The UAE residents and visitors’ dream of flying in an air taxi is one step closer to reality.
The US-based Archer Aviation’s Midnight aircraft, which will operate as a flying taxi in Abu Dhabi and Dubai in 2025, successfully completed the transition to flying at a speed of over 360 kilometres per hour.
Considered to be a challenging task, an eVTOl takes off vertically like a helicopter during the transition, accelerates forward, and shifts from thrust-borne to wing-borne flight like an aeroplane with tilt propellers forward before decelerating and landing vertically.
Transition is critical for Midnight and other similar aircraft to be able to carry commercially viable passenger payloads.
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Midnight aircraft is currently undergoing test and trial runs in the US. Once complete, Archer Aviation will set up Midnight manufacturing facilities in UAE in cooperation with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (Adio) and also set up an international head office in the Emirate.
“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,” said Dr Geoff Bower, chief engineer at Archer.
“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,” he said.
Piloted test flight in 2024
In an interview with Khaleej Times last month, Nikhil Goel, chief commercial officer of Archer Aviation, revealed that Midnight will reduce 60-90 minute distances between the two emirates to 10-20 minutes and will cost up to Dh350 within each emirate and between Dh800-Dh1,500 from one emirate to another when it will launch service at the end of next year.
Midnight is a piloted, four-passenger aircraft designed to perform rapid back-to-back flights with minimal charge time between flights. Archer has now received its Part 135 and Part 145 certificates from the US regulator Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). Additionally, Archer is one of two companies in the world to have its final airworthiness criteria for an eVTOL aircraft issued by the regulator. Midnight is now in the final “implementation” phase of its Type Certification program with piloted flight testing on track to begin later this year.