Archer Aviation’s Midnight eVTOL aircraft successfully completed its first transition flight, an important milestone to being able to carry commercially viable passenger payloads. A transition flight basically involves the aircraft taking off vertically like a helicopter, accelerating forward, transitioning with tilt propellers forward before decelerating and landing vertically.
The 6,500-pound aircraft features a 12 propellers design, each with their own electric motor. The one pilot and four passenger configuration can achieve a top speed of 150 mph, thanks in part to six battery packs good for rapid back-to-back flights of 20-50 miles with minimal charge time in between.
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Successfully completing the transition from hover to wing-borne flight with a full-scale eVTOL aircraft is a tremendous engineering feat that only a handful of companies in the world have achieved. Over the seven eVTOL aircraft I’ve built and flown in my career, they have gotten progressively larger as we pursued payloads that made the aircraft platform commercially viable. Midnight is believed to be one of the largest eVTOL aircraft ever to achieve transition and one of the first that is purpose built to carry enough passengers to be able to operate a successful air taxi business,” said Dr. Geoff Bower, Archer’s Chief Engineer.
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