Story ID: 
Archer Tops 400 Flights with Midnight Aircraft
By: Hanneke Weitering
Caption: Archer's Midnight eVTOL prototype has been busy this year
Word Count: 361
Archer Aviation’s Midnight eVTOL air taxi prototype has completed 402 flight tests so far this year, the company announced on September 3.
With its 2025 target for FAA certification and service entry looming, the company has ramped up flight testing activities this year, surpassing the 400-flight goal it set for 2024 four months ahead of schedule.
Now Archer is expanding the flight envelope as it prepares to begin “for-credit” certification testing with the FAA later this year. The U.S. air safety regulator finalized the airworthiness criteria for the Midnight aircraft in May.
The full-scale Midnight prototype made its first hover flights in October 2023 at Archer’s flight testing facility in Salinas, California. It successfully transitioned from hover to cruise flight in June.
Since then, the test flights have progressively increased in speed, duration, and frequency. According to Archer, the flight test campaign has been focused on five key areas: transition flights, high-rate operations, landings, noise, and flight control laws.
The flight test team evaluated the aircraft’s landing abilities in various wind conditions and at different descent rates, and they set up microphone arrays to measure the aircraft’s noise signature during hover operations. Data from these flights allows Archer to optimize the aircraft and fine-tune the flight controls ahead of FAA certification testing.
Archer is building six additional Midnight prototypes at its San Jose headquarters to use for FAA certification testing, and the company will use the first of those “FAA-conforming” aircraft for its first flights with pilots on board. So far, all flight tests have been remotely piloted. 
Meanwhile, Archer is making progress with the construction of a 400,000-sq-ft factory in Georgia, where it plans to build hundreds of Midnight eVTOL aircraft per year. It is also building out plans for eVTOL air taxi networks in cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, where it will operate the Midnight aircraft in partnership with Southwest Airlines and United Airlines. In August, Archer delivered a Midnight aircraft to the U.S. Air Force for evaluation, marking its first delivery to a customer.