Archer Aviation teams up with United Airlines for NYC ‘air taxi network’

The skies over New York City may soon get even more crowded as electric air taxi company Archer Aviation is planning to launch a network that connects the city’s major and regional airports with vertiports in Manhattan.

The company, which is teaming up with United Airlines for the effort, announced the plans on Thursday. It hopes to connect Manhattan with six airports in the area—LaGuardia, JFK, Newark, and regional airports, Republic, Teterboro, and Westchester—with flights as short as five minutes.

Archer’s “Midnight” aircraft could save passengers hours when trying to get between those airports or the three vertiports in Manhattan, according to the company. And the partnership with United Airlines would allow travelers to book those flights as a sort of “add-on” to their traditional inbound or outbound flight from one of the participating airports.

For example, if you live in Manhattan and are booking a United flight out of JFK, you can book a flight from the Downtown Skyport to JFK as part of the booking process. 

The New York City air taxi network is the third such network in the U.S. that Archer has announced so far, with the other two being in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Archer Aviation CCO Nikhil Goel says that the company is currently working out the final details of getting those networks online with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

“There aren’t too many steps left,” Goel says, adding that Midnight air taxis could be flying people around New York, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area “as soon as next year.”

Looking up

If and when regulatory all the regulatory hurdles will be cleared is anyone’s guess, but should that day come, Archer may not be the only player soaring above the Big Apple. Its competitor Joby Aviation is also planning to launch service in New York City, even showing off its aircraft at an event in Grand Central Terminal late last year.

There’s also the potential that the networks could expand. “We’ll start with nine nodes in the New York area,” Goel says. “That’s the three vertiports in Manhattan, the three major airports, and the three regionals—that covers a very large percentage of the people who live and work in the metropolitan area.”

When Archer gets a better sense of where more demand for its flights lies, it could expand to other “nodes” in the area, and the same goes for other cities, too.

As for pricing, Goel says that the goal is to get to a place where air taxi flights are priced similarly to an Uber ride. 

For now, the goal is to open and speed up transit options, according to Adam Goldstein, Archer’s founder and CEO.

“[The] drive from Manhattan to any of these airports can be painful, taking one, sometimes two hours,” Goldstein said in a statement. “We want to change that by giving residents and visitors the option to complete trips in mere minutes.”

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