That intro video.
It's funny, that video was actually originally made for the All- In Summit, so the All- In podcast. I presented like a segment at the summit this year, but that was the toned-down version. The original one is the Thunderstruck, and it's like super hard-hitting, and it's like I was, well, first time I was watching the redo because I told the guys, "Hey, I'm presenting at a conference. You can't do the crazy All In version," so that one was the toned-down version.
Just to formally introduce, this is Adam, CEO of Archer Aviation. I'm with Chris Pierce with Needham. This is the 27th Annual Needham Growth Conference. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for coming out from the West Coast.
Good to be here.
appreciate you having me, and we're going to have a fireside chat format. Any questions from the room, just raise your hand. We can work those in as well. Thanks again for coming. I guess let's start really big picture. When investors leave this room or when they leave meetings with you, kind of what do you want them to take away on your path to certification? That's sort of the industry hot-button topic, whether that gets too much focus or too little. We can talk about that, but how do you want investors to think about the path to certification?
The industry is actually quite mature. It's been worked on since 2009. And in 2025, you'll see the culmination of all that work come together where we officially launch aircraft and put them into the market. I think maybe the biggest misunderstanding is there's like this one moment that everybody's waiting for where the FAA hands you like a type certificate and says, "Go." There are lots of paths to start deploying planes to get ready for a larger launch. And I think you will see that in 2025 when we deliver aircraft into the UAE, where we start actual operations. We can start flying people, and you can start to see this new technology actually into use. And then we can shift the conversation to, "OK, in theory, this is a really incredible idea. You can take these vehicles. They're safer. They're quieter. They're much more affordable.
But what is the experience like? Can this be scaled? Can we make any money doing this?" and we'll start to move into that phase of the development, which I think is going to be most exciting. That will all get proven out, or at least the start of that journey will happen this year. The second thing that you should think about is we are not just an air taxi company. We are a company that is building the future of vertical lift, and so we have a new big defense initiative, and there's opportunities to win very large contracts in the defense space in the relative near term, and so you'll start to see Archer more as a platform and not as just an air taxi company.
And then if we do think about the air taxi side of the world or the aircraft side of the world, let's just start there, how should we think about Archer's strategy? What do you want investors to take away? As an OEM, as an eventual air taxi operator? What's the right way to think about framing the usage of the equipment from your perspective?
My long-term vision is that aviation will move autonomous. But that's a 10, 20-year vision that will certainly be a long road to get there, not because the technology on the OEM side isn't there, but more because all of the infrastructure around has to be changed in order to support that. But that being said, the journey to getting there, I think, will be introducing new types of aircraft like Midnight to help move that journey along. So Archer will focus very heavily on selling aircraft in the early parts of that journey. And as we get more mature, we will still operate some as we are learning the business and we are starting to introduce all the autonomous capabilities.
But I envision it more of like a Tesla Cybercab type of setup where you build stuff, you sell stuff, and when you operate, you're largely trying to move towards this more autonomous world. And that's going to take some time. And the operations that we do will help build all the lessons we need and the technology we need to launch that long-term vision.
OK. And we've got a new administration coming in D.C. The FAA, we're going to have a new head of the FAA. How should investors think about regulation or just broadly how these changes affect your business, if at all?
At least the environment in Silicon Valley right now where we're based is the most optimistic I've ever seen it. People are excited because it's a chance to go build stuff with the hope that there will be less things blocking, and so that is true across, I think, many different industries, whether it's the fintech or, in our case, transportation. We have seen very positive signs from the administration that they want to do things differently. I spent time at Mar-a-Lago where the transition team spent time asking CEOs in tech companies, "What do we want to see changed?" Like, write it down. Actually give us real ideas, not just, "Hey, we're going to do things different." Like, actually tell me the ideas you want to see changed, and so all the signs are certainly there that we can see things, and the question is, what can be implemented?
And so I think one is around the FAA is obvious. It's what things can be done to help make the FAA as productive as possible, as efficient as possible, and helping to advance a lot of these programs. It's not just advanced air mobility. It's the same thing with the large OEMs, the Boeings, the Airbuses, want more progress on their side too. So I think there's an openness to doing things differently. And so that's created a lot of optimism. But we have to see if anything gets delivered.
OK. OK. And we talked about the UAE a little bit. Can you talk about why the enthusiasm for an air taxi network in the UAE, why it's a good fit, why start there, and why they've been pushing the ball forward?
Yeah. So Mubadala is the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi. So Mubadala has been an investor in Archer for a while. And then there was another fund, which is a fund that is run by Sheikh Tahnoon, which is the brother of the president of the country, who's also an investor in Archer. And so there's been a lot of support for the industry from the beginning. And I think that was important. Number two is UAE itself is a very successful startup. It's like a startup country. It's done extraordinarily well. If you haven't been there, I'd recommend you go there and see what's been built in a really short period of time, from not a lot to incredible world-class cities in 20 years. And that is just simply unbelievable. And they think of themselves as a country that wants to lead across lots of categories.
And technology is certainly one of them. And so there's a great, interesting opportunity in advanced air mobility to capture some of the benefits in technology with a, I'll call it, more productive regulatory setup. So when we go through the FAA laid out all the rules that we have to go test against. And there are periods of time where you have to go do all the tests, and you get credit for all those tests between that time and when you actually will get a type certificate just saying you can fully start operating. What the UAE has said is, "OK, well, we're going to follow the same FAA's rules. They wrote the rules. They know what they're doing. It's been going on for many, many decades.
But we can try to take advantage of that time period where the tests have been done and there's less of a discussion about what comes next, and we can instantly let you get going," and so it'll be early operations. It'll be lower cadence of stuff. All the data will be shared back with the FAA. It should be positive for everybody, but it's an opportunity to let them go early, to show the world that they are a great place for technology companies to come and to really push that global leadership. From our perspective, we just need to put aircraft into the market and collect lots of data and lessons. We need to understand all the things from how this is going to interact with existing airspace, how the consumer experience is going to be, and how we make this a big scalable business.
So when you look at the chart we put out showing manufacturing volumes. The first two years, so '25 and '26, are largely about us learning, not about us. We're not trying to maximize profit. We're not trying to build as many airplanes as possible. We're trying to launch a new category, learn from it, make sure it's ready for the big time as we scale up into the hundreds and hopefully thousands of aircraft.
So if we look at where you're a year from now, what are the checkmarks that investors would have seen in '25 in the UAE, and what would make it a success in your mind?
I think there's two categories that you have to work your way through. One is on the regulation side, and that's largely the certification process, and the second is on the operations side, so in the UAE, there is a certification process we have to go through as well, and so we'll step our way through that process. On the operational side, there's lots of things that have to happen, so the infrastructure has to be ready, meaning there are existing heliports that we're working with that will then become electrified that we can go use to charge. There have to be pilots that go through training, so we have simulators and training programs that we're working through in terms of training them. There are all types of operational things that we need to go do with maintenance, pilots, training, infrastructure across operations, across everything.
The good news is we have the support of the country and the leading companies there, so whether it's Etihad, Etihad Training, Etihad Engineering, Falcon Aviation, which is one of the big helicopter operators, they're all on board to help us set this up, and so you'll see pieces of the infrastructure get put in place, and you'll see pieces of the regulation get put in place in order to help us do this. We'll talk about it on the earnings calls as they progress, and you'll start to see kind of the pathway to get there.
OK. And if we move beyond the UAE, we're sitting here in Manhattan. Some of us flew here. You flew here. Just sketch out what the sort of the holy grail might look like on an airport trip. However, you don't have to put a number on it. Five years from now, 10 years from now, what does it look like for a consumer that can afford this type of transportation?
First, I think it's interesting to just understand why an airline would do this and then to help understand what they would do and to understand why they would do it, so if you take like United Airlines, United is their New York City airport is based in Newark. It's on the west side. Their business model is really based around flying long-haul flights and capturing first-class, business-class travelers that pay the most. And that's how they make money, and so the question is, how can they sell more of the expensive seats, and so if you look at some volume will go unsold in the premium seats, and they will upgrade some of their passengers, the 1Kers, the Global Services, the premium economy, and so instead of taking a $700 ticket and converting it to a $3,000 business-class ticket, they upgrade you.
Basically, they don't make any money on that. But what if you could sell those seats? Could I go market them to people in Brooklyn who typically won't fly out of Newark because it's too far? I'd rather just fly to JFK. Could I market those to people in Westchester? And if all of a sudden I can eat the cost of the flight, meaning say it's $100 each way, $200, and now I can sell a $3,000 ticket instead of a $700 ticket, and I make an extra $2,500 net on that, that's a good deal. And so they look at this as there's a real financial incentive for them to do that. It's not even like darkening out the skies with air taxis. It's how do we just sell the most highest margin seats that we have. So that's why they do it.
So then the question is, OK, it's going to start with their premium customers, so they want to make it a premium experience. So the good news is these planes can take off and land vertically. So where are we going to put the infrastructure at the different airports to help make that experience really good? And so that's the learning process to get there. The dream, the sort of multi-year dream that's out there, is that it's so liquid you don't even have to really book stuff. You can just show up and just take it or not. You don't have to pick a seat. That's like the dream. It's very, very liquid. But that's many years away. I think that's like I don't know how many decade-plus kind of years.
The more realistic version of all this stuff launching will look something like lots of airlines and operators buying low amounts of aircraft and integrating them. So the way I think all of this launches is you'll have an operator like a United Airlines. So United will say, "OK, if we're really going to launch in Newark, that's like a big deal. Newark is complicated airspace. It is a very small airport, and there's not a lot of room. So if you want to land near Terminal C or whatever, I got to move 737s around. Where am I going to put those 737s?" It is a very tightly run operation. You're going to mess with that? I need to understand how this really works because I will lose revenue day one unless this works. OK, so we need to get you some planes. That's what you need.
You need to figure out how this is going to work. We need to go talk to the airport managers, air traffic control, the people who are going to charge it. Where are these planes going to sleep? Where is everything going to go? So the Uniteds of the world are like, "When can you give me planes? Get them to a safe place. Get me some planes. We can test all this stuff out, and let's get going." That is true for every airline across the world that's looking at this that's interested. They just want access to the vehicles. So what I think the big misunderstanding is everybody's waiting for this FAA certification. Like, "You got your type certificate. Boom. It's the one big thing." I do think it's obviously very important.
I think the precursor to that will be companies like Archer delivering aircraft to customers that are figuring out how this is going to work. Dollars will be changing hands, and you'll start to see the build-out of the fleet. So let's say Newark needs two planes. SFO needs two planes. LAX needs two planes. OK, there's six planes that are out there. OK, how many airlines are there out there? There's 5,000 airlines globally, 2,000 of them of any reasonable size. Let's say 30% wanted to try eVTOL. OK, well, if 30% of 2,000 want to try eVTOL, that's a lot of planes that we would go give two to five planes to all these different companies.
So I think the more realistic rollout of the first, let's call it, 5,000 aircraft that get sold will be handfuls of aircraft to lots of different people all over the place that we can go give out there. It will not be the darkening of skies in Manhattan. It will be more of lots of stuff that's out there. All of a sudden, Archer will have tens of billions of dollars of revenue, and it won't be necessarily this fully ubiquitous program. And people will be like, "How did that get so big?" It's a big world, and there's not a lot of people selling this stuff. And so it offers value. There are very few people that have the supply.
And so I think that's the likely way it goes because that's the least path of resistance to fighting the not-in-my-backyard story, the competing engagement that we need, all the stuff that's going to take to roll out a big program.
Can you talk about the order book then and how airlines play a role in sort of what you talked about, pricing and margins and the guidance you put out there as far as unit production?
Sure. So the interesting twist on the order book now is the large, I would say, fast-moving interest from the defense side of things. And so whether we make civil or defense applications, they will all still come out of our same factory in Georgia. And we have the ability to expand that factory in Georgia. But again, it's going to take time to ramp all this stuff. So we're not going to be able to just build 2,000 airplanes day one. That would be very, very, very, very challenging. We put a ramp kind of place out there, roughly 10, 50, 250, 650 of showing a theoretical ramp of what you could ramp a factory like that. So the question would be when you get to year three and you have the ability to build 250, where do those go?
If you have a military application, do you sell them into the defense side, or do you sell them into the civil side? And the obvious question will be, well, where's the margin in the business, and what are the commitments to the different customers? And so I think there's opportunity, hedged opportunity, let's call it, on both sides. So on the civil side of things, we have announced several big partners. We always start from a country-level perspective first. So when we go into the UAE, we meet with the government. So we talk to the equivalent of Secretary of Transportation, so the transportation ministers, the commerce ministers. We say, "How is this important to your country?" When we went to India, as an example, so we're working with Rahul Bhatia, who was one of the founders of IndiGo, the largest airline in India.
We did a partnership with them, and they brought us to all the important ministers and even up to Prime Minister Modi and said, "OK, what's important to the country to do this first? Because there's real infrastructure problems." That's the same thing with all the big groups you work with: Japan, Korea, and so on, and so it starts with the top. We partner with the largest, typically, transportation companies in the country, and then we devise a plan over a long period of time on how to scale production, and so again, I think it will be handfuls of planes to all these different groups so you can start to seed the markets for all of them, get everybody learning how this is going to work, and then all of them, you start growing those portfolios over time.
OK. And how should we think about you've talked about infrastructure a couple of times? How should we think about the west side helipad, the east side helipad, new locations in New York, and take that example to other cities? Is this a difficult conversion? What needs to happen? Or is that sort of something that we have time? Or what's the right way to think about the infrastructure needs?
Access to infrastructure will definitely be one of the challenges, but the good news is there are existing helipads. New York has a lot of them. LA has a lot of them. UAE has a lot of them, so in the UAE, if you went to Dubai, Palm Jumeirah has a handful of helipads. Those are all owned, operated by Falcon Aviation, one of Archer's big partners, and so these things exist, and so we will start by looking at the existing infrastructure and then adding the necessary things to get us operational, which is typically charging infrastructure. We use a very similar technology as what they use on the ground for EVs, so 2C-type charging, and it doesn't take much to get that going.
The sort of quick hack to get that going fast is you just use a diesel generator to power all that stuff, and you don't need to dig up the ground or anything. So there's plenty of ways to get it going fast, but the long-term solution is to put in all the electric charging equipment. I think there's companies like Tesla, which have tens of thousands of chargers all over the place. There's a lot of other groups that have chargers, too. We don't need that many. So if you think about the vertiports, the sort of heliports that we would electrify, you're talking like tens and then eventually into the hundreds. But we're not talking about into the tens of thousands anytime soon. So there's plenty of time to go do that. The lift is modest.
It's not super crazy, but it definitely is a thing that has to get done and will take work.
OK. We're about halfway through. I just want to open it up to any questions from the room. OK, so moving on from that, you talked about pilots as well, and the FAA had their SFAR that they put out the second half of this year. What do you need to scale up for pilot training? What does that look like?
The pilot training side, I think, will be very interesting. In the beginning, I think we'll get a surge of aviation enthusiasts that want to fly the newest, coolest stuff, and so we get lots of people that will say, "Hey, I'm a retired pilot. Love to come," or "I'm a commercial general aviation pilot. Love to come," but I think we will create a whole new crop of pilots that will grow more organically. A lot of pilots come from the Air Force, and that's kind of like a good feeder to the commercial aviation program, but globally, the Air Forces aren't that big, meaning the U.S. has a very large Air Force. There's a lot of pilots, but if you go to a place, like pick another country, Japan, it's just not nearly as big as what the Air Force in the U.S.
The good news is the products are cool. And so they're easy to fly. And I think there's a new career path that people can be attracted to go do it. And so the pitch to a new pilot to come fly for United is a tough pitch because it's, "Hey, come learn how to be a pilot. Go to flight school. Get 250 hours. Get another 250 training." And then you still need another at least 1,000 hours before they're even allowed to hire you. And then typically, the senior pilots all have thousands and thousands of hours. So there's a missing block in between pilot training and flying for an airline. And it makes sense, obviously. You don't necessarily have the new pilots flying the most complicated, largest aircraft. The good news is our aircraft are not complicated. They're very easy to fly.
I can teach anyone in this room to fly the plane in 10 minutes. They're all fly-by-wire. The computers largely do most of it. You point the sticks in the direction, and it largely is flying on your behalf. So they're relatively easy to fly. Being a pilot is a great career. You have a really nice career trajectory. There's a huge need for pilots globally. Aviation is still growing massively. And so I do think this will be a feeder into the global pilot program.
OK. Oh, now we have questions. Why don't you start in the front? Oh, start in the back. Sorry. Let's just start in the front.
Following that thought, autopilots existed for decades on airplanes, so it's an inherently easier problem than the two-dimensional problem of cars on roads, and I know you've done some work there already. When do you think we'll see autonomous flying in detail?
So like you said, we fly them autonomously today. And so it's not a technology gap. It's more of a, I'll call it, regulation and infrastructure gap, meaning the rest of the world doesn't really work like that. So ATC, like air traffic control, is all humans talking to humans. And so today, there's not exactly solutions on how to solve that stuff. So the FAA is working on that. NASA is working on that. There's Boeing working on that. There's companies that have long processes to go try to get through this. But I think it's more of almost like a whole changing of the guard of the entire system will happen. So when we work with some of our airline partners, we went to them and said, "Hey, here's the movement control stuff we built. We'd love to talk to you about what you guys built.
Let's see how the pros do it." One of the big parts about movement control is what they call IROPs, or irregular operations. Because if you take a company like United, they have like 1,000 airplanes. Something like 50 of them will be down any given day, either maintenance or there's a weather event or there's something that takes part of their stuff down. They have to figure out how to redistribute people, crews, all that stuff. It's complicated. A lot of that stuff today is all done manually. So it's done by hand. They're hand doing it when your flight gets canceled because someone decided, a human decided, to cancel that one and go with a different one. An algorithm did not automatically do that.
So if you imagine it when Uber started, Uber did not go, "Oh, let's go do what the cabs did and have a physical dispatcher and do that." They went, "No." It all went straight to digital. So as we're looking at this, we built stuff with all digital in mind. And so when we looked at the whole system, the way it works today, it's unbelievable. It's all manual. And you're just like, obviously, pilots should never miss the runway. A human should not have to do that. The machine can do that every time, like 1,000 out of 1,000 times. It'll never miss. And so there is definitely an insane opportunity to go build all the software applications to help upgrade it. And you have to start it at the OEM level. It needs to be started from the beginning.
All that stuff has been taken into consideration. We don't go out there and sell this because we have to launch the pilot itself first. So we don't even really promote it because everyone's working on it, but it's a thing that is hard to quantify when that will ever happen. So it's not built into our business models or anything. But I do think what will happen naturally is that companies like Archer will start to be viewed as much more software-heavy than anybody actually understands because it's the software that's the backbone of everything we do. And that's the key infrastructure. And then all the stuff that makes it work is all software-based. And so the same thing, if you take the Tesla Cybercab analogy, it's like, "I don't want to go build a big manual system right now.
I want to have the thing that can do it itself and when the world's ready for it, deploy that." And I think that becomes a way more profitable business over time than trying to recreate a human-intensive, heavy manual business like the way the old world was built.
Yeah. I just had a question. Maybe it's too niche, but about the pilot training hours. If you're using the fly-by-wire technology, would the FAA actually consider that as hours towards your regular pilot's license? Because are you flying a completely different aircraft that is different?
So yeah. So yes, the hours count. A lot of what the early hours build up are; it's not even as much of what this knob does versus this knob because lots of the airplanes are all different anyways. And so a lot of it has to do with just a situational experience and a situational awareness of being up in the air when things go wrong and lots of time to be able to stay calm and go through all that stuff. And so pilots build lots of hours to just be able to observe all types of scenarios. And so I think it does make sense. But if you are going to switch aircraft, you have to go get different ratings for different aircraft to allow you to do that.
It's not just like, "Oh, we pop a Silver to a 787 and let me go." There's still another courses and stuff you have to go through and training you have to go through, but you are gaining the experience, and I think it's a gift because right now, what happens is there's just not a lot of pilots because there's not a lot of jobs. What do you do in that middle period? You go fly cargo. You can go fly Part 135 private stuff, but they're not generally hiring younger people for that, still bigger planes, so this gives an opportunity to gain hours where today, there's not really an opportunity to gain a lot of hours.
How about command and control links? Is there a different FAA-certified or directional command and control links from the ground to your vehicles? Or are you going to use the old satellite-based aircraft?
When we launch, everything will be based on existing infrastructure, so we are not trying to introduce things from the very beginning that will structurally change the way air traffic control works. I think that's a very ambitious task. I do think over time, that can be done, and there's a lot of companies that want to do that. There's a lot of companies that are trying to help do things different and move different industries in a different direction, so for example, on the defense side, the reason that we are excited to partner with Anduril is because they're doing that, and so they work with Palantir. Palantir builds a really good back-end system and how to manage all of your ERPs and MESs. It's like if you're going to build a lot of stuff.
Oh, because we're talking about air links.
Yeah.
So out-of-band, obviously, you can't have in-band signaling for something like this. Is it the air links into the network, a real network over the air? Are you going to be satcom-based? Or are you going to be terrestrial-based wireless?
Yeah. I think a lot of the way that we will launch and the way that the industry will launch will be the lowest friction paths to do that and not really pushing any of that too far, and again, the goal is going to be everything V1 will be lowest risk path to get everything going because there's a million things that can go wrong to prevent this industry from starting to then advancing everything, so it goes back to the core strategy of what we built. So it's so tempting to want to go build everything for these planes, but we focused on things like, let's go build a powertrain because you can't buy it.
I mean, at the end of the day, you're going to make or break your gear, right?
Yeah.
What does FAA want on command and control links?
Yeah. I don't know the exact answer to that. I think there are multiple paths, but that's certainly not a point of contention today. Yeah.
If we think about the path to, like you laid out, the path of least resistance, can you kind of tie that back to your OEM strategy in terms of partnering with aerospace suppliers versus building everything on your own vertically integrating?
Yeah. You can be successful both ways. It's not like one's right and one's wrong. They're just different tactics on how you go do it. And then there's a risk spectrum to going to do that. So when launching this business, there's lots of new things we have to go do. And so when I first started talking to Tom Muniz, who's my CTO, we had this very conversation. And so Tom was the head of engineering for Zee.Aero, which was Larry Page's company. And they built five generations of aircrafts. Today, it's called Wisk. Boeing owns it. And so Tom built all those planes. The plane they still fly today, that Tom was running engineering when they built that plane. And so the challenges that experienced OEM builders have define what you do next.
And so, because he had built five generations and Archer now had built three generations, it's eight generations of planes. There were a lot of lessons where things that we just didn't want to do again that he had already kind of lived through. So one of the biggest challenges about these aircraft is the physics around payload. And so batteries are only so good. And so batteries are very heavy. And so they're at this point of the curve where batteries got good enough, energy dense enough, power dense enough where you can actually start to move, lift enough stuff, and fly it far enough and fast enough that somebody would be willing to pay you for it. If you can only go 10 miles, it's not that valuable to somebody. Why would I pay you for that? I can just take a car. I can bike.
I can walk. I can take a cab. So it got to this point where you got that. But even then, when you started to look at all the stuff off the shelf, some stuff worked. Some of the stuff didn't. So when you work with a regulator and you introduce a new piece of technology, you have to convince them that that piece of technology is going to be as safe as the stuff that exists or is going to be safe enough to hit their standards. So 3D printing is like a good example. You can 3D print parts. They're not saying you can't do it. They're just saying we might not have ever seen that part being 3D printed before. We might not have ever certified that before. Obviously, it's going to be riskier than a thing that's already been certified before that's not 3D printed.
Off-the-shelf, it might even be pre-certified. They have literally a certification that comes with that part. Obviously, that's going to be less risky to do that. So the powertrain is hard. The powertrain is the new thing. You have to build a very lightweight, high-powered powertrain. And so if you look at the world and you're like, "OK, there were like 1,000 eVTOL companies. Why is it that the two leading ones are neighbors? Why is it Archer and Joby are both within a 20-mile radius of each other when there's an entire world?" And it's because the powertrains are all built in-house at both those companies led by people from Tesla. And it's all people that have 20-plus years of building high-powered, lightest, lots of generations of electric powertrains. And that's the real answer.
And so I remember when one of the companies came to me and said, "Hey, we're going to go use Rolls-Royce." And I said, "I've looked at it. It's so heavy. I just don't know how you'll make the math work." Because any weight you give to any one of the individual components reduces the weight of your payload. So that system we were comparing to was literally 900 pounds heavier than the system we were using. And so that literally wipes your entire payload. So I just don't even know how the math could possibly ever work. So it's build the stuff that you have to, build the stuff that you want to control the core IP around, but then why take the risk of the other stuff when you don't need to? Over time, we can do that. Sure.
Generation two, generation three will vertically integrate a lot more. But generation one, we're not going to do that.
And just lastly, can you talk about we've talked about regulation a bit here. Talk about regulation as a moat for the industry and for yourself, for Archer.
Yeah. I do think, again, that's sort of what everybody views this industry's biggest risk is, I think, is its biggest reward, its biggest upside. And that's regulation. And the reason I think that's important is these vehicles are complicated, and they will only grow more complicated over time, especially as you introduce all the autonomous features. And so software will become a very big part of this whole story. I don't think there is a desire for there to be 10, 20 new companies out there. I think it's hard enough to manage two big OEMs today. And so there is a real desire to have this category work, not because people want it to work, but because America needs to maintain a leadership in aviation. Air dominance is a core part of our defense strategy. And China built very good hardware. And so we have to build.
There's almost like not a choice. You have to do it, but that doesn't mean they want 20 of them, and so because that becomes very hard to control and how to understand and all the upgrades and changes, it's how do you track down all this stuff. So I do think that there's a nice mix where there's going to be some companies, but there's not going to be companies that just pop out of nowhere and, oh, boom, there's a new Tesla one. We would know about it. Everyone would know. Specialized engineers, they'd have public programs that would be you would see them in the Federal Register with the FAA. All of it's very transparent, so it does provide a nice moat, and it will give, I think, the leaders a good opportunity to gain some real headway in market position.
OK. One last call. Any questions from the room? No? Well, why don't we leave it there? Adam, thanks for your time.
All right. Thank you.