Of the conference. It, you know, we, I'm the Savi Syth, the global airline analyst, and recently kind of, a few years ago, picked up advanced mobility as well. And Archer is who we have up next, and Archer's one of the leaders in kind of building and working to certify electric vertical takeoff and landing or eVTOL vehicles. They promised me they'll come up with a better terminology for it. So any ideas, please send it their way. So the goal here is to kind of free us from the tyranny of traffic congestion in an environmentally sustainable manner, with potentially kind of material implications for, you know, just the way we live and work and transport things.
Since its founding in 2018, Archer has built up a really impressive and strong team, with a lot of experience, as well as a group of kind of impressive partners to help them with this journey. With us today, we have Mark Mesler, who is no stranger to sustainability investors. So without much ado, I'm going to turn it over to Mark to share.
Great. Yeah, thank you, Savi. Appreciate it, and thanks for having us here at the conference. Thanks, everyone, for coming. I'm going to talk a lot today, clearly, about this eVTOL sector that Savi had just articulated. Particularly, I'm going to talk about Archer's journey across a number of vectors. One, we'll clearly talk about commercialization, what our path to commercialization is, and how we're going to go to market. We're going to give you an update on some of the technology as well, because I think this right here is our Midnight aircraft going through some flight testing at our Salinas facility. I think it'd be good for you to understand what the specs and capabilities of this aircraft are, its use cases.
And then finally, we're also going to talk about some of the really, really powerful partnerships that we've built to help get this company off the ground. But let me first start off with a video of what Midnight looks like flying. This is our downwash test with the FAA, and this was last December.
So we've got 12 rotors, six on the front of a fixed wing, six on the back of a fixed wing. The six on the front tilt forward as we transition into forward flight. This is about an hour and a half south of San Diego Airport. So that's the vertical takeoff, really through the aspects of a helicopter, which provides drive the axis, which you know you otherwise can't get in a fixed wing.
You also have the efficiency of the fixed wing in forward flight, which lift is generated from the fixed wing versus the rotors. So that is an eVTOL aircraft. That's all electric. There are six battery packs, which we'll get into when we switch back.
Okay, so quick company snapshot. We've raised over $1 billion as a company. We think you need at least $1 billion to go from a clean sheet design aircraft to a prototype and get to commercialization. Went public on the NYSE in 2021. We have 700 people, which relative to the industry is fairly capital light in terms of our investment in headcount and facilities. We are in the process of building our high-volume manufacturing plant in Covington, Georgia. When we think about getting to market and commercialization, how do you unlock scale?
Well, clearly, we have to be able to manufacture these once we get there. As Savi said, we have some of the leading folks, not only in the eVTOL aviation space, but from powertrain. So the leader of our powertrain team comes from Tesla. He helped with the Model 3 powertrain. He's designed our electric engines and our battery packs to get the aircraft propulsion system. So some really great talent out in Silicon Valley. So from a use case standpoint, what does commercialization look like? So clearly, an aircraft like this would have multiple use cases. It could be aerial ride-sharing, could be used for cargo and logistics, emergency services. We do have a DoD contract, so there's some military or non-kinetic use cases. We're primarily going to market and focused on this urban air mobility problem statement.
So think about New York City, getting from city center to one of the airports generally takes you an hour, an hour and a half, and it'll cost you $120-$150 in cab fees or airfare or ride-share fare. We're going to be able to do that in about 10 minutes. This aircraft was specifically designed for the 20-50 mi mission, so the battery packs can support up to a 100 mi range. But the sweet spot for us, based on our market analytics and how people move through cities throughout the day, that 20-50 mi mission is the targeted use case. It's moving, you know, as you know, as time goes on, more and more people are moving to cities. They're moving away from, you know, more rural areas.
So if this isn't just a New York or an L.A. issue, this is a Delhi, Bangalore, other areas of the world's problem as well, Seoul, etc. So, loose timeline for us and probably, you know, close to where the industry is as well. I think, since through next year, the industry and Archer have been working on getting through the final design stages of the aircraft and working on getting through the certification process with the FAA. I'll talk a little bit about the FAA certification process. We could have a whole separate session on that. But that's largely where we've been focused in getting to commercialization. When you think about what does commercialization look like, if we're going to be operating these aircraft, we have to have customers in place. We have to have routes in place.
We have to have manufacturing in place such that by the time we get through, at least in the U.S., the certification process, we're hitting the ground running and threading that needle so that all those vectors come together at the same time. 2025 and beyond, you know, we'll have initial UAM operations and what we call trunk routes. Those trunk routes are the city center to airports. Those are high-value routes. Those are high volume of people. There's ability and willingness to pay. You know, if we price, we're going to price these like an Uber Black, which is $6 a seat mi roughly. That's what you pay for a cab, from any of the airports to the city center in New York. So, that is the trunk route. Branch routes will eventually build off those.
So think, you know, city center to Greenwich, Connecticut, or one of the airports to Long Island, etc. So think about cities. It's not just like the single route. It's what does a network of these look like? 12-15 access points. We call them vertiports in New York City would be sort of an ideal steady-state use case. Going to market, however, we are going to be using existing real estate aviation assets. You think about general-purpose airports. All we have to do is really put charging infrastructure there, and you've already got a ready-made access point that folks can access and utilize the aircraft. Finally, we are getting our manufacturing facilities in place to hit the ground running when we get to commercialization.
So we think probably 2027, 2028 and beyond is where you really see the scale of this, of this industry once we get through initial commercial operations. So what is the aircraft? First, some specs of the aircraft. So as I said, performance of Midnight, it's, it's got a range of up to 100 mi, but it's optimized for this 20- to 25 mi trip, back-to-back missions. We charge the aircraft within 10 minutes. Once it lands, we charge, and get ready for the next the next mission. And, you know, if you got a 15-minute window, 20-minute window, you can charge within 10 minutes, speed up to 150 mi per hour. And the payload's important. So we're targeting a 1,000 pounds of payload. So a 1,000 pounds of payload is roughly, you know, four average-sized passengers and maybe some maybe some luggage.
There will be a pilot on board as well. So you generally need, you know, payload for up to 1,000 pounds. Advantages of this versus other technologies, this will be certified to commercial airline standards. That's what this whole process that we're going through with the FAA is right now. It is sustainable because it's all electric. An interesting factor is because these propellers are moving, spinning a lot slower than a standard helicopter, the noise footprint's about 100 times quieter than a helicopter. So if you think about just a minimally viable market for us would be helicopter replacement. If the dream of urban air mobility didn't play out for whatever reason, you've got 50,000 commercial helicopters in operation around the world that, you know, could start using an eVTOL aircraft like our Midnight.
Talked a little bit about cost. So this isn't going to be a wealthy person's tool. We want this to be accessed by, and very be very ubiquitous. And so, you know, pricing these like ride-sharing is where we think the sweet spot for the market will be. So we have just about completed all of our design. It's frozen as we've transitioned into building some aircraft, which we'll talk about for FAA certification. Our supply chain is pretty well built out. We've selected just over 90% of our vendors and parts already for the aircraft for manufacturing in our supply chain. And we've got production tooling underway for our not only at our vendors, but also at our high-volume manufacturing facility. So let's just pivot to the certification process a little bit.
So the certification process is not well understood by your average person. So we do a lot of education around the certification process. It's split up into phases. There is the sort of what I would call the administrative phase where you come to an agreement on how you're going to be testing your various components and aircraft with the FAA. Then you get into the implementation phase where you're actually going to start at testing for credit with the FAA. We are starting to transition now into that implementation phase of the certification program. So what does that mean? We are going to right now, the goal is for us to begin flying piloted conforming aircraft later this year.
So a conforming aircraft is one where the design and parts are intended to be, to meet the FAA standards to which we're certifying to. And having a pilot in the aircraft, so the flight test I showed you earlier does not have a pilot in it. Those are remotely piloted. But having a pilot in later this year will be a big milestone for the company. Big milestone for the company. We are naturally, for the FAA certification process, we will be building a total of six conforming aircraft. And conforming means that they can be used in FAA certification testing. We've already started to build the first three in our production facility in San Jose. And we will, once they're complete, we'll start the building, manufacturing of the second three.
I think one of the key elements of our certification strategy is to use the existing aerospace supply base for a material portion of the components of the aircraft. You can see here, I've got 80% of our components and subsystems have what we call certification heritage, which means it's a Honeywell component that was previously certified or a Safran flight computer that was previously certified. The benefit there is that if the FAA has seen that before and they've certified, you know, tens, dozens of these on previous aircraft, that is not something that's new and novel to them. And we believe it'll help us get through the certification process a lot faster. Really, the piece that the FAA hasn't seen from our aircraft is the propulsion system.
It's the battery packs that are being used for primary propulsion and the electric engines. And so that will be, we are working with them to outline what that testing protocol is for those that are part of our what's called our subject-specific certification plans, which we're in the process of getting agreement with the FAA on currently. Interesting fact. So the former FAA administrator, Billy Nolen, he joined the company last June. Great addition to the team. He's our Chief Safety Officer. We think about safety a lot. He's also a pilot, former pilot and helicopter pilot as well. So he's brought a lot to us to help us think through this, mature the process through which we're engaged with the FAA. He's got to have one year blackout period for which he can't talk to the FAA.
But starting in June, he'll be able to engage directly with the FAA. And like I said, this is just touching on certification. Happy to answer more questions around that. So manufacturing, as I said, we're threading this needle. Yeah, you got to get through the certification process. We're going to sell aircraft. We're going to operate aircraft when we get to commercialization. But you also have to be able to build them. And the good news is we have a really good partner with Stellantis. So Stellantis is the third largest auto manufacturer by revenue. Carlos Tavares is CEO. Has a lot of conviction in the company, meaning a lot of conviction in Archer. And he helps us. His team helps us.
We've got about 30, 30 or so, Stellantis employees helping us thinking about taking that technology from the R&D phase into the manufacturing phase. This is the building. This is the factory that they're helping us stand up in Covington, Georgia. This is just southeast of Atlanta. This will be a 350,000 sq ft facility. We've already started pouring the concrete for the foundations on this. We'll take certificate of occupancy later this year in the August-September timeframe, if the weather continues to cooperate, which it didn't for the first month of the year. Had a big mud puddle down in Georgia. But this will be 350,000 sq ft. We'll have the capacity to build up to 650 aircraft per year. There's a phase two option on this where we can manufacture up to 2,300 aircraft per year.
It's very capital light. It's only costing me $65 million to stand this factory up, and then we put some capital equipment in it. But it's essentially an assembly and test facility. So I'm not building autoclaves to manufacture carbon composite materials. I'm not building autoclaves to manufacture subcomponents. We are manufacturing our battery packs and our electric engines. And then everything else is coming from the existing aerospace supply base. So very capital light approach to manufacturing. And the goal is, with a couple more pictures here we're building. I said earlier, here's the concrete that we're pouring here, making good progress. The State of Georgia has been a really good partner. Now, Stellantis is, as I said, helping us stand up this factory. And they've been a great partner. They've been an investor last year.
They gave us. We had agreement with them to do a $150 million forward equity purchase agreement that allowed us to draw some capital as needed, throughout the year. We still have $55 million left on that to draw down, this year. This is a pretty understated statement here, but the goal is to expand that partnership to allow Stellantis to be our contract manufacturer. So they build 506,000 cars a month. We think that, you know, with their expertise in scaling manufacturing, that we can really de-risk our manufacturing profile by having them be our contract manufacturer as well. So a couple real benefits there is one, I can forego a lot of the capital equipment expenditures, going forward, a lot of the staffing and manufacturing staffing if Stellantis takes that over.
Then, two, just in terms of scaling and de-risking, that'll be a big benefit for us. But really great partner with Stellantis. I can't, you know, minimize the importance that they've been to the company. So this was our manufacturing facility in San Jose. It's right around the corner from our engineering team. This is where the first 6 conforming aircraft will be built. It's also where our battery pack and engine line is. And eventually those two functions will move to the Covington, Georgia facility as well. So that's manufacturing. A lot of work's being done around that. So next stage is, well, what does commercial operations look like? How are we going to go to market now that we've got if we get certified and we can build them, how are we going to market?
We're going to market with a hybrid hybrid approach. You know, if you if you look at the industry, you have a choice. You can either operate these like an airline or you could sell them like an OEM. We think there's value to both of them. So we are going to market using this hybrid strategy. We have and I'll talk through through our Archer Air, which is the ride-sharing side of the business. That would be, you know, long-term Archer instead of Ubering places, you're archering places. There's a lot of value in the brand. Customer experience is a big part of that. But you're operating a a a mini airline and you've got to build out and have partners to help you build out that infrastructure. We've announced two routes so far.
The two trunk routes we've announced are 34th Street helipad in New York to Newark Liberty International Airport. Again, that's about a 15-mile trip, but it could take you an hour and a half, two hours in traffic. That'll be a 7-10 minute flight. We've also announced Chicago O'Hare to Chicago Vertiport, which is downtown Chicago. The other side of the business is Archer Direct. This is more like the OEM side of the business where we're selling the aircraft. We've more recently announced a number of deals that I'll talk through here in a little bit and talk through our order book. You know, our ASPs are about $5 million an aircraft on this side. Loosely, our models show about a 50% gross margin on that business at steady state.
On the ride-sharing side, pricing the ride-sharing business in that $5-$6 per seat mile in New York, that can get us to a steady state of about a 40% gross margin there. But you've got that ongoing, you know, the 10-12-year operating life of an aircraft. So you can get the revenue, you know, instead of getting $5 million once, you can get $5 million probably two or three times over the life of the aircraft. So the other big partner I said I'd talk about our key partners, I already talked about Stellantis. United's been a great partner for us. They invested in the original PIPE. They really help us think through the operations of the aircraft.
When you think about what does perfection look like in terms of operating a trunk route? You could clear TSA at the heliport in Manhattan and land in Terminal C where the United terminal is. So you don't have to go through TSA pre or you don't have to go through the TSA checkpoints at any of the airports. So we're working with United on how to make that happen, working with TSA on how to make that happen. They also think through. You know, they've helped us design access points for maintenance. When they look at the aircraft, oh, you should move this access point here because your maintenance folks are going to be able to move this piece at this speed.
They've just been a really good partner in terms of thinking through all aspects of our business. Clearly investing. They invested last summer again in a PIPE that we raised. They've been a great customer. I've got an order with them for up to 300 aircraft, 200 aircraft committed, another option for 100. That's at $5 million ASP. So that's like a $1.5 billion opportunity with them. So again, very good partner. We talked through a lot of these. I talked through the other aspect of the United relationship is I do have Oscar Munoz, former chairman and CEO on our board. He's been very active in the business. He's a really good mentor to the company and just a really good board member.
So we've also announced recently we hired a new Chief Commercial Officer, Nikhil Goel, last summer. So we've really stepped up in terms of thinking about commercialization on the OEM side of the business as well and developing partnerships internationally. So we announced last fall a partnership with the UAE to build out a service there. We've got an order from Air Chateau. Air Chateau is a large operator in the UAE. This is specifically around Abu Dhabi. And Air Chateau has an order for 100 aircraft with an option for another 100 aircraft to operate there. So that's, you know, a minimum of a $500 million on the first 100 $500 million order.
And then we've got a really good partnership that we've started with Rahul Bhatia of InterGlobe, who operates IndiGo in India, the largest operator of travel services in India. So that's up to 200 aircraft as well. So when you pull that all together, the order book on the Archer Direct side or the OEM side is starting to shape up to be pretty meaningful. You've got up to 700 aircraft here, you know, base of 500, up to 700 for, you know, close to $3.5 billion of we call it indicative backlog. It's not an accounting backlog. If I don't get a certification, you know, these deals could be canceled. But what where the conviction comes in is when we start getting deposits on these aircraft. I've got $10 million deposit on aircraft already from United.
We've got a commitment for a deposit on the Air Chateau. We're working with InterGlobe as well for deposits there. So I'm pretty excited about this. This is the first quarter that we've actually reported this. And you know, that could create some meaningful traction in the market once we get through certification, once we get through to commercialization. And with that, that's one more. So we do have a contract with the DOD or AFWERX. So the DOD is very interested in military applications for this, specifically around base to base logistics.
So if you think about what is a new paradigm that the DoD is thinking about, they're thinking about more distributed bases such that they don't put at risk at any one large base, you know, bad actors who may try to impact that. So they've their long range plan is to have smaller bases and could be a good use case to help between bases that are smaller and more distributed amongst a number of other use cases as well. So, you know, think about any logistics for the larger ones, logistics, rescue missions, et cetera. So the $142 million contract with the DoD, some of that's IDIQ, meaning indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity. But the first part of that is really to develop the use cases for them. We're going to be giving them simulators. We're going to be training pilots.
We're going to be doing some flight testing for them. And, you know, this could be, you know, if they get conviction around this, you could think of a generational option here as well, just like, you know, the Black Hawk helicopter and some other generational programs that they have in place. So a lot of information with that. I'll pause.
[audio distortion]I worry a little bit to see military had with their hospitality. Yeah. The number of crashes. Yeah, yeah. As you're talking about, you know, two engines having to go up the same guy. Yeah. Of horizontal. Yeah. Very hard. And you've got six engines, you know, or three on another kind of guy. Yeah. And if one of them malfunctions, you know, it slides out. There's no, you know, I don't know. I think it's just military trying to help. Yeah, yeah.
I'm not sure. Yeah. What do you do when you're in I can't apply IFR because I'm not high enough up to get radar contact. Yeah. With somebody. Low IFR, you can be even 25 miles from. Yeah. Seaport flight or 14 past you in order to. Yeah. To know where it is. Yeah. So a couple. Do you know if it's going to be IFR? Yeah. This is VFR initially. So this is VFR flies, you know, it can fly at night, but there's no instrument flight. So VFR is visual flight rules. IFR is instrument flight rules. So you've got waiting miles in credit. Yeah. Potentially. I mean, we argue. We are looking at some of the more fair cities to go to market with. But with respect to your Osprey, it's a good question.
Let's just talk about the safety of this. So first off, the Osprey is an incredibly complicated aircraft. Those two engines are almost a single point of failure because they are on a single bar that goes across. We had a guy in our who was an engineer who worked on that program. And he says the cost of that bar that those two engines are connected to is more than the total bomb cost of my aircraft. The other thing is that this is designed. It's a very simple design, but it does have multiple redundancies. So the 12-tilt-6 technology is based on multiple redundant connections. So we've got six battery packs that power 12 engines. And those battery packs are connected to engines that are diametrically opposed to each other.
So if you think about the far left battery pack, it's connected to the far left back rotor and the far up front right rotor. So if for whatever reason one of the engines, let's just say the battery pack went down, those two to maintain symmetry, it's designed to have symmetry of flight. Those two rotors would go down, but we could still take off and land in a VTOL fashion using the power of the batteries and the motors for lift. We can actually drop four of those and still fly. So you can lose four engines and still fly. When I say still fly, I mean take off and land in the vertical takeoff landing fashion. The other thing is that this has STOL capability, meaning conventional takeoff and landing. So there's a glide path to this.
If for whatever reason you had a catastrophic issue where you lost more than five engines for whatever reason, you could glide and fly, you know, with the aircraft in full, with the front six or the front propellers in full horizontal position, you could still fly and land conventionally. So there are multiple redundancies built into this that it's just a lot simpler. And as we get through the certification process, I think we're going to see it's going to be a lot safer than sort of the Osprey. But it's a really good question because that is the other, you know, perceived VTOL that's out there being operational.
Yes, sir. Can you just talk to me about the competitive situation that you face in the industry and how you do that?
Is this where we want to talk about that?
You mean versus like Ubers or versus other eVTOL players or all the above or?
Specifically Joby. If you want me to get it down. I don't see you competing with Uber, quite frankly. Yeah. Not not today.
I mean, Joby and us are the two, I would say the two lead steers in the race. I think we've taken some different approaches to the market. We know those guys very well over there. We're sort of rooting for for each other. They want to operate the aircraft. We're sort of going to market. We're going to sell the aircraft and operate the aircraft. So would we see them competitively in the marketplace as we as we get through certification, probably on some of the high value routes that you're talking about?
I'm sure that they've got they want to fly in New York as well. I think that we've taken different approaches on how to get to market. I think they're using a more vertically integrated and this is, you know, from them. They're using a more vertically integrated strategy in order to potentially get benefits on weight and payload. We've taken a strategy. We're using, you know, I don't want to say off the shelf, but we're using existing aerospace supply base to, we think de-risk our path through the certification process. Listen, I think. Yeah.
I just sat through their presentation. How do I make a differentiation? If I want to make a bet with CERT.
You know, I think you just got to go deep and get comfortable around the management team. You got to get comfortable around who's going to get through CERT.
Maybe you make a bet on both of them. It's a big enough the stock prices right now are both, you know, $5. You know, I think I mean, it's a difficult question to answer. I think the whole industry will raise incremental money as we get to commercialization. We're probably both fairly well capitalized to get to to commercialization. It's it's what does the cap table look like after commercialization? I think there's some ways to minimize that, you know, using aircraft financing mechanisms, using partners for vertiports. So I think that I think that but the industry will have to have capital growth capital as we get to commercialization.
Thanks, everyone. And we have a breakout downstairs at 12:30. Thanks. Thanks, Mark. Okay.