Archer Plans City-to-city Tour with Midnight eVTOL

Archer Aviation plans to fly its four-passenger Midnight eVTOL prototype on city-to-city routes in the Los Angeles area, Texas, and Florida in the coming months. The San Jose, California-based start-up says the demonstration flights will prepare it for commercial air taxi operations under the FAA’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) as well as the 2028 Olympic Games.

The “No Roads” tour opens with a series of Northern California flights, starting with a trip to Hollister and continuing to Monterey, San Martin, San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco, Archer said on Thursday. The company is coordinating the flights with the FAA. It also plans to announce charging sites in several states during the tour, as part of America’s Consortium for Electric Skyways, a venture Archer formed with Beta Technologies and Macquarie Capital.

Archer has not said which aircraft will fly the tour. Its only piloted city-to-city flight to date, a Salinas-to-Monterey round trip on July 30, used a nonconforming prototype that cannot transition between vertical and wing-borne flight. That aircraft takes off and lands on runways, the operating mode eVTOL air taxis are meant to replace, and it flies with two-blade lifting propellers rather than the four-blade design Archer has said it will certify. 

A second piloted Midnight, which the FAA cleared for flight in February, has been working through vertical takeoff and landing tests. Archer has yet to announce a piloted transition flight, which would demonstrate the capability to take off and land at the sort of urban sites the company is lining up in the Los Angeles area.

Archer co-founder and CEO Adam Goldstein described the tour as the company’s “biggest step yet toward making air taxis an everyday reality.” The flights follow more than 70 test flights in August from its flight-test facility at Salinas Municipal Airport (KSNS) in Monterey County, California.

The tour supports Archer’s role as the “official air taxi provider” of the LA28 Games and its place in the eIPP, a three-year initiative that lets manufacturers fly real-world operations, potentially with paying passengers, before obtaining FAA type certification—a milestone that appears likely to slip from Archer’s latest end-of-year target into 2027 or later.