Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the H.C. Wainwright twenty-sixth Annual Global Investment Conference. My name is Alejandro Borjas, and I'm an analyst on the investment banking team. We're very excited you all could join us for a productive day of one-on-one meetings, corporate presentations, and panels. For this session, we are thrilled to welcome Dave Dennison, CFO from Archer Aviation.
Mic, mic check? All good. Okay. Hi. Well, first of all, I'm not the CFO. I'm filling in for the CFO. Mark Mesler was going to be here, so we apologize. Mark had a very urgent personal matter last second and could not make it, and so I'm actually the Vice President of Engineering. I've been with Archer for three and a half years. So I won't be able to answer all your financial questions. I can get into that a little bit, but I certainly can answer a lot more of the technical questions than Mark, which maybe you're more interested in, so I've been with Archer for three and a half years. I came out of the traditional aerospace industry.
I spent 13 years at Bell Helicopter, innovating in vertical lift, then spent five years at a tier one supplier, in aerostructures for Boeing and Airbus and Gulfstream. And then decided there's something real happening right now. It's a unique opportunity and time, and we'll talk a little bit about where we've been in those three and a half years. So personal note, I told my wife, "I think we need to move to California" three and a half years ago, with the kids, pick up from Texas after 20 years, because the third revolution in aerospace is happening. And in general, aerospace is driven by propulsion innovation. First one was just getting piston engine, compact enough for the Wright brothers to take flight, in terms of lightweighting.
The second revolution was the jet age in the 1950s, and you saw all kinds of innovation happening then, and then you see stabilization. The third revolution in aerospace is electric propulsion, and that's what we're talking about right now. And so it was extremely attractive for me to leave traditional industry and go innovate and create something new. In three and a half years, when I joined, I was employee number 77. We had about 40 engineers, very smart engineers, all Silicon Valley-based, had never certified an aircraft, didn't know how to do that. My job was to come in, build a team, build processes for us to actually certify something with the FAA. And we are now over 500 strong, about 70% traditional aerospace, about 30% non-traditional Silicon Valley, Tesla, EV, and we are on a great path to certification.
So that's what we're gonna get into today. Picture right here is Midnight. I apologize. I had some really great videos on this Mac, but we're not doing Mac at this conference. So unfortunately, if you wanna go see the great videos of the aircraft flying, go to, go to YouTube, just search Archer, and you'll see that. All the normal disclaimers, we'll get past that. Okay, just real quick overview, we have raised over $1.5 billion now to date. We are publicly listed, ACHR. We did that in 2018. We are targeting a 2025 commercial launch, and initial markets will most likely be overseas, with some countries that are now willing to maybe go ahead of the FAA to start allowing us to do revenue-generating services, and we'll talk about our strategy there.
Our proprietary powertrain, we have vertically integrated in the powertrain and nowhere else. The powertrain is what is core to this. The strategy at Archer is to keep it simple. Everything else is aerospace pedigree, trying to certify with things that have already been certified before, and then we have some great partnerships we'll talk about, and we are now about 900 people, and two-thirds of that is engineering, so very focused on engineering and product delivery right now. Here's the team. Adam is our founder and CEO, a strong history of starting companies in venture capital. A couple of really highlights here, Tom and Geoff, our CTO and our Chief Engineer. This is now their. We have built two full-scale eVTOL aircraft. That is their seventh and eighth full-scale eVTOL aircraft. They are some of the pioneers of eVTOL.
They've been in it since 2009. Geoff led the Vahana program at Airbus. Tom was employee number one with Larry Page at Zee.Aero. So these guys have learned the lessons on what works and what doesn't with these electric aircraft. So a very strong team there. Another person to note there, Billy Nolen, the former administrator of the FAA, has chosen to join Archer, and he is really big on this space. And so Billy has helped create the framework for these electric aircraft in terms of the certification path. Now he's joined Archer and is helping us get that done. Okay, so quick problem statement, it's all about urban congestion for right now, for our primary mission at Archer.
We move through cities in two dimensions, and we waste a lot of time in cities, so we are trying to solve that issue by going into the third dimension. We build cities in three dimensions. We wanna travel now in three dimensions. So Archer is all about innovating in three dimensions, and moving people in much shorter time, and providing people time back, for their lives, and doing it in a eco-friendly way. Why don't we do this right now? We do it in a small scale, and we were just talking about this. There are helicopter services that do this mission, but why aren't they in mass use right now if they can offer those time savings? I'm a helicopter guy. I spent thirteen years in the industry.
I still love helicopters, but they are noisy. Gas turbine engines and helicopters, by their nature of their design, are very noisy. Safety, it's not that helicopters are unsafe, but there is a negative consumer perception around safety on helicopters, and there are a lot of single points of failure in a helicopter. Now, the helicopter industry tries to manage those single points of failure with a lot of quality, but that all adds cost, and so gas turbines are very complex. Gearboxes are very complex. It makes the operating costs of these aircraft very expensive, and so to change the game, you have to change the paradigm in terms of the way the aircraft is constructed, and electric allows us to do that... So what have we created? We've created Archer Midnight.
Archer Midnight is a four-passenger plus one pilot, and we are piloted right now because that is the clear path to certification with the FAA. We will go autonomous later. The technology already exists now to do autonomous. But we are 100 times quieter than a helicopter. In cruise, we're about 45 dBA, if anybody's a technical person, but very, very quiet. You'd be amazed if you came to see our flight test, how much quieter these are than helicopters. We're moving at 150 miles per hour. That allows us to transport people quickly without burning a ton of energy. We have 100 miles of range, up to, depending on if we do a conventional takeoff and landing or a vertical takeoff and landing. Huge redundancy, this is the big safety bullet right here.
Twelve propellers, distributed electric propulsion allows us to reinvent the aerospace space with new types of aircraft configurations because we don't need gearboxes, and drive shafts, and turbine engines, and all that to power all these multiple propulsion sources. All we need is a wire, and a little electric motor, and some props, and we can put propulsion sources anywhere we want in the aircraft design, and that opens up the design space tremendously. So we have triply redundant systems. We are designing the aircraft to commercial airline levels of safety. So the same airplanes that you might have flown here, Airbus, Boeing, Part 25 aircraft, we are designing to those exact same standards, and no operating emissions. This is all electric. This is not a hybrid aircraft or anything like that. Okay? What can we do with this technology?
Here is the exact mission that maybe some of you will do later this week. Manhattan to Newark, and we have announced this as a route. This is a 10-minute flight that currently takes somewhere between an hour, hour and a half, maybe even two hours, by car or rail. We've announced this with our partner, United Airlines, to go start servicing this, and we are actually looking at where in the infrastructure at Newark we are gonna set this up right now. International opportunity, we've talked a lot about the UAE, if you followed our press releases at all. Many people live in Dubai, but work in Abu Dhabi. So there's a corridor there that's 75-120 minutes that we could service by air in 20 minutes.
So again, time savings that we're offering our customers. What is the enabling key technology? It is all about the electric powertrain, and we have invested heavily in this area, and we have built an incredible team. So most of these players are non-aerospace. These are folks that have come from Tesla, Apple, Rivian, SpaceX, all those types of companies that are experts in EV, and we have brought them into aerospace, and applied the aerospace standard in terms of certification and quality to that product. So we have vertically integrated in both the electric motor and the battery. We have factories that are already operating at rate to build these components.
The only thing we buy are the little individual pieces that go into each of those assemblies, as well as the battery cell, which comes from Molicel in Taiwan, which we've announced, which is a very reputable supplier. Standard cylindrical cells, nothing fancy here. It's all about getting certified. This is our state-of-the-art powertrain factory in San Jose. If anybody ever wants to come to San Jose and see what we're doing, it's an awesome tour. What we've built in three and a half years is literally world-class. We can build 15,000 battery packs per year off of this line already, and then we can just replicate the line to go up to our future needs as needed. Highly automated, about 80% automated right now, and we can move towards 95% in the future.
Okay, had a great video of the flight test here. We have pretty much finished flight testing with our pre-production Midnight aircraft, which you see here, as well as Maker. If you've been following, we've been flying Maker for about three years. Both two full-scale eVTOL aircraft, and this is all about learning. We needed to get flying. We needed to learn how the aircraft behaves in flight. We need to learn how is the complex software that controls all these propellers and control surfaces gonna work together? And so the aircraft has now fully transitioned and what we mean by transition is, when you take off vertically, you take off in a hover, and then aerodynamically, you have to push through a region into a wing-borne flight.
That is a very key aerodynamic factor, and not many people in the world have been able to achieve that. So we do these flights all the time. I saw, like, three of them last week with different customers. And in fact, those aircraft now are basically complete. They've completed their flight test program. So we're in very good shape there. We're now just flying them to learn a little bit more about the operational side of the aircraft, while everything from a technical perspective, we've learned and know. Okay, we talked a little bit about our strategy here. Again, we are not reinventing the wheel on anything in aerospace that's been done before. No need to. We aren't doing our own structures. We aren't doing our own flight control systems.
We aren't doing our own avionics. We've got all the suppliers like Garmin, Honeywell, Safran, very reputable suppliers, for this product. In fact, the sidesticks, the controllers that the pilot actually uses to fly the aircraft, are the same sidesticks on the Airbus A220, aircraft, and they're just modified for us. So about 80% of our components have a certification heritage. That will mean a lot to the FAA when we go in front of them and say, "This customer or this supplier and this product have been certified before or have certification pedigree." Means a lot with the FAA, and the only new things we have to really focus on is electric propulsion, which we're also making great progress with. What are we doing right now?
Really, the focus everybody looks at the videos of us flight testing. That's honestly not the focus right now. We're kind of beyond that with those aircraft. We're very focused on building what we call conforming test aircraft. We are gonna build six aircraft that are FAA-conforming. These will be used for the real flight test certification credit with the FAA next year. And the first aircraft is right there. You can see a picture of it. In fact, it's far more mature than that picture now. And we are trying to get that in the air as soon as possible, hopefully this year. Okay? That's all around the end in the short term, getting certified, but what do we do after we get certified? Well, we have a very large factory that is almost operational.
We're probably two months away from commissioning this factory outside of Atlanta in Covington, Georgia. The state of Georgia has been a great partner for us. This is a 350,000 sq ft facility that can manufacture up to 650 aircraft per year, and this facility can easily be. The site can be expanded to go up to a couple thousand aircraft per year, if needed. Stellantis is one of our major partners here. They are helping fund the journey, as well, the state of Georgia, to allow us to scale. The key here is going to be scaling to high volumes. We just recently announced that Stellantis is backing our capital and labor expenses, for that scaling of rate of up to, I think it's up to $400 million.
Here's Carlos, the Stellantis CEO, with Adam, our CEO, so up to $400 million in investment to help us achieve rate, which is really the key, right? If you think back to Tesla and the Model 3 production hell, and almost dying on the vine there, that is the challenging time. After we certify, we have to scale, and so now Stellantis is backing that journey, which feels great. Commercial strategy, it's both domestic and international. We've talked a lot about UAE publicly, and Saudi, as well as India, Korea, Japan, and even Africa now, as well as in the US. Here are some of that order book. Lots of questions always about the order book. When you're pre-certified, what does it really mean? What are the real commitments? We have real deposits.
I think our LOIs are as mature as anybody in the industry. This is no different than traditional aerospace. Boeing, Bell, Airbus, they all take LOIs. Until the aircraft is certified, you're not going to get a full-in commitment from a customer, until you can guarantee performance specs, and that's what we are on our way to doing. But we do have up to $26 million of deposits coming in this year, as well as future progress payments as we ramp production. United Airlines has been one of the leaders since the beginning, great partner for us. They have up to $1.5 billion of potential buys here, 200 committed, 100 aircraft as an option. So United, we work with them every day on our maintenance programs. We've got programs around pilot training.
A lot of people ask, "Where, where are you gonna get all these pilots?" Well, United already has a program called Aviate to try to introduce pilots with the pilot shortage. What that program does is get pilots up to five hundred hours, but actually, you have to have fifteen hundred hours to fly for United, and so there's a thousand-hour gap that a lot of pilots drop out, because they can't fund that journey. We give them the opportunity to come and fly Archer Midnight from five hundred to fifteen hundred, and then they have a career path all the way into the airline, and so that's how we're looking at addressing the pilot shortage. Also just announced an MOU with Southwest around an air taxi network in California. The vision here is anywhere in California in three hours.
Southwest has got a great network in California, and so if you think you're living in Santa Monica, and you want to go to Napa for the day, take a Archer Midnight, Santa Monica to Burbank, great airport, get on a Southwest, go to Oakland, jump on an Archer Midnight, you're to Napa in three hours. So that's kind of the division of what we're trying to do with Southwest, and I'm sure that will be replicated in other areas of the country as well. So you have the product, you've got the customers, you certify. What are we gonna do with it? Where are we going? So we've announced launch markets in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami. Take a look, we also have partnered with Signature Aviation and Atlantic Aviation.
These are FBOs, services all around the country, and you put that all together, and you start seeing a network that looks like this, and we just announced this five-node network in the Bay Area. So where can you get what are the time savings that you can get? So very excited. You can actually see we're starting to make real progress into building out the networks, and where we're gonna go here. Same thing in LA, trying to prep for the Olympics, for the Super Bowl. Billy Nolen, the FAA administrator, created Innovate 2028. How are we gonna get aircraft and eVTOLs working in the LA Olympics at scale, not just a one-off demonstrator? Okay, and then UAE, a $multi-hundred-million-dollar framework here to help invest in Archer in region. That could be manufacturing, that could be vertiports.
All kinds of different things are being explored right now with that entity. India, we've launched InterGlobe. It was just the holder of IndiGo Airlines, the largest airline in India, and their goal is to deploy up to 200 Midnight aircraft right now in the region, and obviously India has some fantastic markets for us with the congestion in that country, and then DoD, we have up to a $148 million contract. We actually have two separate contracts with the U.S. Air Force. This is anything ranging from autonomy to cargo-carrying aircraft to all-weather type of military aircraft, but really trying to figure out what does the DoD want to do with this new electric technology?
Electric is very interesting from a thermal and acoustic signature perspective from the DoD, so they're trying to figure out what could we do with these aircraft. Very reputable government advisory board there. A lot of stars on those pictures right there between Army, Air Force, and Navy.... Finally, our economics, this is what we're trying to do in terms of scale up, in terms of production. We see a need to potentially get to 650 within three years. You can see the operating economics as well, below 40-50% margins by 2027 is what the goal is. And if you want to talk about where is Archer's burn rate, you know, we're burning about $300-$400 million in cash each year.
If you look at the economics here, you assume a hundred and fifty aircraft is around a break-even. And so 2027 could be a break-even year for Archer. The long-term pricing strategy, it's around launching somewhere around that Uber Black premium service and scaling then, and reducing that over time, to under UberX. What's next? Geoff. Geoff and I go way back to Bell days. Right now we talk a lot about the excitement around Archer, but we stay grounded. Geoff and I went through the worst day in our careers together. We lost two pilots in a flight test accident at Bell about seven, eight years ago. Worst day of my career. So we understand the gravity of flying and certifying aircraft. Archer has always been about safety first.
And the next step is getting Geoff in an aircraft, and we want to bring him home safely every night, and we want to bring our future passengers and customers home safely every night, so we don't ever lose perspective on that. So with that, I'll open up to any questions. We're actually right at time, but if you want to catch me in some private meetings as well, we can. Real quick questions? Yeah.
Charging time, so everything-
Yep. Yep, charging time. So we really envision doing 20-30-mile missions all day long, and that kind of depletes the battery from, like, 80-50 or 80-40, and in that time, we charge in 11 minutes. So we turn the aircraft in 11 minutes, and we do those missions all day long. Now, if you deplete the battery all the way to 0 or close to 0 and charge to 100, it's about 40 minutes, but that is not a realistic operational scenario. We would only do that at night while we're waiting for the next day.
Batteries-
Yes. Yep, and it's energy density and power density, and those things. That's the great thing about electric aircraft. We're a nascent industry right now. The technology exists to do real missions right now, but as these aircraft get fielded, they'll only get better, and we plan on, like, offering new battery tech every two years to upgrade the aircraft, and you get more range or more payload.
Dave, sorry, guys, we are gonna have to wrap up here. Really appreciate the presentation, appreciate all of you for attending, and for everybody who's listening in online. Have a great rest of your days, everybody.