At Archer we don’t settle for safe enough, our aim is to create an aircraft that’s as safe as it can be. We are combining proven aviation knowledge and experience from the past with new ideas and fresh thinking for the future. More than merely changing the way we move around cities, we are working to usher in an era of advanced air mobility. Safety is paramount to driving both FAA and customer adoption of these new technologies. And this is how we’re making that possible.
Innovation is not without risk. All equipment can fail, no matter how well designed, built or maintained. That is why the highest levels of safety are based on the “fail-safe principle”: the aircraft should still deliver passengers safely after any single failure, be it equipment that fails to function correctly or altogether. Our MIdnight aircraft is designed to eliminate any single points of failure in the aircraft’s critical systems.
Eliminating any single points of failure in Midnight’s critical systems requires redundancy: having two or more separate ways to perform every safety-critical function. All critical systems on Midnight are designed to be continuously monitored and operationally redundant, including engines, fly-by-wire flight controls, pilot displays and the electric propulsion systems that make them work.
Our Midnight aircraft has 12 electric engines. It is designed to safely complete a flight if any engine shuts down at any point of the flight - including during vertical takeoff or landing. Midnight can continue to fly safely after any single part of its propulsion system stops working.
Our Midnight aircraft does not use fuel to power the aircraft, but instead uses six battery packs. Not only does this electric power result in our aircraft producing zero-emissions during use, it means that our power source has no moving parts and is fully self-contained (i.e., it uses electric energy stored in the batteries). This eliminates numerous potential hazards. Midnight is designed with six independent battery packs, each powering a set of forward and aft motors diagonally opposite each other. This means the aircraft can safely complete a flight even with the total loss of power from any one of the battery packs.
