that it’s safe. And so I think that’s very helpful in aviation. I think if you saw a United logo on an aircraft, you don’t really ask, ‘Oh, is that a 737? Is that A220? Is that a 787? You’re like, oh, it’s a United plane.’ It like kind of stands for safety. That’s what their brand stands for, which why we partner with some of those groups to kind of help with that. I think also, like, the aircraft are built and designed to withstand battery fires, and so they can certainly withstand that. And so we have to make an assumption there will be a fire. What you can’t have is what’s called propagation, which is where it spreads throughout it.
So, you have to design around that. You have to design that assume there will be fires, but it has to be controlled. And so all the safety stuff in the air, you know, the standards we certify to are extraordinary. They’re much, much higher than like what you’d see on the ground. I think the FAA has done a good job of putting in rules in place to help make sure that is contained. And I think the brands of the FAA and the different airlines that will fly these aircraft are going to really help with consumer adoption and consumer acceptance. But I think that’s a lot of what the EIPP is about too…