- Archer Aviation (Nasdaq: ACHR, “Archer”) has built a reputation as a leading publicly traded eVTOL company through misleading projections and PR, reminiscent of Nikola’s tactics.
- Our in-depth analysis, conducted with eVTOL engineers, scrutinizes all major players and finds Archer’s Midnight aircraft fundamentally flawed and likely uncertifiable. In contrast, their competitor Joby Aviation (“Joby”) is making tangible and impressive progress on all fronts.
- Site visits to Archer’s “state-of-the-art” Covington, Georgia manufacturing facility in June, July and August 2025 showed little to no production activity. This comes despite claims of current production along with current scaling to production of 50 aircraft per year and a final goal of 650 aircraft per year with support from Stellantis.
- Archer’s “$6B” order book is inflated with questionable and fraudulent commitments:
- Air Chateau’s Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for 100 Midnights (valued at up to $500M) is implausible. The UAE operator, with only one helicopter purchased in November 2023, lacks the scale or capital for such a fleet. Our findings also lead us to think that Air Chateau is now defunct.
- Future Flight Global’s “up to 116” Midnight order is tied to a shell company with no operational track record.
- KakaoMobility’s 50-aircraft commitment fell apart after Archer failed to deliver for a Q4 2024 demo in Goheung, Korea, yet the order remains included in the backlog.
- The U.S. Air Force’s “up to $148M” Agility Prime contract has only awarded $33M, with just $744,796 disbursed, and the $110M firm-fixed-price portion delivered only $1.3M in awards so far.
- Archer’s UAE “Launch Edition” was nothing more than a staged hover at a photo-op location, using an obsolete aircraft recycled for marketing. The choice of venue, lack of real test data, and diversion of scarce engineering resources all underscore that this was a PR stunt, not a meaningful step toward certification or commercialization. The company also claimed to have delivered their first Midnight aircraft there. Yet they remain the sole owner of this aircraft that has now supposedly been delivered two times.
- Archer’s recent “Defense” pivot is a desperate attempt to stay in the race, but the company lacks the resources and capacity to be a credible player in that field.
Introduction
Archer has built a fundamentally uncompetitive and uncertifiable aircraft. To begin this report, we present an extensive technical analysis of how the timelines announced by the company are farcical and how poorly their Midnight aircraft performs and compares to peers. That entire chapter was written in collaboration with a team of experts working in the eVTOL sector and with extensive experience in the helicopter and defense sector. What we present in the first chapter led to a logical conclusion, the highly touted and recently highlighted manufacturing facility in Georgia appears almost idle, with only a few dozen cars on the parking lot on the days we monitored it. To mask these multiple engineering and technical failures, the company has announced massive deals, supposedly amounting to $6 billion in future orders. In the last chapter, we uncovered that a significant portion of these deals is made out of thin air through several bogus counterparts. We also address the ridiculous “Abu Dhabi Launch” and claim of aircraft delivery to the UAE, which is the last iteration of Archer’s deceptive and misleading marketing strategy. Finally, we analyze Archer’s reactive pivot into defense and find there to be a high risk and competitive dead end to what is an overestimated and overstated market opportunity.
Core Technical Failure
We begin this first chapter with a section on the certification timeline. We believe it to be the most important aspect of this business, as the first eVTOL company to obtain certification will be able to start commercial operations ahead of competitors, a clear advantage. But the path to certification also demonstrates the capabilities of a company and its trustworthiness regarding its promises to investors and its operational execution over time. As we also mentioned in our previous report on Archer, the company’s strongest feature is its marketing strategy and how it presents itself to investors, not its actual operations. We explain in detail why.
Part I: Obfuscated Certification Progress on Farcical Timelines
Type certification by a reputable regulator is mandatory and underpins the business model of Joby and Archer. To those unaware of the monumental effort to type certify an aircraft, it is worth noting a few case studies that we present in this section.
Before we compare Archer’s Midnight aircraft against these case studies, it is important to remind Archers Shareholder Letter history and what the current ‘Midnight’ was meant to do, and now is doing for the company:
Baseline (Q4 2022): The Original Promise
Aircraft Promise: To build 6+ conforming aircraft.
Testing Promise: To begin flight testing in early 2024.
Q1 2023: The Goal Shrinks
Aircraft Status: DOWNGRADED. The goal was revised from “6+” to just “6” but still
described as conforming aircraft.
Testing Status: NO CHANGE. The “early 2024” flight testing target was maintained.
Q2 2023: Holding Pattern
Aircraft Status: NO CHANGE. The goal remained at “6” conforming aircraft.
Testing Status: NO CHANGE. The “early 2024” flight testing target was still being maintained.
Q3 2023: The First Delay
Aircraft Status: NO CHANGE. The goal remained at “6” conforming aircraft.
Testing Status: DELAYED. The flight-testing target was pushed back from “early 2024” to mid-2024.
Q4 2023: The Language Shifts
Aircraft Status: DOWNGRADED. The commitment changed from “building 6” to having “3 conforming aircraft in progress, 6 planned”.
Testing Status: INFORMATION GAP. The “mid-2024” target was no longer mentioned, presumably because Archer saw it was under threat (later realized).
Q1 2024: Stagnation
Aircraft Status: NO CHANGE. The status remained at “3 conforming aircraft in progress, 6 planned”.
Testing Status: INFORMATION GAP. The previous “mid-2024” target was again not mentioned.
Q2 2024: Still No Progress
Aircraft Status: NO CHANGE. The company reported the same status: “3 conforming aircraft in progress, 6 planned”.
Testing Status: INFORMATION GAP. The “mid-2024” target remained unmentioned.
Q3 2024: Miss
Aircraft Status: DOWNGRADED. The goal of building “conforming” aircraft was replaced with a new focus on “piloted, type-design aircraft”, a subtle change that does not describe whether the aircraft are conforming or non-conforming. What even is a “type-design aircraft”?
Testing Status: MISSED. The “mid-2024” flight testing window for conformal aircraft had now passed.
Q4 2024: Non-Conformal Admission
Aircraft Status: DOWNGRADED. The plan changed to manufacturing up to 10 Midnight Aircraft in 2025, planning to deliver first piloted Midnight aircraft to the UAE. The caveat: Earnings Call elaborates: “3 heavily instrumented for flight testing and the remainder as Launch Edition aircraft for early commercial deployment”1, and CTO comments indicate increasing levels of conformity, which means the aircraft, particularly the first aircraft referenced are not fully conformal any longer)2.
Testing Status: MISSED. A further three months have elapsed, and no progress has been made on flight test of even one of the original 6 conforming aircraft. No new targets after the prior MISS on conformal aircraft flight testing.
Q1 2025: A Vague Update
Aircraft Status: NO UPDATE. No information was provided relating to prior aircraft manufacturing targets. The caveat continues: Earnings Call elaborates “a lot of the remaining other areas are available to build conforming hardware and start executing all the tests for credit working towards TIA”3, again confirming progress toward conforming hardware but in turn highlighting current hardware is either partially conforming or non-conforming.
Testing Status: MISSED. A further three months have elapsed, and no progress has been made on flight test of even one of the original 6 conforming aircraft. No new targets after the prior MISS on conformal aircraft flight testing.
Q2 2025: Recent Status
Aircraft Status: Earnings Call indicates Archer “are currently producing six Midnight aircraft, three of which are in final assembly”4
Testing Status: MISSED. A further three months have elapsed, and no progress has been made on flight test of even one of the original 6 conforming aircraft. No new targets after the prior MISS on conformal aircraft flight testing.
The Outcome and Current Status: The final number was lower than the original “6+” and the revised “10” from Q4 2024. Most importantly, the aircraft were downgraded to be non-conformal, a much lower benchmark than the original hype of a fleet of conforming aircraft. Despite the “early 2024” (later changed to “mid-2024”) target for flight testing of the conformal prototype, after over 12 months have elapsed there is still no progress on this promise.
Archer’s story has barely changed in the last three years, aside from dropping from ‘6+’ to ‘6’, dropping ‘conforming’ thereby non-conforming, and consistently missing all flight test commencement dates.
So, as one can see from a longitudinal assessment of their own data, Archer has not only reduced the scope of these prototypes but is also very much behind schedule despite supposed industry-leading manufacturing capabilities.
The following two case studies will exemplify why these delays (and many more to come) show that Archers current timelines for Type Certification in 2026 and operation at scale by early 2028 are virtually impossible.
Read the full report here by Grizzly Research
