Archer Aviation flew its piloted Midnight air taxi around San Francisco Bay over several days, taking off from and landing at Oakland International Airport. One flight went from Oakland to San Francisco’s Marina District in about 10 minutes, a drive Archer says routinely takes more than an hour in traffic.
The Bay flights closed the Northern California leg of Archer’s “No Roads” tour, which worked north from Salinas through Hollister, San Martin, San Jose, Mountain View and Hayward. Archer says Midnight hit 131 mph and covered more than 200 miles, flying into seven cities over three days.
Midnight is an eVTOL, built to take off and land vertically. In the nearly 20-minute uncut video Archer posted Monday, it rolls down a runway to take off and touches down on Oakland’s Runway 28 Left like an airplane.
Archer Flew the Bay Tour in Airplane Mode
Archer’s announcement never uses the word “vertical,” and its own photos of the Bay flights show why. The six rear lift propellers sit stopped and stowed while the six front propellers pull Midnight along on its wing, the way a conventional airplane flies.
That pattern runs through the whole tour. Archer’s July 30 round trip between Salinas and Monterey also used conventional runway takeoffs and landings, Aviation Week reported. N703AX is the same airframe DroneXL wrote about in March, when it had spent all of 2025 flying as an airplane with no piloted vertical takeoffs or landings. Archer’s piloted vertical testing runs on a second aircraft, N704AX, which received its special airworthiness certificate in February.
Archer Still Owes Its First Piloted Transition
Archer has not yet announced a piloted Midnight flight that takes off vertically, transitions into wingborne cruise and lands vertically, the maneuver the aircraft was designed around. On the company’s August 10 earnings call, CEO Adam Goldstein said Archer is “on track to full transition later this year.”
On the same call, Goldstein said the first operations under the White House’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) will start with CTOL aircraft, meaning conventional takeoff and landing. Los Angeles is Midnight’s next stop as Archer prepares for those operations. Rival Joby Aviation flew its first piloted transition on April 22, 2025, at its Marina, California, test site, and flew past the Golden Gate Bridge in March to open its own tour.
DroneXL’s Take
Getting a piloted eVTOL in and out of Oakland, inside the airspace around three international airports, took real coordination with the FAA and the Oakland tower, and Archer earned that part of the headline. But a runway-to-runway flight over the Bay is something a Cessna does every day, and the reason anyone wants Midnight in a city is that it shouldn’t need a runway at all. I think Archer is running a very good marketing tour around the one flight it hasn’t shown yet. Goldstein put full transition on the calendar for this year, and there are about ten weeks left in it. When a piloted Midnight takes off vertically and flies away on its wing, we’ll know whether it can work from a rooftop vertiport in Los Angeles.
Sources: Archer, Archer on YouTube, Aviation Week, Joby Aviation
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
