AAM Spotlight: Nikhil Goel, Archer CCO

As Archer gears up to begin final assembly of its first conforming Midnight air taxi, the company’s chief commercial officer, Nikhil Goel, sat down again with the AAM Report to discuss the company's production plans and share his thoughts on the rapidly evolving advanced air mobility sector. A partial transcript follows:

AAM Report: Archer recently secured financing that covers most of the cost of constructing the first phase of the factory in Covington, Georgia. How quickly can you ramp up to 650 aircraft per year?

Goel: First off, It’s worth mentioning that we were the first eVTOL [electric-vertical-takeoff-and-landing] company to break ground on a high-volume facility, and the goal of Phase One is to produce 650 aircraft annually, which will also make it the largest manufacturing facility by volume in the entire industry. So, we’re really shooting big here, and Stellantis is the partner that helps us do it. We’re very much on track to complete the construction there on schedule. It began this past March, and our goal is to have the first phase done early next year. We were also able to close $65 million in financing from Synovus, a traditional bank, which was a really big deal for us, and for the industry as a whole.

As far as getting to 650 aircraft, we can get there as quickly as we want, but the question is how quickly do we want to get there? The way we’re thinking about it, given the FAA’s timeline, is that 2025 is probably going to be in the dozens of aircraft; it’s not going to be hundreds or thousands of aircraft. The following year is when we really start ramping up. We could produce 650 in 2026 if we wanted to, and assuming that everything else from a market perspective lines up, that’s what we’ll do.

What exactly is the role of Stellantis in manufacturing these aircraft?

Zooming out, the reason we’re working with Stellantis, and the reason you see others like Joby working with Toyota, is at their core, these eVTOLs are much more like cars than they are airplanes. I actually call them Teslas with wings. They’re carbon-composite bodies with wings and propellers. They’re actually pretty simple machines, and a car company would be way better at making them than an airplane company. That’s why we’ve partnered with Stellantis.

Now, what are they doing for us? First of all, they’re an equity investor and they’ve committed $200 million, most of which they’ve already put into the company. Second, is they’re helping us build the facility in Georgia, and they’re also helping us think about the manufacturing process the right way. That goes all the way down to the design of the vehicle and making sure every part and piece and assembly of the vehicle is manufactured as low cost and quickly as possible.

So, they’re helping us build the factory. That includes setting up the assembly, the tooling, figuring out from a process perspective how to manufacture at scale, how to deal with import and export, shipping and inventory, and so on. These are all things that Stellantis is a massive expert in. There are literally also dozens of full-time Stellantis employees working at the plant in Georgia alongside us, so it’s a true partnership from head to toe.

Is everything still on track for commercial service in 2025? How confident are you in that timeline?

Our goal is still very much 2025. If you look at us, we have always done what we said we’re going to do. We’ve always said our range will be 100 miles, we’ve always said we’ll fly 150 miles per hour, and we’ve always said we’re going to have four passengers. So we’ve just been really consistent. Two years ago, some people may have criticized those performance specs, but we’ve always been careful not to overpromise and to be really honest and transparent about where we’re at.

I think you’ve seen other companies in the industry sort of converge around the same conclusions around what is optimal, so I think people are starting to figure what is realistic and what isn’t. But we’ve stuck to our guns this whole time, because we’re lucky to have experienced leaders like [COO] Tom Muniz and [Chief Engineer] Geoff Bower heading up the technical teams, and they’ve been doing this a long time. They know what specs are real and what specs aren’t, and they know what timeline is realistic and what’s not. For us, 2025 has always been the answer and that’s what we're tracking to.

What’s your sense about the level of investor enthusiasm right now? It seems like there has been some renewed pessimism with things like program delays and a crash at one of your competitors.

I think it’s quite the opposite, actually. I talk to investors all day long, every day, and what I think is happening is they’re starting to separate the signal from the noise. So, if you rewind back two years ago, it was really hard to tell who and what was real. Companies were announcing all sorts of quote-unquote 'deals,' and it was basically impossible to tell who the real players were and who had the actual right team, the right IP, the right aircraft and the right partnerships, versus who didn’t.

I think what’s happened over the last two years is you’ve seen the FAA select two aircraft makers and push them forward. You’ve seen the U.S. airlines select two OEMs and push them forward. You’ve seen two  companies raise a billion dollars in capital. So, you’ve basically started to see the separation unfold, where some players, including Archer, are receiving money and building the right partnerships and actually have a sizable war chest to get this to deployment and commercialization.

Other people are running out of money pretty quickly and they haven’t made much progress on their flight test regimes. And so you’re basically seeing a consolidation, or a separation, between the players that are positioned to enter the market and the players that are going to have a lot of trouble over the next few years. And I think that we see investors gravitating toward who they think the winners are going to be in this space.

You’ve been a big proponent of urban air mobility (UAM) from the outset. As we approach commercialization, is there anything about that vision that keeps you up at night?

I think if you asked me two years ago, I’d have a bunch of concerns: are the batteries going to be good enough? Is the FAA really going to support this? Are these [aircraft] actually going to be as quiet as we say they are? Now, we’ve answered all those big questions. The FAA is publicly out there supporting our goal for 2025. I’ve heard numerous aircraft fly and I can confidently say they are extremely quiet. And I’ve spoken to mayors and heads of state who are just really supportive of what we’re doing, so there’s a lot of demand pull from outside the industry.

I think we’ve knocked out most of those big, early questions about this technology. The batteries are here and they’re real. The cells are in our lab right now, they exist and they’re not exotic, crazy cells either. So the big challenges are out of the way now. It’s really just about the next 18 months, which is going to require ruthless execution from everyone involved who is serious about this technology. There is no room for delays or slip-ups; everyone is marching heads down and there’s going to be long days and long hours ahead of us. Execution will be hard, and we know this, but fortunately, there are no more big unknowns.