Archer Aviation Takes Off • Adam Goldstein

Archer Aviation Founder and CEO, Adam Goldstein, joins Niki in the studio to talk about why, after years of flying cars being science fiction, the eVTOL industry is taking off now, how coordination with the FAA is critical to American dominance in the industry, and what the future of travel looks like. He lays out a future in which flying cars will be as accessible as automobiles. 

“...talent and capital are the two advantages that the US has that nowhere else in the world has.” -Adam Goldstein

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Transcript

Niki: I'm Niki Christoff and welcome to Tech'ed Up. 

Today I'm in the studio talking with Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO of Archer Aviation. We're talking about the future of eVTOLs, aka flying vehicles or air taxis, and how this new type of aircraft can help give us back some of the time we spend sitting in traffic.

Adam, thank you for coming into the studio while you're visiting Washington. 

Adam: It's good to be here. 

Niki: So, let's just jump right out of the gate with an acronym that I sort of understand because when I was at Uber we worked on it, but eVTOLs, what is that?

Adam:  eVTOLS. Ugh, here we go! It stands for Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing and it was a term that was coined by a NASA scientist named Mark Moore. So, Mark was the first one to figure out how to build airplanes using electric powertrains, electric motors. And so, because this started, y’know, from a, a NASA technology, of course, NASA, not from a branding perspective, but from a scientific perspective, gave it its name. [Niki: yes] 

But the way to think about it are. These are electric helicopters with wings. And so, the category that we're trying to create is all around flying cars. So, think about the way that people move around cities today, where they're spending 60 to 90 minutes in a car, moving, y’know, 20, 30, 40 miles, where we can take those trips, move them into the air, and fly those trips 5, 10, 15 minutes.

Niki: And make them all-electric, too. So they're quieter than regular helicopters. 

Adam: So, the types of vehicles, these, we'll just call them flying cars [Niki: Ok], have substantial benefits over the existing, what we call urban air mobility solution, so helicopters. So, helicopters are used today, they fly, they, y’know, very similar types of trips, similar types of missions.

Helicopters have kind of three big challenges. First one is noise, and that really prevents them from scaling across the different cities. Even the cities they operate in already today, they're limited in what they can do because of the noise pollution it causes to the people below them. 

Second one is safety. So, the challenges with helicopters are they have a lot of single points of failure. So, if you put too many of them in the air, you'll start to have a lot of incidents. And then finally, it's cost. Very expensive to take helicopters today because they're very complicated. So, the cost safety noise value proposition of flying cars is just structurally different than what you see with helicopters today.

That's why I'm so excited about it. And that's why I think it will ultimately change the way people move in and around cities. 

Niki: Washington's a kind of odd city because we have closed airspace, but we have about a zillion helicopters all the time. Government, I live next to the Vice President's house and it's just like, it's brutal. It's constant, constant noise. The other thing we have is the trip from Dulles airport to downtown is absolutely brutal. But, however, we have a lot of regulations here, so you're looking at places like, say, New York. 

Adam: Yeah, so pretty much the major cities in the US are obvious: New York, L.A., San Francisco, Miami. But D.C. is actually pretty interesting, too. You're right. A lot of the airspace here is restricted. But today, they use Hueys to fly a lot of those missions in and around cities, and a lot more VIP missions.

You're taking a general or a senator or somebody like that, y’know, whether it's to the White House or to the Pentagon or wherever, to the airport. There is a desire for a solution that's safer, quieter, lower cost, just like the general public wants. And so, when you start to step back and realize what this category is, it's going to really impact everyone everywhere.

Much of the rotorcraf