Flying Green by Christopher de Bellaigue

Author:Christopher de Bellaigue [Bellaigue, Christopher de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Flying Electric

On December 16, 2021, a group of men dressed in the sober, branded casual wear of the Silicon Valley startup gathered on the tarmac at an airstrip outside Salinas, in California’s salad bowl in Monterey County. In front of them stood a black shiny capsule on three spindly legs, the offspring of a suppository and a golf trolley with a V-tail like a hunchback whale. Its single cross-span wing had four banks of three rotor blades—six at the front and six at the back—which made the sound of a loud hair dryer. As the spectators bobbed nervously from foot to foot, the machine rose into the air, tipped a bow, and hovered for ten seconds or so before coming gently to earth. Everyone cheered and clapped and exchanged slightly standoffish hugs that said, “Hey, we’re just workmates.” Back in the headquarters of Archer Aviation in Palo Alto, watching events on a huge screen, the rest of the company’s employees were on their feet, whooping and whistling.

It was the first test flight for Maker, Archer’s version of a new kind of aircraft called an Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing Vehicle. This masterpiece of nomenclature should on no account be attempted when drunk; its acronym, eVTOL, is also hard to get your mouth around; and consensus is lacking over whether the “e” should in fact be capitalized. The bet that significant numbers of investors are making is that eVTOLs, if that is what they continue to be called, will be big. Three months before the test flight, on September 17, Archer had merged with a special purpose acquisition company, which has its own lamentable acronym, SPAC, but is known more colloquially (and informatively) as a blank check company.

With the ringing of the New York Stock Exchange bell that autumn morning, Archer Aviation (ticker symbol: ACHR) was $857.6 million richer and free of many of the financial constraints that inhibit startups in their early, geeks-in-a-garage years. When I visited Archer in Palo Alto in the spring of 2022, it was onboarding engineers at a rate of several a week and preparing to move to bigger headquarters. “This is a really cool period of time for us,” Adam Goldstein, the company’s then joint (now sole) CEO, told me in a large, airy meeting room in the stark, two-story building that served as the company’s headquarters (Archer has since moved the fifteen or so miles to San Jose, which has the advantage of offering the company’s growing workforce more affordable housing). “It’s a different mindset when you’re not sitting there stressed about capital all the time. You can actually go out and execute.”

“Execute” for Goldstein means guiding Maker, the company’s demonstrator vehicle, through certification with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), a process that can take years and costs hundreds of millions of dollars. It also means preparing for mass production (to that end Archer has entered a partnership with Stellantis, one of the world’s biggest car-makers), identifying routes and take-off sites in cooperation with

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