Your pre-flight ride from Manhattan to LaGuardia, JFK, or Newark Airports could be a lot more scenic and immensely faster—with a price elevated to match that experience—in plans for an electric air-taxi network that Archer Aviation announced Thursday.

The proposal from this eVTOL startup goes beyond earlier concepts for service around the Bay Area and Los Angeles to include a partnership with United Airlines that will have passengers book transportation on Archer’s Midnight aircraft to complement their airline bookings.

That battery-electric, four-passenger aircraft will take off and land vertically, then transition to horizontal flight at speeds of up to 150mph. Archer would provide service from three existing heliports in Manhattan—East 34th Street Heliport and Downtown Skyport on the East River and West 30th Street Heliport on the Hudson—to LaGuardia Airport and John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens and Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey.

Archer also plans to offer flights to and from Westchester County Airport in White Plains, NY, and two nearby general-aviation airports popular with private-jet users: Republic Airport in East Farmingdale, NY, and Teterboro Airport in Teterboro, NJ.

“My goal is that we can launch the service in New York as soon as next year,” Nikhil Goel, chief commercial officer at the Santa Clara, Calif., firm, said in a call Wednesday.

An advance copy of Archer’s press release doesn’t mention pricing, but Goel said Archer will cost about what a top-end Uber ride would.

“Our goal is on day one to be competitive with Uber Black,” he said, defining that as about $200 to EWR, JFK, or LGA. Goel noted how long those rides can take in traffic: “I did it yesterday, and it was an hour and a half in the car.”

(Our navigation advice: Taking transit to those airports will cost vastly less and should be quicker than 90 minutes, even factoring in the connections required because New York has not followed the example of Washington and other cities by extending direct rail service to its airports.)

Goel suggested that Archer’s service would start with small numbers of Midnight aircraft that limits the number of flights available—"it’s crawl, walk, run"—but would scale eventually to “a flight leaving every few minutes.”

Midnight flight times to those airports would be in the range of 10 minutes, but passengers—with carry-on luggage only for now—would also need to factor in time to get from Archer’s landing areas at each airport’s general-aviation facilities to passenger terminals and then to security screenings. "By the time you’d land, there would be a car waiting to take you directly to your terminal," Goel said.

He added that the company is working with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates those three airports as well as Teterboro, and with United to ensure that these cross-airport rides don’t disrupt existing operations.

United, an investor in Archer that has also placed orders for 200 Midnight aircraft starting in 2021 (and has a similar partnership with a competing eVTOL startup, the Embraer-backed Eve), did not provide further details about how this integration with Archer would work.

Archer also signed a partnership with Southwest Airlines last July.

First, however, Archer has to finish securing type certification for Midnight from the Federal Aviation Administration, a lengthy process that the company began in 2020. “We’re in the final stages of certification,” Goel said. Asked what made him confident that the FAA would sign off on its aircraft this year, he vouched for the Trump administration’s priorities.

“I’ve spent a lot of time at the White House and with the new administration, and I can tell you that they are very forward-leaning about innovation,” he said.

Aviation-safety experts have been much more skeptical of this White House. Elon Musk’s DOGE government-disruption effort has forced layoffs on the FAA and drawn conflict-of-interest complaints after the FAA began testing SpaceX’s Starlink to connect some facilities.

And after a mid-air collision in January near Washington National Airport between an Army helicopter and an American Airlines regional jet left 67 people dead, Trump baselessly suggested that FAA efforts at diverse air-traffic controller hiring were to blame.

Asked about what Archer would say to people newly nervous about having more small aircraft operating in the vicinity of major airports, Goel led with the safety of Midnight’s design and its close cooperation with regulators.

“These aircraft are fundamentally safer than helicopters,” he said, citing their fly-by-wire digital controls and redundant array of electric motors, and stressed how Archer aims to be “good citizens” in operation: “We are working with the FAA to make sure we integrate these really safely into the airspace.”

By: DocMemory
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