Apr 6, 2026
It’s summer 2028. You touch down at LAX for the Olympic Games, sporting your finest Team USA merchandise (because who else would you be rooting for?). You get off the plane, shuffle through the terminal, and are guided to a shiny vehicle sporting 12 propellers.
It almost looks like a helicopter, but… sleeker?
After vertical takeoff, you cruise over Santa Monica, leapfrogging the infamous LA rush hour until you arrive safely at a helipad in SoFi Stadium, or some other venue. For a slightly higher fee, you’ve just saved yourself at least an hour of time.
Archer Aviation — which recently got the White House’s green light to bring “air taxis” to market later this year — seems poised to make this future a reality.
Archer’s wasp-shaped “Midnight craft” casts an imposing figure. The five-seater electric helicopter is one in a new class of “powered lift” aircraft, or electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles (eVTOLs), the first new aircraft type licensed by the FAA for commercial testing since the 1940s.
Obviously, they don’t need runways. Or traditional fuel. And rather than having just one critical propeller, they have an array dispersed across their outstretched wings.
It’s a quieter, cleaner, cheaper, safer helicopter.
And the $90 billion helicopter industry is a prime candidate for disruption. The technology hasn’t fundamentally changed in ~70 years, and helicopters are notoriously unsafe, with a 35 percent higher crash risk than planes. (Last April, a sightseeing helicopter crashed in the Hudson River; all six people onboard died.)
“David Smith, the CEO of Robinson Helicopter [the most popular manufacturer of civilian helicopters in the world] hates my guts,” Archer’s CEO, Adam Goldstein, told me. “He takes a cheap shot at me in any way he can. Why? Because the helicopter industry is afraid we’re a structurally better product than what they are. And so those guys are threatened by us.”
Electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles evoke the dream of flying cars, where anyone an levitate above the street grid with the press of a button, Back to the Future style. The notion that flying cars are almost here, and their repeated failure to materialize, is so central to discourse about the future that “we were promised flying cars” has become a meme.
While Archer’s aircraft aren’t exactly “flying cars” (they require a pilot, so the company tends to describe them as “air taxis” instead), they’re a bright spot in a recent history of failed attempts to build new consumer aircraft.
In 2009, DARPA invested ~$65 million in AAI Corporation (developer of the RQ-7 Shadow, one of the U.S. Army’s most widely used drones in the War on Terror) and Lockheed Martin to develop a four-person, vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft. Their deadline was 2015, but the underlying tech just wasn’t sophisticated enough, so progress slowed and the military lost interest. The program was shuttered in 2013.
In 2010, Larry Page invested hundreds of millions of dollars into flying cars via his Kitty Hawk Corporation, which developed more than 20 prototype eVTOLs and constructed more than 100 aircraft. But after numerous failed prototypes and infighting, Kitty Hawk shut down in 2022.
Even those who could build the technology had to make it through a horde of regulations. Because no previous regulations existed for eVTOLs, this meant working with the government to define the rules as they went… adding years to the timeline.
The hazards of trying to launch a new aircraft got worse under Biden’s FAA. In 2022, then-FAA Director Michael Whitaker abruptly reversed course on the planned classification of eVTOLs as fixed-wing small airplanes, routing them instead through a more bespoke “powered lift” framework. This subjected manufacturers to even more rigorous special certification rules around their design, production, and pilot training.
Four years later, a select few companies — Archer included — were able to limp through the government beating.
Adam Goldstein, CEO and co-founder of Archer, is a fast-talking 45-year-old born and raised in Tampa, Florida.
“There was no internet,” he says of growing up in 1990s Tampa, “[everybody] shot guns in the backyard and drove pickup trucks and nobody left the state.”
But Goldstein did. After graduating from the University of Florida, he moved to New York to pursue investment banking. Because he had no connections, he was forced to “claw his way in” to Harvard networking events around the city just to get an interview. Eventually, he got one… and a job at Merrill Lynch… where his second day of work was 9/11. He watched the first plane crash into the North Tower while on his way to work at the World Financial Center.
Fast-forward to 2013, and he’d founded hiring marketplace Vettery, which he sold five years later for $100 million. Now with considerable money in his pocket, Goldstein pivoted to hard tech.
“I wanted to build hardware. It was fun, it was stuff I could touch. And I believed the hardware supercycle was coming and that hardware would be the new software,” he explains.
Goldstein donated to his alma mater’s mechanical aerospace school to build an aviation lab on Archer Road (his company’s namesake), and used that lab to start his company, poaching the head of engineering at Kitty Hawk.
They wanted to make something that could be certified, mass-produced, and used by consumers and the defense industry alike — three priorities that set Archer apart from other research-focused competitors in the mid-to-late 2010s.
It wasn’t always easy.
In 2021, within six weeks of going public, the FBI showed up at Archer HQ. Turns out Boeing had accused one of Archer’s engineers of being a Chinese spy, then sued the company for allegedly stealing Boeing’s trade secrets. The New York Times and Bloomberg were also accusing Archer of corporate and international espionage.
Seventeen armed FBI agents blew the doors of the alleged spy’s house, hog-tied him, and took all of his electronics. He was later exonerated, but the FBI issued no apology.
“Good luck putting that toothpaste back in the tube,” Goldstein told me.
Thankfully, Archer has been spared from such scrutiny in recent years. And the second Trump administration has been supportive.
Goldstein chalks that up to Archer’s focus on military capability in addition to consumer tech. “In China,” he says, “every boat has to [...] be able to carry tanks; their ship-building is partially civil, partially military.” The Trump administration wants to optimize for something similar: “If we organize our supply chains and products to be instantly adaptable for defense purposes, it’s very beneficial to them and they’ll help us on the civil side.” (Archer is also partnering with Anduril on eVTOLs for defense.)
On March 9th, following under Trump’s 2025 “Unleashing American Drone Dominance” Executive Order, the White House rolled out its brand-new eVTOL “Integration Pilot Program.” Basically, eight selected eVTOL companies — including Archer — will operate in approved areas across 26 states. Each one will focus on something different, from urban air taxi services to cargo transportation, emergency medical response, offshore and energy sector transportation, and regional passenger transportation.
They’ll start by testing piloted flights without passengers (those will come later).
Why is the White House so bullish on air taxis?
As Goldstein explains, regulatory capture and institutional bloat have paralyzed aviation (see: last month’s horrific collision between an Air Canada jet and a fire truck on the runway at LGA). The White House knows we need better flying objects, and they know the legacy players won’t be able to do it. So they’re finally starting to greenlight new competitors.
Later this year, Archer will pilot test flights in Florida, Texas, and New York. They’ve inked a partnership with United Airlines to connect city centers to local airports. Late last year, Archer announced a $126 million acquisition of Hawthorne Municipal Airport in LA, which is also home to the Tesla Design Studio (the Boring Company’s tunnel runs under the airport, too). Hawthorne will be Archer’s base for one of its first human-passenger tests: the 2028 LA Olympics, where it will serve as the official air taxi provider, transporting spectators from LAX to sporting venues in ~10 to 20 minutes.
But given that Tesla and Boring share the space, Goldstein thinks Hawthorne could become a kind of transportation laboratory. “There’s a lot we could do here,” he says, “tunnel networks, robots running airports, cybercabs driving everybody everywhere…” Sort of like an SEZ for transportation, in LA, just east of the 405.
Goldstein tells me his aircraft is only viable because the Trump admin has aggressively issued clearances for them to fly.
“Trump said to Transportation Secretary Duffy: Go build a couple of these vertical takeoff crafts and focus your resources,” Goldstein says. The surest way to do this was finding private sector partners who’d already built state-of-the-art aircraft — like Archer, BETA Technologies, and Joby Aviation (Archer’s main competitor in the eVTOL space) — and let them fight for the potentially $9 trillion eVTOL market.
“We want this administration to keep going,” he says, “because if we could get four more years or eight more years out of it, what we will be able to build is incredible. It’d be awesome to be the next Gatorade to come out of Florida too,” he mused.
On the other hand, Goldstein told me, “If the Blue Lizard is going to block me from building anything and make me get a million permits, that makes it impossible to build anything again. So it’s a full sprint right now. Take advantage of the time we have.”
—Hunter Ryerson
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