Archer Aviation has completed several days of piloted flights with its all-electric Midnight air taxi around San Francisco Bay, taking off and landing at Oakland International Airport to show how the aircraft integrates into busy urban airspace.
The flights capped the Northern California leg of Archer’s ‘No Roads’ tour and built on a flight-test program that has passed 400 test flights. Beginning in Salinas, Midnight flew into seven cities over three days – Hollister, San Martin, San Jose, Mountain View and Hayward before Oakland – reaching top speeds of 131mph and covering more than 200 miles.
The aim was to show Midnight operating in the complex airspace around the Bay Area’s three international airports – San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose – one of the busiest flight corridors in the USA. Midnight flew from Oakland to San Francisco’s Marina District in about 10 minutes, a journey that can take more than an hour by car.
Midnight is a piloted, four-passenger air taxi powered by 12 electric motors driving tilting and lift propellers, fed by six independent battery packs. Archer designs it for rapid back-to-back trips of roughly 20 to 50 miles at cruise speeds of about 150mph, recharging in around 10 minutes between flights.
In testing, the aircraft has flown about 55 miles (89km) on a single charge and reached 10,000ft, and has completed the high-speed transition from vertical to wing-borne flight that is central to the design. Archer says Midnight produces around 45 decibels in forward flight and no operating emissions.
Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO of Archer, said, “Flying Midnight across multiple cities in Northern California shows we can connect communities with no roads, no traffic, and no emissions in minutes instead of hours. That’s the future we’re working towards bringing to the Bay Area, Los Angeles and cities across the country.”
Archer launched the ‘No Roads’ tour in September ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games, for which it is the official air taxi provider. The tour opened with city-to-city flights from Salinas to Monterey and Hollister and piloted displays at the California International Airshow before the Bay Area flights.
Archer plans to fly Midnight in Los Angeles next as it prepares to operate under the White House’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP), a federal scheme for testing air-taxi operations. The program selected Archer applications spanning several states in early 2026.
The company is targeting initial US commercial operations in 2026 under the pilot program, although full FAA type certification remains ahead. Archer says it was the first eVTOL developer to clear Phase 3 of the FAA’s four-stage certification process and is now in Phase 4, and it already holds the Part 135 and Part 145 approvals needed to operate and maintain commercial services.
