Why the FAA Just Created a New Aircraft Category for Archer Aviation

Really building a next generation aviation company and it spans across civil and defense. On the civil side, we're building products that are designed to carry a pilot plus four passengers in and around urban environments. So instead of driving on the ground 90 minutes to go 15, 20, 30 miles, you could fly and you can get there in 5 to 10 minutes. And so we're really in the business of saving people time, giving people back time, and really trying to help them enjoy their lives a bit better. On the defense side, there's a whole new set of applications that we're building. Once aircraft could go electric, there's an ability to really build new applications that solve a lot of the modern-day problems. So you can think about this category they call autonomous and attritable, which means unmanned low-cost solutions that can really confront a lot of the modern-day challenges that we have.

There's a lot of different categories that you have to think about. And so the first one is really design, so like aircraft design. So what are we going to build? So you have this really advancement of electric power systems. And so you can now build electric engines. You can now use fuel from lithium-ion batteries and you can create a totally new type of product. And so historically you would be using a piston or a combustion engine. And that is a very big product that does not scale down very well. So they tend to be bigger products. So a helicopter as an example will use a piston and combustion engine. They're big and you have one big rotor that ties into that engine. But now with electric engines you can scale them down. So you can have one, two, 100, a thousand. And so you have this new design space to go build something. And that as an aviation nerd is like an unbelievable opportunity. In our lifetime, there's a crazy opportunity to be able to go build something entirely new in a category. So there's a design side of things that you have to get right. And there's tons of decisions to make. A lot of them are just trade-offs. There's technology bets. There's things that you want to do to design for the consumer experience. There's things that you can do to design for a certification process. So, there's a lot of trade-offs you have to think about.

Once you have a design in place, then you have to really start thinking about, okay, how do we go and actually build, test, and certify this vehicle. So, we have to actually create - there had to be a new category that was created for us. So, it's the first new category that the FAA created in 60 years. So, it's a totally new concept. It's not a helicopter. It's not an airplane. It's this new concept that they call powered lift or what people call advanced air mobility. And so there's an opportunity now to really take something, build a totally new category of aircraft, but then we have to decide and sort of argue the rules. What does safety mean? So how do you define safety? How do we argue safety?

No, that's totally fine. All good here. Hold on. We need to take a second. I think it's probably a start over type situation here.

Okay. Yeah, we could keep going. They'll take it out. Yeah, they'll just edit it. Okay.

So, we have to now really establish what safety means. And so we have to think about the rules that get written, the laws that ultimately get approved, the tests that we have to do to really show that those rules were done and met and the safety standards were met. So there's a whole another category of certification you have to do. And then finally on the other side, you have to do manufacturing, which is you have to go build a lot of things. And so how do we go build and scale up a whole new industry that didn't really exist before? It's new supply chains, that's new production systems. There's a whole new category in the manufacturing side that has to get delivered to. So, those are really the three big categories that I spend my time on. That's where all the people are really spending their time on, but it's a heck of an undertaking.

Oh, yeah. I've always loved things that fly. It's definitely sort of rooted in who I am, but really building complex things, building complex machines is what I really enjoy. And so this is obviously a very very difficult problem and it goes back to my startup roots. So I started working building software-based startups and I really wanted to always build things that I could touch and hold and physically see. And so I loved the hardware side of things. Hardware didn't become fashionable though really until post Tesla being successful and SpaceX being successful. It was near impossible to raise money for hardware. And so hardware became like the new software, became very investable only really like 10 years ago. And so it was very difficult to do that before. So even if you loved it, it was very hard to do because no one would put any money into it. It was always viewed as it takes too long, the cycles are bad. I've always heard the sort of the rules at some of the biggest venture funds were never hardware. And so that was kind of like the top rules. And I think Tesla helped change all that.

A lot of it has to do with how do you want to lay the aircraft out and where do you want to think about putting the engines and propellers? So, when you're building this new type of vertical lift aircraft, there's a couple things you have to think about. First, you start with a maximum takeoff weight and a wingspan. So, you want to fit inside existing infrastructure. And so, there's a lot of trade-offs there of how big, how small do you want it to be? The size of the aircraft will generally lead to ultimately the amount of payload you can carry. So if you build a really small thing, you can't carry that much stuff. You need a bigger thing with a bigger wing that's more efficient to carry more stuff. But that has to fit inside the existing helicopter infrastructure unless you want to build a whole new set of infrastructure, which we don't want to do from the very beginning. Over time, that can happen. The next thing you have to do is you have to say, okay, well, we need to spin something, a proper rotor fast enough to generate lift to bring these aircraft off the ground. And so when you do that, then you have to really figure out, okay, are we going to have one propeller, 10, 100, a thousand, and whatever how many you have and decide what you have, where are you going to put them on the aircraft? And so you can laterally spread them across the wing, you can put them more in line with the fuselage, you can put them in a circle. There's lots of different ways that you can do it. So a lot of the early concepts were really trying to understand those trades. How many propellers, where do you put them? Why? What are the advantages, disadvantage of doing this? And so we went through a bit of a cycle to do that. Some of the earliest engineers that work at Archer have also been doing this for a very very long time. So there's a lot of lessons that have been learned in the industry and that have been generic things of what not to do. And that's really helped shape a lot of what the designs look like today.

So today you need a pilot because there's not laws, certification or infrastructure to really allow for autonomous civil travel. Of course you can see autonomous travel today without people in them. There's lots of drones that do this, but if you want to start putting people in them, there's a very strict set of rules that need to get established that help really identify safety to get that done. And then there's infrastructure that needs to get done. So for example, just because technologically you can do it doesn't mean that infrastructure can handle it. So how would this aircraft communicate with air traffic control is a good example. How is that going to work? So even if you technically could do it, there's no real system in today that's been decided on what to do. So do you need a pilot to do it? You don't need a pilot to do it technically, but from all the other things you need infrastructure, certification. The other side is you definitely need it today. Over time that will certainly happen. I don't think that's a two-year journey, but I don't think that's a 20-year journey either.