Hi and good day to everyone joining us. Thank you for taking the time. My name is Davis Sunderland, and I cover sustainable energy and mobility here at Baird with my partner, Ben Kallo. We're very happy to have Mark Mesler here from Archer Aviation, the CFO, who's going to show a brief video and then lead us through a formal presentation. At the end, we'll save a few minutes for some Q&A, which I will facilitate. So to the extent that you have questions, please email them to me at dsunderland@rwbaird.com, or you can also use the portal as well. So with that, Mark, I will turn it over to you.
Thanks for hosting this, Davis. Really quality conference, and thanks for having us. So as Davis said, I'm Mark Mesler. I'm the CFO of Archer Aviation. I've got some prepared slides here to give you a background on the company, and then we can open it up for some Q&A afterwards. So let me start off. This is our Midnight aircraft. This is the aircraft that we are building to deploy in urban environments for what I would call sort of a short-haul mobility, 20-50-mile missions, focused on moving those 1-hour to 2-hour terrestrial by car routes to the air. It's called eVTOL. It is the electric vertical takeoff and landing technology, is what it's been come to know to be called from some monikers coming out of NASA.
I'm going to walk through our commercialization strategy today, walk through a little bit of the certification process that we have to get through with the FAA, discuss some of our manufacturing capabilities, and then finally talk about our business model. But before we do that, I just wanted to briefly show a video of one of the flight tests that we performed last fall. This was for the FAA. It's called a downwash-outwash test. Flight test facility in San Francisco. It's Midnight. tail number . So where are we in this process? Just a brief overview of the company. We've raised over $1 billion of capital to date, went public in 2021 on the New York Stock Exchange. Currently have around 700 people working for the company. As you can imagine, a lot of those would be working in our R&D and flight testing departments.
We're also starting to build out manufacturing capability and clearly have an SG&A team that's helping us scale as a public company. I'll talk more about our manufacturing facilities later. One of the key, key, I think, enablers of success for us has been the heritage and the pedigree of our engineering leaders that have been doing this type of design of eVTOL aircraft for a very long time. Our Chief Operating Officer and our Chief Engineer, two separate folks, have previously built seven eVTOL aircraft from clean sheet design to prototype. So they've been able to iterate and get experience on the different types of technologies, and they know what works and what does not work. And so when we found that Archer and they joined, we were able to quickly get to a final form factor of the aircraft.
One of the key differentiators for us as well is our Powertrain team. Powertrain is what we think is the, for the industry, a key differentiator. That is the battery packs and the electric engines that create primary power and propulsion for our aircraft. We're working through the certification process. This type of aircraft, as you can imagine, could be used for a number of use cases. Aerial ride-sharing, sort of the Uber of the air and air taxi, is a primary use case that we're going to market with. This could also be used for cargo logistics, emergency services, non-combat military applications. We do have a contract with the Department of Defense through their AFWERX program to help them develop use cases for this aircraft in the military.
I'll talk more about that contract that we have with them, which is actually the largest eVTOL DoD contract awarded to a company. We're focused on this urban air mobility challenge. I mean, think about the number of people who've moved the cities just over the past decade and the congestion that you experience in your everyday lives. That happens not only here in the U.S., but it happens globally. So our use case that we developed was very data-driven. We have an internal application. Data science team has developed this application called Prime Radiant, where we have monitored, using anonymous cell phone data, how people move through urban settings, the top 50 urban settings in the world, and where those bottlenecks are.
I mean, if you just think about New York City alone, there's, I think, 50 million trips between New York City, Manhattan itself, to one of the three airports, JFK, LaGuardia, or Newark. And so that route, if you think about a city center to, just say, Newark, that is a 15-mile trip. It's not terribly long, but at any given point of the day, trying to leave New York City, it's probably an hour and a half trip to get out there by ground. We could do that in 7-10 minutes with our aircraft. So we have announced with our partner, United, a route from the 34th Street Helipad in New York to the United Terminal, Terminal C at Newark Liberty International, and the goal would be to land behind security there. So that's one of the use cases that we call a trunk route.
You think about how these networks could be built out in cities. We would start with a network like that, city center to an airport, and then organically build out from there. We'll talk more about that. That is the challenge that we're focused on currently, is to take that terrestrial sort of congestion in major cities around the world and make more efficient uses of it in the 7-10-minute, 7-15-minute timeline in the third dimension, which is in the air. What does that timeline look like? The industry itself, as Archer, we've been focused on getting the technology and the certification process in place with the FAA. The goal would be to get to commercialization, commercial operations in 2025. These would be early operations. I talked about this concept of a trunk route.
From a trunk route, you can build branch routes off of that. You would think instead of city center, New York to Newark, maybe city center to Greenwich, or White Plains, where you have a high population of folks commuting into the city for work. We would be generally repurposing existing aviation assets to do that. Minimal investment. We can put charging infrastructure at these areas to charge these aircraft. And then from there, and we are building out manufacturing, which I will talk about here in a minute, from there, we start seeing really scale operations in that 2027, 2028 timeframe and beyond, where we're manufacturing hundreds of these a year, if not more. These are being deployed not just in one or two cities, but globally. The goal would be to deploy these in global cities as well. So that's loosely the timeline that Archer's on.
I'd say the industry's loosely on that timeline as well. So where are we with the aircraft? So Midnight, just some specs around it. eVTOL. On our last earnings call , we started calling these flying cars because of just the pop culture aspect around this as well. There's a lot of interest from various folks in deploying these with use cases even outside of what I've talked about, but we see sort of a pop culture type adaptation of this technology. The range for this under current battery technology is up to 100 miles, but we've optimized the aircraft for 20-mile rapid back-to-back missions. So almost think of like a gondola every 15 minutes or so, an aircraft taking off from city center somewhere to an airport, a city center to another large target area. Flies up to 150 miles per hour.
We are targeting a four-passenger plus one pilot as our payload, which is roughly 1,000 pounds. The four passengers, we believe, enable commercial operations, enables to be able to operate profitably and generate cash flow. We have a lot of unit-level economic models that support that. These are very safe aircraft, too. These are going to be certified to commercial airline standards. They're a lot safer than a helicopter. If you think about a helicopter, a helicopter's got multiple single points of failure around the rotors and a lot of the subcomponents and systems. We do not have that. eVTOL does not have that. We have multiple points of redundancy. In our case, we have 12 propellers, six on the front of the fixed wing, six on the back of the fixed wing. The front six tilt forward.
When we transition into forward flight, there are six battery packs in the wing. So there's multiple each propeller, or each battery pack supports two propellers that are sort of diametrically on the opposite sides of each other. So you can think front, far, right propeller, rotor, engine is paired up on a battery pack with the back left. So if for a reason one of those were to go down, we could shut both of them down, shut the battery pack down, and you'd still be able to continue your flight with the remaining 10 rotors or propellers. So it's a very safe aircraft, and it's a lot quieter than a helicopter. The footprint is 100 times quieter than a helicopter because you don't the blades aren't spinning at the speed of sound.
They're spinning a lot slower, so you don't hear the loud wop-wop sound. It's almost like you hear a rushing of the wind as this flies by at 1,500-2,000 feet. The goal is to cost these like ride-sharing, standard ride-sharing, maybe Uber Black. I think we'll price to what the market will bear. But if you take a cab from Newark or any other airport into the city center of New York, you're paying $100-$120. That equates to about $6 a seat mile on a 15-mile trip. With 4 passengers, that's roughly $90-$100 a seat for each flight. So that's the aircraft. We've come a long way with the aircraft. We've been flying full-scale technical demonstrators for a number of years. Midnight, which you just saw flying here, is our production aircraft. We've been flying this since last November.
From a design standpoint, the design and all the gate reviews have been completed, and the design's, I think, materially frozen at this point. We validated a bunch of the performance targets already, specifically around speeds, ranges, etc. We've got a supply chain that is just about built out to supply all the key parts to this. And then finally, we are starting to build out production tooling to deploy into our high-volume manufacturing facility in Covington, Georgia. So certification, clearly a big enabler of, if not the key enabler here in the U.S., is to get this aircraft certified with the FAA through a sort of a commercial airline certification process. A couple of things around this. One, we've been very advantaged because we were able to hire the former FAA administrator, Billy Nolen, onto our team as a Chief Safety Officer last June.
So he is onboarding, helping us think about how to navigate the certification process. We're in what's called the Implementation Phase of the certification program with the FAA right now, which is essentially we're starting to transition from the administrative piece of certification. We're agreeing on what types of tests we'll be running and what type of what's the specific regulatory framework that we're going to be getting certified under. We're starting to pivot into what the FAA calls the Implementation Phase, where we are going to be starting testing of various components and subsystems in the full aircraft eventually. The goal is for us to begin piloting or flying piloted conforming aircraft the second half of this year. A conforming aircraft is an aircraft and its parts that are designed that the design intent is to be it's designed as if for the intended use of the FAA.
We are constructing right now 3 of the total 6 that we will build in our factory here in San Jose. All 6 of those conforming aircraft will be used for certification flight testing with the FAA when we begin that. When we think about what are the milestones that we have to get through the FAA, well, you have all of your subsystems and components have to be tested with them. And the good news is 80% of our components and subsystems have already had what is called certification heritage, meaning that the supplier and/or that part have gone through the certification process with the FAA previously. So for instance, our flight computers come from Safran, which is a large aerospace supplier out of France. And they've been doing this for decades, and their flight computers are being used in commercial airliners.
So these are things that the FAA is used to seeing in the past. We think that's a benefit in helping us get through the FAA certification process. I think at a separate time, if folks on the call want to go deeper on certification, we can schedule some time to go through the certification process. It's fairly detailed. It's fairly rigorous. We could spend a whole session going through the certification process. But we are well through our administrative side of the certification process, and we're starting to pivot into this implementation phase with the FAA with the goal of beginning piloted flying a piloted conforming aircraft the second half of this year. So in order to commercialize, clearly, we got to be able to build these things. One of the vectors we're working is our standing up manufacturing.
This is a rendering of the factory that we're building in Covington, Georgia. We've got a really great partner with Stellantis, an auto manufacturing company, third largest auto manufacturer in the world by revenue, headed by Carlos Tavares, a very well-respected automotive leader. He was also on the board of Airbus, so he does have some aviation experience. We are standing this factory up now. There's just some pictures of the site on the upper left. It's a 100-acre site in Covington, Georgia. And you can see at the very, very top of that picture, that's the Covington Municipal Airport. There's a runway there. So we've built an ingress/egress access point at the very top to access that airport so we can do flight testing there. This factory will have capacity to manufacture up to 650 aircraft per year when it's up and running.
There is an option for a second phase of this that will manufacture up to 2,300 aircraft per year. You can see here, we just started this, a fresh picture. We just started pouring the foundation at this factory. I'll get certificate of occupancy, as I said, probably August, September of this year. We're on track for that. This will enable us to be able to manufacture these, so we're not going to have a hiccup when we get to commercialization. Stellantis, we have dozens of Stellantis employees running around our HQ here helping us think about this factory itself and how to transition the technology from in the R&D phase to the production phase. We're very confident with our ability with our partner, Stellantis, to help us manufacture these.
We just talked on our earnings call on Monday that the goal is for Stellantis to become a contract manufacturer for us as well. That's what Stellantis's goal is also. That will actually, on a forward-going basis, allow me to continue to have this capital light approach to the market. A typical contract manufacturing relationship is just we're paid by the drink as you take delivery of the product. I'll be able to forgo a lot of CapEx, a lot of hiring of people, and all of the costs with extending this factory beyond the 650 capacity range. That's an agreement that we're still working on. We haven't inked it yet, but that is the goal of both companies that we announced last year. Really, really excited about the work we're doing with Stellantis.
I should also note that they are an investor in the company. They've been very supportive of us from a capitalization standpoint last year. We did put in place with them a $150 million forward equity purchase agreement that allowed us to access capital based on certain milestones and when we needed them. When we needed the capital, I still have $55 million left on that forward equity purchase agreement with Stellantis. But I can't stress how good of a partner both Stellantis and Carlos Tavares has been with Archer. This is the factory here in San Jose that we're building the first six conforming aircraft. It's close to engineering. It's close to our R&D team. And so that allows us to get that knowledge very quickly from engineering into a manufacturing environment. And then I showed earlier what the Covington, Georgia facility is going to look like.
So when you bring that all together, what do commercial operations look like for the company upon getting through the certification process and then executing on our commercial roadmap? So I look at that as the third vector. You're going to get the certification vector, which we're clearly working. We've got the manufacturing vector for which we're standing up operations to be ready to build these things when we get to commercialization. And finally, we have to have customers in place in order to start generating revenue. So what does that look like? We've talked about two very different revenue streams that we're executing to. We're a hybrid versus others in the market. Some in the market only want to operate these as like a mini airline or only as a ride-sharing business, and some are pure OEMs. They're going to manufacture the aircraft and sell them to somebody.
I think we've taken a very pragmatic hybrid approach to this where we're going to market with both of those revenue streams. Our Archer Air side, the business where we will be operating these under an Archer-branded name. And operating the routes that I had talked about from city center to an airport or essentially just building out a network. And I can go a little bit deeper into what a network potentially looks like. Our modeling shows that we think that ride-sharing business can get to like a 40% gross margin all in. Then there's the Archer Direct side, the business, which is the OEM side where it's a direct sale of aircraft. As I said previously, and I'll walk through sort of an indicative order book that we just talked about on our earnings call earlier this week.
But that's where we're acting, where we're selling the aircraft directly to United, Air Château, InterGlobe, and India. With the ASPs that we're seeing currently in our agreements are about $5 million per aircraft. And our models show that that could be a 50% gross margin business at steady state, sorry, 50% gross margin business at steady state. I talked about the Stellantis partnership that we have. An equally deep one is with United. United is a customer. They're an operating partner. They're also an investor. So much like the Stellantis relationship that's helping us think about how to manufacture these, United is helping us think about how to operate these urban air mobility environments. In those urban air mobility environments, you think about what are some of the pain points in getting through the airport securities.
1, having to wait in line and then just getting, as I had talked about earlier, just getting to the airport itself could be 1 hour, 1 hour and a half. So United is helping us think about the repair and maintenance. They're talking about helping us think about pilot training. We're going to need a lot of pilots to operate these, so got to train the pilots. Also think about how to get to this terminal beyond. So Terminal C at Newark Liberty International Airport is the United terminal. And our goal is to land behind security at Terminal C such that you enter a vertiport at the 34th Street Helipad in Manhattan. You go through TSA security there. It's very seamless. You get on your Archer, the Archer over to the airport. It only takes you 10 minutes door to door.
You exit at Terminal C and you go directly to your next United flight. So yeah, United has been a fantastic partner for us. Talk through some of that. Talk through the ins and outs of operations. I will also note that in addition to United being a great operating partner, Oscar Munoz, the former CEO and chairman of United, is on our board. He's been very involved in helping us get access to who we need to, both the United and other areas. We have announced two routes with them. One is the Newark route that I had articulated earlier, and there's also Chicago O'Hare to Chicago vertiport as well, or two official ones that we've announced. And you can expect us to announce more of these. We have also engaged in some international partnerships.
We're launching our air taxi service in the UAE, which we announced, partnering with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office for some infrastructure build out there. There's an operator in UAE called Air Château that we've announced an agreement to purchase up to $100 million, actually almost sorry, $500 million with an option for another $500 million. And then InterGlobe in India. If you pull that together, what does an indicative order book look like for these? So with United, I've got an option for up to 300 aircraft. Order value of up to $1.5 billion. They've already put a $10 million deposit in the industry. We call it pre-delivery payments, which is roughly 2% of the first 100 aircraft that will be deploying for them. InterGlobe India, as I said, 200 aircraft. That's close to a $1 billion order. Air Château is 100 with an option for 100.
So when you start pulling this order book together, it becomes pretty meaningful on that Archer Direct side. And we think that that's a very pragmatic and rational approach to the market that as we get to commercialization, we can sell aircraft. We can get that gross margin from that aircraft, and that can help fund the build-out of the ride-sharing side of the business as well, where revenue would be recognized there by flight versus by the aircraft. The last thing I'll just briefly discuss is we do have a relationship with the Department of Defense through their AFWERX program. We're working with them on a number of use cases. There's flight testing, there's pilot training, there's simulation. There's battery energy storage systems that we're working with them on repair and maintenance.
They have a very robust interest in this technology as well, mainly used for like just base-to-base logistics with intra-base logistics, inter-based logistics, and even like some cargo and recovery type work as well. With that, that is Archer in a nutshell and happy to take any questions we may have.
That's great. Thank you for the overview, Mark. Very informative. I wonder with just our last couple of minutes if we could talk a bit more about what to be watching for in the near term, maybe looking into 2024. I know you mentioned completion of the factory. Maybe some milestones in the certification process, announcing any of the partnerships, but is there anything specific that we should be watching? And then as it relates to the financing side of the business, if you could just briefly talk through maybe cash burn, near-term cash concerns, or maybe not concerns, but anything upcoming as far as what you will be prioritizing.
Sure. So let's see. I think 2024 is going to be a pivotal year for the industry as well because we've all talked about getting to commercialization in 2025. And so there's a lot of things that have to be put in place for that. I talked about the number of the vectors that we're working on. I think one of the big unlocks this year will be the flying of the piloted conforming aircraft. That is one that when you're flying a piloted conforming aircraft, that means that you are actually starting full-scale testing with the FAA or starting to think about it. So for us, we've talked about that. I think earlier on, the Midnight that I showed a video of, we have a full transition flight that is planned for late Q1, early Q2.
The full transition flight is when the tilt rotors tilt forward 90 degrees horizontally and all the 100% of the lift or a good portion of the lift is being generated from the wing. That's more of a near-term sort of modest milestone. We will be taking delivery of the manufacturing facility later this year. That's a big milestone. And for us, building the six conforming aircraft is going to be a key enabler for the four-quadrant flight testing. So a lot of stuff around certification clearly, but also more work around getting the factory up and running. And honestly, getting more commercial opportunities.
I think what we have right now is a fairly robust backlog, or it's an indicative backlog at this point, and we're going to be continuing to build out those partnerships in another not tens of countries, but a handful of countries that we think are important for this space. With respect to capitalization, we discussed on Monday that Archer has access to $625 million of liquidity right now, which is a combination of cash on our balance sheet and a couple of financing mechanisms that we already have in place. We believe that is a pretty comfortable number for us to get through commercialization. I think the industry itself, however, and Archer included in there is with line of sight to commercialization. We'll want to think about what that capitalization post-commercialization will look like.
That's going to be a lot of growth capital as you're inflecting from essentially R&D phase of the company into an operating rhythm with the company where you're generating revenue and manufacturing product. With our partners, I think some of it will have a little bit of less of a financial burden in order to do that if I'm able to get a deal done with Stellantis to get my contract manufacturing relationship in place with them. That'll remove a significant working capital requirement from us. So thinking about what does that look like post-commercialization is probably what I think about next is how to capitalize the business. But as we sit here today, I think our $625 million liquidity gives us comfort that we can get to commercialization under the assumption that the current timelines hold.
This is great. I think we'll leave it there for time. Thank you very much, Mark. Appreciate having you.
Great. Thanks, Davis. Appreciate it.