Electric vertical takeoff and landing, or electric air taxi portion of the morning. We're very pleased to have Nikhil Goel from Archer, Chief Commercial Officer. A little tiny bit about Archer. He'll tell you some more about Archer here in just a second. But we like to we used to like to think of them as the new kids on the block in this space and kind of the gritty upstart. But maybe the more accurate way is to say, yeah, one of those worldwide leaders in electric aviation that is on pace to bring something about a year from now to commercial service where people can actually bring electric aircraft into their daily lives. Nikhil comes from Uber Technologies, where he helped found the Uber Elevate platform, helped sell it to another company that may or may not be in the building here. You might hear from later.
And then once he was done with that, came over to Archer to help build out their commercial team. So I'll turn it over to Nikhil. He'll give you a little bit about Archer, and then we'll get into price.
Good morning, everyone. Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer at Archer. I'll start off with a short video that'll just sort of recap some of the last few years, and then I'll go into a few of the highlights, and we'll go into the Q&A. I founded Archer in 2018 to change the way the world moves. Curbing congestion isn't sustainable. This leaves the average American stuck in traffic for dozens of hours per year. To combat that challenge, we built Midnight. All electric aircraft, purpose-built to fly back-to-back trips over congested cities. Midnight takes off vertically like a helicopter, then its propellers transition down to fly like an airplane. It's designed to be piloted and carry four passengers and can travel at speeds up to 150 miles per hour. Since 2018, we've made an incredible amount of progress to bringing the Midnight aircraft to market.
Our nearly 1,000-person team has designed, built, and tested the key enabling technologies to bring electric aviation to market. This has enabled us to raise nearly $1.5 billion to date. However, our goal is the same since day one: to get to commercial launch. Our high-volume manufacturing facility in Georgia will open up later this year, and we have incredible partners that are helping us bring this vision to life. Stellantis, the owner of Jeep, Ram, and Maserati, invested nearly $300 million to date. United Airlines has ordered up to $1.5 billion of Midnight aircraft, and with Southwest, our goal is to offer passengers three-hour multimodal journeys across California.
Now he's shaking up the sea.
We have an industry-leading contract with the Air Force, and we recently delivered our first aircraft as part of that contract. In L.A., we recently announced plans for flight networks connecting SoFi Stadium, USC, LAX, and beyond. We can't wait to bring Midnight to a city near you.
Bend and shift. Bend and shift. Yeah, yeah, yeah, bend and shift. Bend and shift.
So that was our founder and CEO, Adam Goldstein. The video's about a couple of months old. We just announced our quarterly earnings a few weeks ago. Four big highlights out of that. The first was that we are building production aircraft. And so you saw this in the video earlier. We're building mature aircraft at our low-rate production facility in California. And then our high-rate production facility just outside of Atlanta is weeks away from receiving a certificate of occupancy, at which point we'll start moving in equipment and producing aircraft early, early next year. Stellantis is one of our big backers and partners within that. We've talked about a few things over the last several months. One is that Stellantis has helped us build that factory with a lot of their operational prowess and experience building vehicles for decades.
And then two is they've committed up to $400 million through the end of the decade to help with the manufacturing CapEx and the manufacturing labor. And so that facility will be coming online very, very shortly. And we'll be building production aircraft. And that's really important because given that the type design of the aircraft has matured to a point where we feel comfortable producing aircraft next year, those aircraft will ultimately be delivered to customers and will reach a point of about two aircraft per month by the end of the year. The second point is that we're rounding the corner into commercialization. Our goal is to launch in the UAE by the end of the next year. And we've got a very fortuitous position there. Mubadala has been a backer of ours since 2021, of course, the sovereign wealth fund of the Emirates.
And then two is earlier this year, we announced a deal with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office, which is a framework agreement to bring hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, helping us operationalize there. And a few very interesting things happened out of that. One is sort of having the backing of the national government to really help facilitate our launch there. Two is the pieces to start putting in place the infrastructure, both with existing infrastructure and bespoke infrastructure to form the launch networks. And then three is all of the sort of regulatory support from the country. So the GCAA, which is their national regulator, has spent a lot of time working with the Archer team, a lot of time at Archer headquarters to put in place what can potentially be an expedited pathway.
Our goal is to launch commercially there as soon as the end of next year, and that continues to be on track. Third was we announced some certification momentum, so this is the FAA Administrator, Mike Whitaker, in the aircraft sort of earlier this year. That relationship has continued to progress significantly. Just several weeks ago, Mike Whitaker signed the SFAR into law. That was a big step, not just for Archer, but really for the whole industry. Because one is it was done with a lot of industry collaboration, and sort of all the pieces that were left open closed pretty elegantly to a point where the industry said, "Okay, this is promoting the industry," and it was done in partnership with all of the big players in the industry. Two is they published it actually ahead of time, so ahead of schedule earlier than they said they would.
And that continues to show that the U.S. is taking kind of American leadership in aviation here. We also published just in our shareholder letter what our sort of updated view is post-SFAR around how to think about the certification process, so sort of the four phases there. And then finally, we showed our order book. So our order book now exceeds $6 billion with the newest addition from Japan. So we announced our deal with Japan's leading airline, JAL, as well as Sumitomo, of course, the large aerospace conglomerate. So with that, I'll let David get to the Q&A.
Thank you. All right. Thanks Nikhil. You mentioned a lot of things. We'll delve into most of them in pretty good depth. One of the pushbacks we get in general is that the producers of electric aircraft right now are trying to do a whole lot of things, and just getting to market and getting to certification in the U.S. seems to be a pretty big challenge, so how would you describe the focus? What are you doing to make sure that that is still the North Star for what you're trying to do to reach the U.S. market?
Yeah, look, the bulk of the team here, we have just short of 1,000 people at Archer. The bulk of the team is focused on R&D and certification, and so that continues to be the case. As we've talked about, our next big milestone there is piloted flight with substantially conforming aircraft, and then we'll continue to there through the final stages of certification. That's where the bulk of the effort continues to be. In addition to that, you've got a production team that's focused on manufacturing. I spoke about that earlier, and then on the commercialization front, we're working across all of these different regions.
The UAE has taken a big step forward and said, "Hey, we want to be the first in the world to go launch." So you've got embedded teams that are actually in the Emirates that are thinking about the infrastructure, the operations, all of the partnership, and all the government work there.
From the certification perspective in the U.S., and we'll get to the UAE here in just a second because that's a special case. But how should investors be thinking about the progress you've made towards certification? You did show the chart up here earlier. And what should we be thinking about from a timeline? Because it's been kind of a moving target a little bit for the industry overall as Administrator Whitaker has come on board and they've refocused the team.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, as I mentioned, the SFAR was a really big step forward. So our Chief Regulatory Officer, Billy Nolen, was Mike Whitaker's predecessor at the FAA as the administrator. So he was alongside Mike Whitaker at the signing just a few weeks ago. That was a big step forward because it sort of closed nearly all of the open issues that we were facing as an industry. And almost all of them were in a very positive sort of progress-forward way. And what that also enabled us to do is take more of a quantitative approach to how we were showing our progress. So this year's a chart that we didn't make up. We sort of took the FAA's four phases. And we were able to pretty concretely define where we are with each of them.
The first couple of phases, the conceptual design, the requirements definition, those were sort of commenced years ago and were completed with those. Phase three is what we call sort of substantially complete. There's one remaining kind of open issue by the FAA that we expect them to close imminently around emergency landings. But consider that effectively complete. Phase four is in process. We said roughly about 12% of that's been validated by the FAA. That's the one that will, it's the implementation phase. That's the one that we'll continue to report progress on here as we sort of complete that final phase of certification.
Given that the UAE is expected to be the initial commercial launch market, we should take that as a sign that that certification is probably not going to be completed next year?
Well, I mean, look, we're focused on delivering a safe aircraft, right, and the regulators, I think, all over the world will meet us where we're at. We feel very confident that we'll deliver a safe aircraft next year, and that will conform to what the FAA has published as our final Airworthiness Criteria. Then we'll see where the different regulatory bodies come in. The UAE is committed to us in a big way, where the GCAA, their regulator, said, "Look, our goal is to kind of complete that work by the end of next year," and I think the FAA is going to be not too far behind that.
How is the GCAA taking the work that the FAA has done, internalized it, and turned it around to make sure that you operate exactly there?
Yeah. Well, it's the exact same airworthiness criteria. So earlier this year, the FAA published its final airworthiness criteria for Archer and for our Midnight aircraft. What the GCAA has done is taken that set of airworthiness criteria, and they're holding us to the same bar from the safety perspective. So they're not deviating from that at all. The big difference is that they are sort of committing resources to this around the validation side. And so given the support that we've got from the royal family of the UAE, they have said, "Look, we're going to go commit resources to helping expedite the validation process in country." And then the government itself has said, "We're going to support you in all the other aspects too. We're going to make sure the infrastructure is in place." Our operator there, Falcon Aviation, is actually founded by the royal family as well.
We're working with Etihad, which is one of the top 20 airlines in the world, thinking about how passengers can connect in and out of Abu Dhabi Airport and also training the pilots. So we've really sort of started to build that whole ecosystem in the country.
I think you've highlighted that you're doing some for-credit testing now. You're definitely building the aircraft conforming. I guess, what are you able to do from a high-level perspective in for-credit testing right now? What are you flying, and what's the plan on for-credit testing in 2025?
Yeah. Well, taking a step back, this is really where the design philosophy of Archer comes into play. When Adam founded the company, the first thing we did was bring on our CTO, Tom Muniz. And the beauty of Tom is that he's been building these aircraft for 15 years. And so this is the eighth eVTOL that he's working on. He started 15 years ago with Larry Page building the aircraft for Zee.Aero. And sort of what he learned through that process was the first, call it, two or three iterations were largely vertically integrated. And that was great from an engineering perspective where they saw some issues was, hey, from a certification perspective, so any one of those pieces could be the long pole in the tent. And so when it came to designing Midnight, the approach we took was we're going to minimize every risk possible.
We're really only going to focus on building three pieces in-house. So that's the powertrain, the electric engine, and the flight control software. Virtually everything else, we are going to source from tier one suppliers: Honeywell, Garmin, Safran. For example, our inceptors, they are the exact same inceptors from the A220 built by a company called Crouzet. And so roughly 80% of the aircraft, the major subsystems are either already certified or substantially certified. And so when it comes to doing for-credit testing, a lot of that we're already able to start either on the component level or the subsystem level. On the aircraft itself, we're obviously flight testing that continuously. We've flown hundreds of hours with Midnight year to date. And then when we have the piloted aircraft, we'll actually be able to start flying that for-credit.
You did just deliver an aircraft to the Air Force recently. So one, is that supporting your test plan as well? And then I guess what's the plan in number of aircraft flying for testing kind of into 2025?
So sort of two questions there. So on the Air Force side, the support we've gotten from AFWERX and the Air Force has been pretty significant. The main thing it's really done is get its exposure. So what it's allowed us to do is start working with different branches of the military and getting the right decision-makers sort of in front of the aircraft to be able to understand the performance, understand the data coming off the airplane, and then also understanding the different use cases. So as they think about the Midnight aircraft vis-à-vis what they use today, like a Black Hawk or a Huey, they're able to see the aircraft significantly quieter and significantly more affordable to operate, particularly when they think about missions like moving VIPs 10 to 20 miles between bases or moving kind of cargo and other logistics missions.
As they think about those, they're able to understand, "Okay, here's how this would translate ultimately into a larger program of record." And we've started to see across the industry companies like Anduril really make a dent against some of the big guys. And so what AFWERX is doing here is really trying to stimulate more of the upstarts, as you called them earlier, the new entrants building kind of these multi-billion dollar programs of record. So that's sort of the first piece of the question. The second piece of the question was around how we are going to deploy aircraft next year. So our manufacturing facility, as I mentioned, is sort of weeks away from getting its certificate of occupancy. We will start rolling aircraft off of that line next year. We're also building aircraft at our low-rate production facility near our headquarters in California.
And so those we'll probably see deployed locally around sort of our R&D and certification efforts. And then the aircraft that we're building sort of out of Atlanta with the large facility, some of those you'll start to see deployed in these early markets. So the UAE, of course, will be one of them. Even here in the U.S., we'll be able to start flying those in increasingly urban environments under kind of what the FAA calls Market Survey. So being able to showcase those airplanes in urban environments and ultimately kind of ramp up to commercial operations.
The piloted aircraft, that's where you start really ramping up the payload and getting to the more intensive testing?
Yeah. All of the aircraft that I just spoke of, they'll be piloted from day one.
Stellantis, you had mentioned it's going to be a big part of the production facility, deeply integrated. I think you just announced an agreement for basically cost sharing to where they're coming in and bearing some of the costs. Can you maybe just give us an overview? Stellantis, I think a lot of these ladies and gentlemen in here are very familiar with the relationship with Stellantis and how you plan to leverage that going into 2025 and beyond.
For those of you who don't know, Stellantis is the third largest automaker in the world, owner of brands like Jeep, Ram, Maserati, and others. So they've been working with us for several years now. What we announced earlier this year was sort of kind of an agreement in principle around contract manufacturing. And so Stellantis committed up to $400 million to help us through the end of the decade around manufacturing both CapEx and labor. So that was a piece of it. But outside of capital, probably one of the more important things they bring is expertise. And so one of the things we think about a lot is they have so much experience around when is the right time to sort of automate different parts of the manufacturing process. Like I'll give you an example, paint.
You can paint an aircraft in several weeks or months, or you can paint an aircraft in several hours if you sort of use kind of robotic and automated ways to do it. When is the right time to do that is sort of a big question because that's a big CapEx expenditure that you incur, but you have to do it kind of in the right place in the manufacturing process. So that's just one of hundreds of decisions that we have to make where if you're trying to do it from scratch, it's very difficult to figure out the right way to do it. Stellantis has a lot of experience there. The other piece of that is thinking about how to get the right throughput for sort of square meter of footprint.
And so the footprint that we have is capable of scaling up to about 650 aircraft per year. We were able to do that in a very capital-efficient way. We spent roughly about $65 million building that facility. And the throughput that we'll get for kind of that expenditure, I think will make it very, very capital-efficient. And then the third piece is supply chain. Stellantis has an incredible set of folks that are very skilled at logistics and procurement. And so they're starting to help us with that part of the process as well. So as you think about procurement costs, kind of the supply chain and getting parts at the right time, they've been extremely helpful there.
I mean, they've had personnel on the ground. I mean, I think when I visited in 2022, there were people in your facility right there with Stellantis. Certainly, there's Stellantis personnel integrated in the Georgia facility right now.
Absolutely.
Helping ramp up.
Yeah. Dozens of full-time Stellantis employees, and so I think as people get to start to actually come out to the Atlanta facility, you'll sort of see that in action.
Another company we know well on our side is United. United was an early investor in the PIPE and into the de-SPAC process with Archer. I guess, yeah, how is that relationship involved? How are they going to be involved commercially in terms of you've announced Newark, Chicago, Los Angeles? How are you planning to roll that out?
Yeah. United's been a phenomenal partner on multiple fronts. You heard earlier that they have ordered up to $1.5 billion of aircraft, and so that was not only a substantial order, but I think the first in the industry as far as an airline goes to really step forward and say, "Hey, we see eVTOL as the future, and we're going to go invest in this and bring Archer's eVTOL into our fleet for our passengers." So that was sort of a big step. The second front's been on the capital. So they've invested in the company three times, something in the $60-$65 million ballpark over those three investments. On top of that, they also placed earlier this year a $10 million non-refundable cash deposit against that order.
And so they sort of put skin in the game and said, "Hey, we see significant progress, and we are very serious about sort of the order we've placed." So on those two fronts, they've been very helpful. And then, of course, we're focused on commercializing with them. So you think about Newark, San Francisco, L.A., Houston, Denver, Chicago, all their big hubs in the U.S. All of those are really great eVTOL markets. And so we've been doing a few things with them. One is thinking about the integration at those airports. The premier use case will be, let's say you're flying SFO to New York, you land here at Newark. Maybe if you're one of their more loyal passengers or business-class passenger, maybe you sort of get included as part of your flight, a transfer to the city.
And so you land in Newark, you're immediately transferred airside to one of our aircraft, and within six or seven minutes, you're in Manhattan. That's a pretty phenomenal experience versus today. You've got to sort of exit and take an hour Uber into the city. And so they're thinking about that across all of their hubs in a very deep way. Like earlier this year, the Houston International Airport, which United is leading a sort of multi-billion-dollar renovation there, they showed renderings of vertiports on top of the terminal at Houston International Airport. And so that makes the experience even more seamless. So we're working with them on things like that. We're working with them on kind of recruiting and training pilots, sort of all aspects of the commercialization plan.
They'll probably have a big seat at the table, but production, initially, you have the low production facility. You're going to be ramping up the high-volume facility. Production rate is not going to be able to fill that big order book all at once. So how are you thinking about, as a commercial officer, how you allocate those aircraft strategically? Obviously, UAE, like you said, is probably going to get the first crack. They've been investors as well. But once you get the go-ahead in the U.S., what's the plan on rollout for deployment there?
Yeah. And look, it's a multivariate problem, but it's a good problem to have. So there are a few things we think about. One is the commercial partners, right? Everything we're doing, we are doing in partnership with others who sort of can bring capital and the demand to the equation. And so United's been one of those that I think has continued to showcase that commitment. The UAE, as I mentioned, is another one. Another one's Japan. Japan, earlier, just several weeks ago, paid their first kind of cash deposit against their commitment as well. And so the capital's a piece of it, kind of that commercial commitment. The other piece is obviously sort of the regulatory and government piece. And so each of those partners has worked with us on the municipal level as well as the federal level of sort of wherever they're operating.
And so when we start to see kind of the capital click into place, the kind of integration with the rest of their teams pop into place, and then the regulatory kind of support pop into place, that's when we'll start to say, "Okay, it makes sense for an aircraft to be in Abu Dhabi. It makes sense for us to start flying in places like New York and LA." And we'll start to sort of announce more of that later in the year.
You had mentioned the SFAR coming out a lot there. I think we'll touch on pilots here in a second because that's an important part. One of the parts of the SFAR that was heavily commented upon and heavily commented by the FAA in response was the fuel reserve requirement. I'll try to summarize here briefly. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my read is basically all the aircraft that are going to be under visual flight rules will have to have a 20-minute reserve battery requirement, which is similar to what helicopters have today. And the FAA gave an exception by which on a route-by-route basis, if you have an alternate landing facility, they will consider deviations from that to allow less reserves with the understanding that some of these flights are very short, so for a six-minute flight, having a 20-minute reserve may not make sense.
Looking at that as on a road-by-route basis. So you were involved in the team that did all of this route planning years ago, certainly have all the data. What level of the routes that you're looking at right now will be able to fit within that 20-minute reserve requirement?
I mean, virtually all of them. The reserve requirement portion of the SFAR was very favorable, not just for us, but for the industry. It's kind of exactly what we expected and what we were sort of asking the FAA for. Years ago, when we found the Uber Elevate initiative, one of the very first things I did was we took all of the Uber data around how people are moving in and around cities in order to define what the eVTOL use cases should be, and the vast majority of those are kind of the 20mile-50-mile bucket. And so when Archer sort of said, "Hey, how are we thinking about the specifications of the aircraft range, speed, payload?" everything was designed around those back-to-back 20mile-50-mile trips, and so all of those fit very comfortably sort of within our battery capacity.
And then the reserve requirements are effectively what we anticipated. And so sure, there are like a handful of trips out there in the world that are obviously longer than that that we'll want to serve one day. But I think given how supply constrained the industry is going to be for the next five to 10 years, virtually all of the routes that we anticipate serving are very well encapsulated in that.
That's at the max range of the route with the max payload, crosswind, no issues from reserve.
That's what we're expecting right now, yeah.
Super helpful. One area that has made some pretty big progress over the last year is it seems like a lot of the industry is moving charging infrastructure towards a common standard. We've been of the view that that is where the direction of the industry is going to have to go because as you have a heliport, they're not going to want 19 different chargers for every kind of aircraft, right?
Exactly.
They're going to want to, in our view, have one standard where you could plug in potentially multiple types of aircraft landing. You could serve multiple companies that are operating. So I guess how are you looking at the evolution of charging infrastructure and how does the standard that you're working towards help you on an operational rollout perspective?
Yeah. Well, this is where the industry consortiums have been very helpful. So GAMA, the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, years ago pulled together all of the OEMs in the space, and they said exactly what you said, which is, "Look, infrastructure will ultimately be the choke point around how this industry scales. It's very important that you have a common charging standard there." And so all of the OEMs, I think except for one, basically said, "Look, we're all going to use CCS, the combined charging standard." And Archer really helps spearhead that with our partner Beta. So Beta is the company that's providing chargers for us. They've already started to install these at dozens of airports across the country.
And so I think everyone we speak to, whether it's airports or whether it's buildings that have a vertiport on top or will install one, are very excited that when they sort of spend the CapEx to put a charger in place, it's going to be interoperable for virtually all of the OEMs. And so that's been very helpful for us as we think about, "Okay, where are all the places you can fly in and out of?" And ultimately for consumers, making sure they have somewhere to go nearby that's going to be a good charging point.
Yeah. Urban markets are going to be a critical market for you guys. How are you thinking about the ramp-up in deploying vertiports around that? Is it initially going to be, like you said, airport routes? Do you see a ramp-up in urban area to suburban area come out? What is your thinking around a typical urban area, maybe in the US?
Yeah. Airport routes will definitely be a big part of it. If you think back to what I was saying earlier on Uber, when we sort of studied the traffic patterns, roughly one in six trips on Uber was to and from an airport. About a quarter of the revenue is from trips to or from an airport. And that's because airports are getting further and further away from cities and they're getting harder to sort of park at. And so given that people don't want to take their own cars. And so we see that as a really big eVTOL use case, particularly given you've already got the takeoff and landing facility on one side of it. So that'll certainly be, I think, a big part of the initial rollout. We also see commuter patterns. Imagine the tri-state area being able to go to and from somewhere like Greenwich.
It's sort of a big one. We think of sort of leisure routes, whether it's to places like festivals or concert venues, also as big. And what's great is that you can think a lot about the existing infrastructure. The United States has over 5,000 existing airports. We use roughly like 30 of them. And then on top of that, you've got another 5-10,000 helipads around the country. And so a lot of those, you can just go install an electric charger and then sort of turn into an Archer vertiport. And so we've already started to do a lot of that work. In LA, we announced an exclusive partnership with SoFi Stadium. We announced kind of eight or nine different FBOs that we'll use. We're the only company in the industry to partner with both Signature and Atlantic.
And so think about, in the L.A. area, think about Hollywood Burbank, Orange County, Santa Monica, LAX Airport, and a number of others, as well as USC. That was one example of a network we rolled out. And L.A. in the next few years is going to host the Super Bowl, the World Cup, and then, of course, the Olympics in 2028. And so that was very timely for us. So that's how we kind of think about building out the urban networks.
You mentioned airport travel. I guess what are the challenges in being able to do TSA-type security in the U.S. at your vertiport so that you can land inside security and then go through and not have to do it twice at the airport?
Yeah. These are all conversations we're having. It's also why we're not doing it all ourselves. It's why we said, "Look, in the U.S., we're going to partner with United and Southwest, two of the top five airlines in the world." And both of them, obviously, are very deeply embedded in the airports in which they serve. And so as we think about how to approach an airport like Newark or like LAX or SFO, we go in there with Southwest, we go in there with United, and really understand what the customer journey is going to look like, whether it's security or being able to sort of seamlessly transition between your Midnight aircraft and your commercial aircraft. And so we're starting to put the pieces of that in place today.
We talked about the SFAR earlier. Some of the things that were discussed, definitely more definite pilot training requirements. How does having that definite knowledge of what's going on with pilots help you from an operational planning perspective?
It's built a lot of confidence for us because now we can sort of with certainty say, "Okay, we understand what the process is going to look like to go train and certify pilots," and so we've sort of gone full speed ahead on that. A lot of the SFAR also sort of enabled heavy use of the simulators as well, and so for us, that put us in a place where we said, "Okay, we feel very good about the process we're going to go through to sort of bring pilots on board to Midnight," and we've continued to do that in earnest.
You think you won't necessarily have to have full big wing pilot experience to be able to come and train and become an Archer Midnight pilot?
Yeah. I mean, and again, this is one of the things we work closely with United and Southwest on. The way we think about it is if you're starting your career to be a pilot, first of all, being a pilot for Midnight is very different than being a commercial pilot because, again, we're doing sort of five to 15-minute trips. And so you don't have to, you get to sleep in your own bed every night. You can go do an 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM shift if you want and then go pick up your kids after work. So it's much more of a flexible job because of the urban nature of it. So given that, we think we'll be able to make the job very attractive to people who otherwise wouldn't have considered being a pilot. And so we'll bring in new pilots to go pilot Midnight.
And some portion of those, at some point, may choose to sort of graduate to a commercial airliner as well. And that's where, again, the airline partnerships are really helpful.
We focused a lot on the U.S., U.S.-based conference here, but initial rollout market, like you said, is going to be in the UAE. What's going to be different about operations there? What should investors understand about that deployment?
I think the big thing to understand is that the country is committed to Archer in a really big way. The support from the Royal Family has been phenomenal. The support from the regulators has been very constructive. They spent a lot of time at Archer's facilities. They spent a lot of time with the Archer team, and through that, we've gotten to know them really well. They've gotten to know us really well, and I think jointly, we feel very comfortable about bringing a safe aircraft to the country next year and ramping that up into urban commercial passenger operations. That's been very helpful. Third has been sort of the support from an infrastructure standpoint.
Abu Dhabi alone has five airports that we'll be able to go use, as well as dozens of helipads that we'll be able to go operationalize from day one at very prominent places like the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi. And then fourth is we've been able to bring on a phenomenal leader there. We brought on the strategy leader for His Highness Sheikh Khaled, the Crown Prince of the country. And he's also on the board of directors for the GCAA. So all the pieces are kind of coming into place. And it just gives us increasing confidence that feeling very good about our launch plans there and our ability to commercialize as soon as next year.
Financial confidence. Have to talk a little bit about finances. Our omath has you guys at a little over a year, year and a half of cash currently on the balance sheet. Every time you guys have gone out and raised equity, it seems like strategics have been very willing to partner up, pony up. How should we think about cash usage into 2025 as we're thinking about what capital markets transactions will have to look like?
I think a few things to think about. One is from a liquidity perspective, we're in a very fortuitous position, just over $500 million sort of at the end of the quarter on the balance sheet. That's the strongest liquidity position we've been in for 18 months. Two is, again, the Stellantis commitment of up to $400 million, puts us in a place where a lot of that manufacturing CapEx and labor will start to sort of get into that commitment. And so you'll start to see that sort of factor into our financials over time. And then third is our strategy around selling aircraft. We've got that $6.2 billion order book. We've already received some pre-delivery payments against those. Our expectation and our goal would be that those ramp up.
And so from a cash flow perspective, it's very advantageous because you can start to receive 1% all the way up to, call it, 50% of that order value prior to delivery. And so from a cash flow perspective, it puts us in a very advantageous position as well. So all three of those factors combined, I think, put us in a really strong financial position. And we'll continue to see that play out.
Even taking that into consideration, there's still going to be some needs for capital raises here, probably in the 2025, 2026 range.
Yeah. Look, we continue to see a lot of demand for people that want to put capital in the company. And so obviously, we'll continue to evaluate that. The position we're in now puts us, I think, in a strong place to get through commercialization. And if we want to take on more capital through that, it's something we'll certainly consider.
Nikhil, I have 40 more questions, but then we'll have to call it a time. Thanks very much for coming and meeting with us. Good luck the rest of the day.
Thank you. Thanks, David.