Archer And United Airlines Are Trying To ‘Move the World Forward’ by Spanning 12 Miles In Chicago

United Airlines and eVTOL maker Archer Aviation last week announced their first commercial electric air taxi route in Chicago, which they say will launch in 2025. Archer’s founder, Adam Goldstein, says, “We’re trying to move the world forward.” In so doing, the companies will have to answer questions they’re reluctant to address.

A joint release from United and Archer trumpets air taxi service from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport (ORD) to a heliport in the City’s Medical District near the Chicago Loop called Vertiport Chicago (43IL). The latter claims to be America’s largest commercial vertical takeoff and landing facility, sitting on ten acres and boasting 30,000 square feet of hangar space, 11,700 square feet of office space, a single takeoff and landing spot and eight helicopter parking spots.

The route (about 12 air-miles) is the first in the partners’ fledgling urban air mobility (UAM) network in the Chicago area which they claim will eventually encompass branch routes to connect surrounding communities to the city and O’Hare. In the release, United and Archer pledge a “goal” of inaugurating electric air taxi service in 2025, now less than 20 months away. They say the air taxi ride to and from the airport and vertiport will take ten minutes.

Archer is also looking at operating its own UAM service in other cities possibly including Miami and Los Angeles. The company’s founder says launching the service will be hard but that’s why it’s “exciting.”

Getting United and Archer to explain how they plan to begin running electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) air taxis between Chicago’s Loop and ORD in 2025 and how they expect to turn a profit is also hard.

Questions the airline and the aircraft maker declined to answer or did not fully answer include; how much a one-way seat on a United air taxi will cost, whether air taxis will be a scheduled service, how many flights per day they’ll make, how much each aircraft will cost, whether they can operate in inclement weather, whether United will subsidize the service, whether the travel will really be 10 minutes and whether they will actually be flying the route 2025.

Almost Midnight

The air taxi that would-be passengers will ride in is Archer’s “Midnight,” a four-passenger fixed-wing aircraft with 12 rotors. Six stationary propellers on the back of the wing provide lift, while the other six rotors on the front of the wing tilt forward and back to transition from hover to cruise flight.

According to the company, the name Midnight derives from the “desire to represent the arrival of a new day.” The aircraft is optimized for a pair of 20-mile trips with about 12 minutes necessary for recharging batteries between flights. It’ll cruise at about 2,000 feet and somewhere over 100 mph though Archer says it’s “engineered for speeds up to 150 mph.”

That’s very helicopter-like performance, if not size. Typical four to six passenger helicopter air taxis like Bell’s 407 weigh in at about 2,700 pounds, are about 9 feet wide, and have a rotor diameter around 35 feet. Midnight has a wingspan of 47 feet and weighs nearly 5,500 pounds. Despite its size, Midnight is projected to only have a payload of about 1,000 pounds whereas a 407 can carry 2,300 pounds or more.

This suggests that United air taxi passengers on their way to O’Hare will want to pack for short duration trips. With FAA weight and carry-on baggage allowances of 200 pounds for men and 179 pounds for women, there would be little margin for additional checked-luggage on flights with all four passenger seats filled.

Midnight builds on Archer’s experience with its Maker prototype eVTOL aircraft. It has “the same configuration, similar flight controls and a lot of the same set up,” Goldstein confirms. Archer says it used Maker as testbed for Midnight, in the process proving the tech and familiarizing the FAA with its intended product. Goldstein explains Archer’s thinking was akin to, “Let’s not bring the FAA something and say, ‘Here, certify this.”

And yet, Midnight has a long way to go before achieving FAA type certification (and FAA Part 135/121 air carrier certification) in time to grace the skies over Chicago by 2025. As of today, it has not begun ground testing nor has it begun flight testing.

Archer has completed its preliminary design review, signed up suppliers, and has just finished building its first pre-production Midnight. Asked whether Archer has completed its final-phase critical design review of the vehicle, Goldstein says his company has “not publicly talked about that yet.”

But Archer has completed a new low-rate initial production facility near its San Jose, Calif., headquarters and by mid-year will begin building a handful of ground test articles and flight-test prototypes there. Ground testing will commence “shortly,” Goldstein says and flight testing will also begin midway through this year. He describes Archer as being a “majority of the way through” step two of the three-step FAA type certification process. Step three is the most challenging, complex and time consuming.

Given the closeness to 2025, I asked why – on a certification basis, let alone readying things in Chicago – Archer and United would tell the world they’ll be flying air taxi passengers in 2025. No one (possibly aside from private/public investors) is pressuring the pair to make such a statement. “We’re an aspirational company trying to change the world,” Goldstein replied.

He stresses that Archer has to-date, stayed on its timeline and delivered on “nearly everything we’ve put out” – from the company’s 2018 founding to its early IPO pitch-deck. Archer, Goldstein adds, “is one of the best executing teams in aerospace.”

Perhaps he’s right. But it’s remarkable that there has been so little questioning of the claims made in the United-Archer press release. The media has overwhelmingly repeated the in-service dates, travel time and other aspects of Vertiport Chicago-O’Hare eVTOL air taxi debut as if it is a done-deal, mildly re-wording the release.

But the real world is a tougher, less predictable place than the “forward looking” statements in a press release might suggest.

Ten Minutes

The attention-grabbing “value-add” that Archer and United point to is that passengers will be able to travel to and from ORD to the City “in approximately ten minutes.” Getting from downtown to the airport via car they add, “can take upwards of an hour or more during rush hour traffic.”

That’s right according to Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) spokesperson Maddie Kilgannon. Ms. Kilgannon says the CTA estimates drive-time from the City to O’Hare in a range between 25 and 90 minutes depending on time-of-day, traffic, construction, weather, etc. By car, it’s a about 20 miles. By the City’s Blue Line train (which makes multiple stops), the trip takes 40-45 minutes. It costs $2.50 and Kilgannon proudly adds that there are no “surge charges” during commuting hours.

The trips above originate in downtown Chicago. United’s route does not. It’s west of the city-center in the Illinois Medical District bordered by Hastings Street to the north, 15th Street to the south, the CTA Pink Line to the east and Wood Street to the west. I asked Ms. Kilgannon and the folks at Vertiport Chicago how long it takes to get from downtown to the heliport via taxi, Uber
UBER
or bus?

Anywhere from about 14 to 20 minutes they say. So, if you’re leaving downtown for ORD and vice-versa, the air taxi route now looks more like 24 to 30 minutes. But those are in-vehicle times. Once arrived at Vertiport Chicago, United passengers connecting to United airliner flights at the airport will almost surely have to go through some sort of security.

Though it’s not certain, that may include a full TSA security scenario. DHS
DHS
didn’t respond to a question regarding passenger security screening for United flights from the vertiport by press time. Even if the process is a breeze, it’ll add five minutes or so to the travel. (Theoretically, passengers coming from ORD may or may not need to clear security.)

Then there’s the emplaning/deplaning process. That should be quick with only four passengers. Assuming there’s a schedule, you may have to wait several minutes for the next air taxi however. Surprisingly, when I spoke with Michael Leskinen, president of United Airlines’ venture capital arm, United Ventures, he did not make clear whether the flights will be a scheduled service.

Nor was any information offered on how many Midnights will be operating to-from the airport-vertiport daily. How many flights a day we can expect is similarly unknown. Re-charging Midnights could take some time as well but it’s difficult to say what operational impact that could have. “We’re very excited about what this is going to do,” Leskinen says, “but we’re not ready to share these types of details that are competitively sensitive.”

Sensitive or not, these factors can and will influence travel time. Even if one is generously optimistic, factoring them in may make the real-world time from downtown to O’Hare via air taxi more like 35 to 45 minutes.

Of course, this leaves aside weather. Vertiport Chicago is not a towered field. It is a Unicom field (pilots call their own traffic positions, approaches, departures) without IFR instrumented approaches. That generally works fine for the low-volume helicopter transport and medivac flights it now sees. But it may be less than practical for a high volume revenue-service air taxi operation by a Part 135 carrier like United.

In checking with the FAA, I was surprised to learn that a towered, positively ATC-controlled airport is not required for passenger-carrying Part 135/121 operations. The Agency says it has not received an application from Vertiport Chicago to become a towered field and officials there confirmed they have not applied so far. As with all air travel, weather will have a say in the air taxi service and it will likely add further time to flying the 12 miles when Chicago’s famous wind and other elements spool up.

They say that time equals money. Whether the new route can save enough of the former to justify the amount of the latter you’ll need to regularly use United’s service will be worth watching.

eVTOL Economics

The price of a seat on a United Midnight eVTOL is a detail we don’t know yet. The public doesn’t have an exact answer because while United and Archer may have some idea, they don’t fully know themselves.

“There are too many unknown factors today,” Goldstein acknowledges, “like landing fees, to even, like, start to guess on that. But over the next 12 months you will start to see those numbers come out from Archer and I’m sure from Joby and other competitors.”

For now, he says Archer and United understand “a chunk of the pricing” from overhead costs (aircraft cost, energy cost, projected maintenance/sustainment) to personnel. United understands “pretty close to what pilots will cost” Goldstein says. Leskinen tells me Midnight pilots will come from United’s in-house ab initio “Aviate” pilot-training system. Given the cost pressures and the initial un-piloted aircraft strategies pursued by eVTOL startups, it’s unclear how much investment United or Archer will want to make in human pilots.

Goldstein will not reveal the exact unit cost of Midnight, instead putting it at approximately $2 million per aircraft. United has ordered 200 of the air taxis with an option for 100 more, putting down a $10 million deposit.

United has also invested directly in Archer (and in eVTOL competitor Eve Air Mobility). But as with most airline aircraft orders, how “firm” it is depends on a raft of conditions, some publicly reported. United and American Airlines’ recent record of splashy press releases centered on speculative orders for Boom Supersonic’s notional Overture supersonic airliner illustrate the often “creative” hype around aircraft orders.

Adam Goldstein recognizes the contingencies that go with such orders. “What we have stated is that there are several things that needed to be completed in the contract, examples like geographic territories, things like that.”

Archer’s CEO makes a salient point with respect to territories. Many, possibly the majority, of the prospective inter city-airport routes that Archer and United (or any other would be eVTOL airline pairing) are looking at are licensed to or controlled by existing helicopter shuttle services. Securing routes from Manhattan heliports to New York area airports is not just a matter of showing up.

Nor is securing slots at airports. A query to the Chicago Department of Aviation as to whether United has indeed secured landing slots at O’Hare yet was not returned by publication time.

Insurance costs are expected to be similar to helicopter insurance based on early assumptions but landing fees are a wildcard. “Because there aren’t that many helicopters out there, landing fees are very high,” Goldstein explains. “The question is, what will landing fees be when there a lot more [air taxis], when you have a big customer like United?”

For the record, it currently costs between $150 and $300 to land at Vertiport Chicago per-flight depending on aircraft weight. Midnight is heavy so the landing fee alone would eat up most of a full air taxi’s seat-revenue if United’s ballpark seat price is to be believed. ORD did not respond with its helicopter landing fee details but $250 is likely in the neighborhood.

According to Mr. Leskinen, United’s air taxi pricing is “evolving” but his view is that the one-way, one-seat price will be about what an Uber Black ride is. He did not give an exact figure but mentioned something in the neighborhood of $100 to $120. “We think that will be a profitable enterprise for us,” he affirmed.

It’s difficult to draw that conclusion from outside with little information. Goldstein pointed to Uber a number of times in our discussion, citing the millions of rides the company pulls off at that price. However, an Uber Black ride takes place in a premium car or SUV in which two or four passengers can ride – splitting the cost. Largely unregulated SUVs or cars are also orders of magnitude cheaper to operate than an air taxi.

One of the most interesting and telling aspects of United’s proposed air taxi service is how it would be ticketed. United’s Leskinen explained that the airline will bundle the air taxi rides with airline tickets for trips booked via an app.

“We’ll likely be selling a round-trip ticket from Vertiport Chicago to Menlo Park [near San Francisco]. That would stop through O’Hare and stop through [San Francisco International airport] and we would sell that whole itinerary as one ticket.”

Thus, the cost of the 12-mile air taxi jaunt could be buried in the overall trip ticket price, a suggestion Mr. Leskinen bristled at. He did not say whether segment prices for such a trip would be clearly broken out for the consumer.

The United Ventures president did allow that the airline does not envision its Midnight air taxis will be flying with a full load of four passengers on every flight. Could the operation turn a profit with just one passenger on a flight? It cannot Leskinen says before adding, “We have specific load factor assumptions based on the traveling patterns of our customers and we expect to be profitable.”

If a customer shows up at Vertiport Chicago as the only passenger for flight X at time Y, one has to wonder if that customer would be forced to wait for the Midnight to fill up or have his/her booking pre-altered to accommodate the load-factor United will need? This could obviously impact the potential timeliness of flights.

CTA’s Maddie Kilgannon raised an interesting point when considering departures from Vertiport Chicago’s Medical District location. Most business trips she said originate from residences, not the offices and businesses surrounding the heliport.

Leskinen asserts that about 50 percent of many business trips he takes originate from the office. Even if we accept that assessment, Chicago’s main business district is some distance from the vertiport and given the timelines, travelers may just as likely elect to bypass Vertiport Chicago for another route or another mode.

“We have great data on our customers and there’s a reason why we’re locating at the Vertiport for our initial launch,” Leskinen says. Adam Goldstein echoed the sentiment, asserting that Archer looks at demand from a “data-driven standpoint”.

He says Archer has built a large mode-choice model called “Prime Rating” which studies a large cellphone movement-tracking database to divine how people circulate. “We have a very good sense of exactly where people are going every day where people are driving so we’ll design the [eVTOL] network around that to make sure it’s full.”

Goldstein also says that business traffic is just “known demand”. There is further “latent demand” which he says Elon Musk has discussed. “I think there will be a substantial amount of people who will be curious and who will want to try this.” Archer, he contends, will have to build lots of Midnights if they can merely succeed in taking people from “flying in a helicopter once in their lives to taking air taxi once a year.”

Demand based on the novelty of electric air taxi flight may in fact exist but how long it can sustain, particularly at the likely prices is a reasonable question. A quick spin on TripAdvisor’s website shows helicopter tours of the City from Vertiport Chicago available from $50.36 per adult up to $849 for a group of three. These are, to put it mildly, not oversubscribed. In any case, United Airlines is not in the city air-tour business.

It is worth noting that the O’Hare-Vertiport Chicago route has been studied before an industry insider told me. The conclusion of one particularly expensive study was that it is not market-feasible. The possibility that United Airlines might have to subsidize such a service was not a question I had the opportunity to raise but it is a meaningful one.

The Quiet, “Sustainable” Mode

Other oft-cited arguments in favor of UAM cite both its low noise compared to helicopters and its “sustainability”. On the noise front, there is a possible advantage. Archer and others claim their aircraft are many decibels quieter than helicopters and so able to operate in more locations with greater public acceptance. Journalists who have witnessed eVTOL flights first-hand have testified to their relative quiet.

“The noise side of this is probably the most interesting thing to people,” Goldstein says. He has a point but how much density that can practically translate to in City and suburban air taxi landing/takeoff spots (few of which actually exist) is an open question. The public may indeed be quite flexible but the old FAA adage that “people see noise” cannot be ignored in the calculation.

Nor can the environmental impact of eVTOLs and EVs in general. It’s a huge subject, rarely critically assessed (or even questioned) but there are real, serious negative environmental externalities associated with battery-electric vehicles.

“A lot of us are trying to move the world towards this more sustainable form of transportation,” Goldstein says including United Airlines CEO, Scott Kirby. If so, these people will want to pay attention to a recent study in the journal, Nature.

The study, “Role of flying cars in sustainable mobility”, concludes that eVTOLs “may have a niche role in a sustainable mobility system.”

It further found that while eVTOLs emit fewer greenhouse gases (GHGs) on a vehicle-kilometers-traveled basis compared with internal combustion engine vehicles for trips beyond 35 km, they emit more embodied GHGs on shorter trips, i.e;

The average ground-based vehicle commute is only about 17 km long, with trips exceeding 35 km accounting for under 15% of all vehicle trips. Hence, the trips where VTOLs are more sustainable than ICEVs only make up a small fraction of total annual vehicle-miles traveled on the ground. Subsequently, VTOLs will be limited in their contribution (and role) in a sustainable mobility system.

The flight to O’Hare is 12 miles (19 km).

A Pessimistic Viewpoint

The deeper dive one does into UAM in general and into the announced United/Archer Chicago air taxi service, the more questions arise. It’s hard to answer all of them and likely harder still to stomach skepticism if you’re running a billion-dollar funded startup like Archer that will continue to look for more capital.

That may explain why at one point in our conversation following a series of questions Adam Goldstein said, “All of this I would say is, like, a very pessimistic viewpoint of trying to understand the future which is a very hard thing to do.”

Maybe it is. But it’s also an effort to look at the knowns we know squarely. Goldstein suggests that we “take a step back and understand what Archer-United trying to do.”

The capital markets, he explains, opened up for a very brief window of time that allowed a few companies to raise [enough] money to have a chance to pursue UAM. An alternate view holds that for several years starting around 2015 investors irrationally threw hundreds of billions into aerospace (known for its decades-long investment/development timelines) expecting a quick return.

Michael Leskinen, a former J.P. Morgan executive, summed it up well in repeating Warren Buffet’s quip that, “Sometimes Mr. Market is happy, sometimes Mr. Market is depressed’.

United has done three years-worth of due diligence on the O’Hare-Vertiport Chicago eVTOL service Leskinen asserts. “We have done enough work to be absolutely confident that electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft…will be a game-changer in certain urban areas,” he adds.

“That’s what’s so exciting,” Goldstein says, “that’s why United is behind it. That’s why entrepreneurs like myself do this. When you get out there and ultimately break through, that’s when you have the chance to change the world.”

Will spanning the 12 miles from Chicago’s vertiport to its biggest airport via United’s Midnight air taxis change the world? It’s a tough ask.