Okay. Good morning and welcome to the JP Morgan Industrials Conference. This conference actually has a long legacy with airlines and, you know, aerospace defense companies, leasing companies. This is the first year we're actually adding some urban air mobility companies. To kick off today, the first of three companies, we have Archer Aviation. I'm really pleased to have Mark Mesler, the CFO of the company. He's gonna walk us through a presentation, and then we can move on to Q&A. Mark, welcome, you know, look forward to hearing the presentation and moving to Q&A. Thanks for joining the conference.
Yeah. Thanks for having us, Bill, thanks for everyone for joining and on the webcast. As Bill said, Mark Mesler, I'm the CFO of Archer Aviation. Archer Aviation is, I would say, a new breed of aviation developer and manufacturer in the urban air mobility space. This picture here is of our production aircraft, which we call Midnight. The distinction of our aircraft is it is an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. You may have heard the acronym for this is eVTOL. That's a buzzword in the market right now. Essentially, an eVTOL aircraft has the attributes of a helicopter during lift, during takeoff and landing, where we're generating lift from those propellers that you see on the aircraft.
We transition into forward flight, where the lift is borne by the fixed wing. That's what an eVTOL aircraft is. It is all electric. It is sustainable. It is quiet. Relative to helicopters, it is an extremely quiet form of transportation. Our goal is to get to commercialization in 2025, and I'll talk through the steps that we're doing to make that a reality. What's the problem statement that we're trying to solve? Let's just take L.A. as an example. L.A. has over 50 million daily trips, of which 5 million or more take an hour terrestrially to get to the destination. Vast majority of these trips are less than 50 mi.
Folks are spending clearly a lot of time, and this isn't just an L.A. problem, this is a New York City problem. It's any major urban metropolitan area. What we've done is we've modeled when we develop our production aircraft and the technology that we use to develop it, we use data to help us drive what the problem statement was. This is an output from an application we developed internally called Prime Radiant, where we model consumers' movements throughout the day from 6:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M. We're able to assess where the big demand, and where the big routes are within city centers, and across a number of urban environments.
This is the use case we're specifically targeting. How are we doing that? Midnight, our aircraft, is targeted for 1,000 lbs of payload, which will allow us to have four passengers and a pilot. We look at that, you know, 20-50 mi mission as core to our core to our use case. We think that can take 10-15 minutes. Typically, that's an hour and a half on the ground. Range of our aircraft is up to 100 mi, at 150 mi per hour.
The use case that I just walked through, the sweet spot is in that roughly 20-50 mi range because that'll allow us rapid back-to-back missions for some of the routes that we're talking about, which I'll get to in a second. Relative to a helicopter, we have no single points of failure. Highly redundant in terms of the technology that we're deploying. As I said, they're designed to be very quiet, unlike the single rotor on a helicopter that rotates near the speed of sound.
We have a 12 -tilt -6 propeller technology that we developed. The speed with which the rotors are rotating are a lot lower, so the sound profile is significantly lower than that of a helicopter, which opens up a lot of a lot more use cases and environments for us to operate in. Sorry, sorry, Bill and Mahima. I have Morgan Stanley's urban air mobility market sizing.
We have a view too. Don't worry about it.
It is the largest out there, so we picked it. It's, you know, $29 billion by 2030 and $1 trillion by 2040. What we've done and what we're in the process of doing is doing a bottoms-up view of this market opportunity as well. When we look at routes and the routes that we can service, you know, we could have 20 to 50 different routes within a major metropolitan area. I'll get to some of the unit-level economics later, and you can see why this becomes a very big market very fast. How are we getting to commercialization? We had a strategy to not just develop a science project. We're in Silicon Valley. We see a lot of these science projects where companies sometimes just don't get to market.
They continue to innovate, but they don't have a real use case for them. We started with the premises, what is the fastest path to get to commercialization? That made us drive a number of decisions. One is we had a business case led strategy to develop a technology, which I just articulated. We wanted to have a minimum of four passenger aircraft. We wanted to be able to focus on those 20-50 mi use cases because that is where the preponderance of the demand we see in cities. We wanted to have and we developed battery technology that allowed rapid back-to-back missions so that our technology, we can charge our aircraft in 10 minutes for the next 20 mi mission.
When we think about commercialization, we specifically developed our use case and technology around that. Secondly, clearly, with an aircraft, we have a certification process we have to run through with the FAA. We did not design an aircraft, take it to the FAA, and have them certify that because 9x out of 10, you're gonna have to have a redesign if something doesn't meet the FAA specs. We actually were designing our aircraft in parallel to discussions with the FAA so that we could be very iterative in our design process. That allowed us to get to our air certification or airworthiness criteria with the FAA last fall in a very expeditious manner. Finally, there is a mature supply base for FAA-certified parts that go into aircraft.
You think of the Garmins, you think of the Honeywells, you think of a lot of the, a lot of the incumbent aircraft developers are using a very mature supply base, and we wanted to leverage that supply base as well. However, we wanted to in-house and develop internally what we felt were differentiating technologies within the sector. For us, that is the propulsion system. We went out and sought some of the best propulsion minds in the world, both on the battery side as well as the engine design side. We sourced our leader of our propulsion team is Dr. Michael Schwekutsch, who, he came from Tesla. He helped develop a propulsion system for the, for the Model 3, as well as helped in their manufacturing process for that.
We have experts from Lucid, from all of the big Silicon Valley tech companies, including Apple's Project X, that have helped us and have designed a propulsion system that had we went out and sourced that from a supplier, we would have had 30%-40% more weight. As you can imagine, payload and weight reduction in aircraft design in order to enable payload, that 1,000 lbs of payload is clearly critical. We designed our own propulsion system in-house. Our own battery technologies and battery packs were designed in-house using commercially available battery batteries themselves. Finally, we had these parameters, as I said, the four passengers plus a pilot, the sequential 20 mi missions, and minimizing direct operating costs. We think that when we combined all those together, the strategy is paying off.
We were able to check the number of boxes last year, we're well on our way to achieving a number of commercialization milestones this year, next year, including certification with the FAA. Here's our timeline. Through the end of next year, clearly, we've been working on the development of the aircraft, which I just talked about, to meet those use cases. The heavy lift between now and next year is gonna be the certification with the FAA, as well as starting to ramp manufacturing, and build what we call conforming aircraft to do the tests for the FAA certification. In parallel, we also recognize that we can't operate serially in terms of developing the market for these.
We have to develop the market in parallel. We have a head of airline operations that is helping us, you know, think about what these, what these little mini airlines or routes look like. We're working on financing of the fleet itself. We're also working on what are the routes that we need to address when we get to commercialization. I'll talk about that in a second as well. From 2025 to 2028, this is where you start seeing the nascent industry start to develop. We have a strategy, a two-pronged revenue strategy, which I'll talk about, but whichever one, whether we're selling the aircraft or whether we're operating the aircraft, there have to be routes that these aircraft fly.
We have a strategy of a trunk versus a branch route, and think of a trunk route as city center to an airport. There's high demand there's a high ability to pay. You have trunk routes off those that, you know, like from a heliport here in Manhattan to Greenwich or somewhere on Long Island or out in New Jersey. Those would be branch routes off of these networks. We've also announced last week we broke ground. We're starting construction on our high-volume manufacturing facility in Covington, Georgia. We will the goal of that the goal of that manufacturing facility is to be able to manufacture up to 650 aircraft per year out of the gate.
Not that we will build that many, but that's the capacity of it. Building out all of the infrastructure such that, you know, 2025-2028, we can start early operations, and then we'll see, once we, once we see the market adopt this, 2028 and beyond is where we see larger volumes and scale of manufacturing and operations. Here is our technical demonstrator Maker, and you'll see this take off like a helicopter, and then it transitions into forward flight, where you're transitioning the lift from the propellers to the fixed wing. This is in our Salinas, and I think the webcast can't see the videos, but this is in our Salinas test facility. Maker achieved its first full transition flight in late November, early December of last year.
Full transition means that those propellers are locked into forward, full forward, horizontal placement, and you're traveling at over 100 knots forward. I think we had a chase plane for this one. We didn't have a chase plane for when we achieved... It's expensive to have a chase plane, so CFO, I think, nixed that unfortunately. This is our production aircraft, Midnight. This is at the Palo Alto Airport. We unveiled this in November of last year. I think Bill and Mahima were there when we unveiled this. You can see this is the one that we're going to market with and we're gonna get certified. It is a pretty sleek, forward-looking sort of Blade Runner type technology. We're pretty excited about this.
I'll talk a little bit more about the design aspects of this in a couple slides. To do this, we felt we needed some really valuable partners, and we've been fortunate enough to partner with United Airlines. United Airlines is a major investor in the company. They're also an operating partner. We're on the phone with United, you know, weekly. They're also a customer. We have a billion-dollar agreement with them for 200 aircraft with an option for another 100 aircraft. That's up to a $1.5 billion contract with them. Last fall, we announced a $10 million deposit received on the first 100 aircraft, which is, in aviation parlance, called a predelivery payment on the first 100.
They are a go-to-market partner as well. We're working with them to figure out what are the right operations for this, what is the right repair cycle or calendar look like. We also announced with them last fall our first commercial point-to-point route, which is from the 34th Street Heliport down here out to Newark Liberty International Airport. It's a 20 mi route. The unit level economics of this, I was just you know, I fly into Newark all the time, as you guys probably do as well. It was $100 from a cab from Newark to my hotel, and that's like $6.50 per seat mile. That's about where when we get into unit level economics, I'll talk about that a little more.
This is the first commercial point-to-point eVTOL route that's been announced in the industry, and we're excited to work with United. You can think about this as the value of this is we think we can get, we're working to get the aircraft beyond the TSA. You could go through TSA down here in Manhattan, get on the aircraft, 10, 15-minute flight out to Newark, and you'll be, you know, you're beyond TSA there, and you can just get your gate to your next to your next point of point of destination. We also have a really good partnership with Stellantis. Stellantis is the merger of Fiat Chrysler with Peugeot. Carlos Tavares is their CEO.
Carlos has a unique perspective on this space because he is the chairman of clearly of a large automotive manufacturer at scale. Stellantis produces 500,000, close to 500,000 cars a month. He was also on the board of Airbus, he understands manufacturing aerospace defense products at scale as well. Stellantis is helping us build out our factory in Georgia. They're bringing a lot of expertise for scale manufacturing. We're helping them. We understand the certification process with the FAA. We understand eVTOL. We understand a number of the aircraft aspects of this. Stellantis brings the scale manufacturing. Our goal is not to manufacture dozens of these as we get to commercialization. Our goal is to manufacture thousands of these eventually, if not tens of thousands of these.
Stellantis is helping us think through that. Secondly, they're also an investor, as I talked about. Third, they also just provided us with an equity option to draw down another $150 million of capital from them over the next two years upon completion of certain business milestones that are loosely tied to some development milestones and certification milestones. They've just been a fantastic partner to work with, very forward-thinking. I think they look at themselves as more of a mobility company. They're playing a big role in helping us scale our operations as well. As I said, we announced our Covington, Georgia factory. Covington's developing into a little bit of an EV corridor. Rivian is putting a facility there.
LG Batteries are putting something there. We have access to an airport, which is big for us, the Covington Municipal Airport. We've got 96 acres there, of which we're building out our first phase of this. The factory is a 350,000 sq ft factory, which will be capable of producing up to 650 aircraft per year. That has the ability to expand another 550,000 sq ft to roughly 800,000 sq ft. At that point, we'd be able to manufacture up to 2,300 aircraft per year.
You know, again, thinking about and trying to not only have the technology in place for 2025, but the ability to produce, the ability to market, and the ability to operate. Let's pivot to our business model a little bit because this is something, as an investor, you clearly wanna understand. We're going to market with two specific and unique revenue streams, is one, there's a clear market for buying these aircraft. The contract or agreement with United for the 200, with an option for 100 aircraft, we act as an OEM. We sell the aircraft to them. The ASP on those, if you look in the public documents, is roughly $5 million on aircraft. Archer Direct, we call it, we will sell to an operator.
We also want to operate these aircraft to help build out that network or Urban Air Mobility network, and we call that Archer Air. We think that in that case, we would recognize revenue by the drink. With every, you know, from every passenger, from every flight of the 4-seat aircraft, you would recognize revenue at that point. Two unique revenue models. One probably a little more lumpy in terms of the Archer OEM or Archer Direct. Another one has more of a lifetime customer value over 10, 12, 15 years of the aircraft life, and I'll get into some of that economics here in a second. Here is some of the unit level revenue economics, and I think we've got a conservative number here.
Typical ride-sharing, 25 mi distance, you know, $1.50 per seat mile. This may be a couple years old, 60-minute trip, 10 trips per day. You know, you've got maybe $140,000 from a car ride share, like an Uber type model. For us, at a 25 mi trip, say 150 mi per hour speed, $3.30 per seat mile is pretty. I would say is an average outside of like maybe some of the bigger, the bigger cities. As I said, I think at a minimum, we can get $6, $6.50 per seat mile. If we're trying to size this and get our costs so that we can compete in the, you know, the $3 per seat mile.
You can get up to almost $2.5 million per aircraft, 25 trips per day, 365 days a year, fourr passengers, $2.5 million per aircraft per year. That probably goes to three and a half if you're at $6 a seat mile. We, it publicly, folks have been talking about operating these at roughly $2 a seat mile is the cost on these. I think the big unknown, we understand the cost of the pilots, we understand the cost of the aircraft, we understand the cost of electricity, et cetera. The big thing that's still being sorted out in the industry is landing fees. They're fairly expensive right now because there isn't a market for this.
I mean, landing a helicopter in Manhattan, you know, five, 10x per day versus 25, you know, 25-45 landings per day from an aircraft. That's the thing I think the industry is still working on, is what do the landing fees look like in the economics. This gives you a high level view of how to think about, you know, on the OEM side, you know, $4 million-$5 million in aircraft sale. If you're operating, it's probably $2.5 million-$3.5 million of revenue, but a longer lifetime average because you're gonna get that over 10 years. Team, we've got a really experienced team. Adam's our founder. Tom, he was employee number one in this industry. Tom Muniz, our COO.
He has personally developed and designed eight aircraft from design to flight. Geoff Bower, our chief engineer, very similar. Tom was Larry Page hired him with Zee.Aero, which was really the first company in this space about 10-12 years ago. Geoff has worked with Airbus Vahana on their aircraft. Dr. Michael Romanowski, who's our head of government affairs. He was the head of technology at the FAA, so he's helping us navigate the FAA landscape. The guy who designed that cool aircraft that I started off with is Julien Montousse. He came from Mazda. Really great guy. Finally, Dr. Michael Schwekutsch, who's the head of powertrain. I referenced him earlier. He runs our propulsion systems, has just done a fantastic job there.
Timeline to certification. Loosely talked about these, but this year we're working on. Last fall, we got our airworthiness criteria published in the Federal Register with the FAA. The companies in this space are loosely working on our means of compliance right now, which it tells the FAA how we're going to comply with our airworthiness certificate. We're in parallel, we're working on what's called subject certification, subject-specific certification plans, SSCPs, of which we're gonna have 18 eventually. You can think about the airworthiness criteria is a document of about 40 pages or so that we give to the FAA.
The means of compliance is a document that's roughly 400 pages, and then the subject-specific certification plan is gonna be like 4,000 pages of documentation because the SSCPs are the specific, "Here's the test that we're gonna run across our aircraft system and systems to get to compliance." Once we get all that finalized with the FAA, then we have to go out and test against those, which is largely what's gonna happen next year. Our first piloted flights will begin in Q1 of next year. Heretofore, it's been autonomous. The first Midnight aircraft that we're building right now is gonna be autonomously flown, but the first piloted flight will be first part of next year.
At the end of 2024 is when our goal is to get our type certification. With that, I mean, just wrapping up, I talked about us executing the most efficient path to commercialization. I think we've also focused on realistic innovation. One of the things that you'll see with Archer is we're not betting on the next big battery technology. We're not betting on the next big tech to unleash our product. Our product is using readily available technologies right now. I do think that we've got a realistic path in using realistic innovation to get to commercialization. We've got a production aircraft, which right now so far, four passengers and a pilot have continued to be validated.
Got a couple revenue streams that sort of de-risk the business, strong balance sheet. I had $531 million on my balance sheet at the end of December. Got an option for another $150 from Stellantis, we remain very well capitalized. With that some forward-looking statements, they were made, those are safe.
All right, great. Thanks for that overview. I'm gonna kick off a few questions, but, you know, happy to take some from the audience too, but, you know, I guess if we look at a two-year period, 2023 and 2024, and maybe kind of stepping back from the details to, you know, where are we in certification today? What has been accomplished? What needs to be accomplished over the next two years to beat your timeline? Maybe, you know, obviously people talk about type certification aircraft, but you have production.
Yeah.
You have operations.
Okay. Certification is sometimes sounds like a nebulous concept with the FAA, but I'll break it down as to how we look at it. There's really two major parts to certification. One is where you tell the FAA what you're gonna do, and they agree with that. Then the second half is you go and you do it, and you perform all the tests. I just walked through the airworthiness criteria, which we came to an agreement with the FAA, like, "This is what you're gonna go certify on your aircraft." We got that into the Federal Register. We're currently working on what's called our means of compliance, which is where we're telling the FAA how we're going to go and validate the airworthiness.
We're working on that piece right now, and then we're also working on the very specific certification plans, the SSCP. Those two are being parallel path right now. We just discussed on our earnings call last week that our goal is to get all of the SSCPs submitted with the FAA by the end of April. The means of compliance, we have largely completed everything on our end, and have submitted that to the FAA, and at this point, we don't see any pushback on our design parameters, et cetera. We feel pretty good about where we are with the means of compliance. We're working with the FAA to get that done, as well as the SSCP.
That'll take us through, you know, let's just say, Q3 of this year, loosely. For 2024, we'll start pivoting the end of this year, and through next year, we'll start manufacturing what's called conforming aircraft, which means aircraft that conforms and is FAA compliant. We've already started that in our supply base, and by the end of this year, we'll have our first conforming aircraft manufactured, and we'll start piloted testing in Q1 of next year. All of next year, we'll be going through the testing process with the FAA that proves out and checks the boxes on all of those. That is, and as Bill referenced, that is primarily the airworthiness criteria. That's showing that the aircraft is safe and can be operated according to the FAA.
There's also two other certifications that we have to get. One is a manufacturing certification that essentially you have a quality management system that is, that is blessed by the FAA, that's saying that every part that you're producing and all aircraft you're producing is complying with FAA standards. We're starting to work on that, instituting what's called a manufacturing execution system right now in our factory, and that will be done in parallel with the airworthiness. Finally, there's a type certification, Part 135 certification, which allows you to operate the aircraft as well, and that's done in parallel. I'd say that the most difficult of those is the airworthiness certification. The manufacturing is not terribly difficult.
You just gotta comply to some manufacturing standards, and then the Part 135 is, isn't terribly difficult either. Hopefully that's a little bit of a tutorial, a lot of words for the FAA certification process.
Yeah.
Trying to distill it down so at least you have an understanding of it.
You've taken a two-pronged approach. You have the partnership, obviously, with United, you know, direct sales, and maybe perhaps there's other means to do direct sales. Obviously you wanna operate a network. How should we think about the payback periods per aircraft and maybe the cash flow profile through time? You talked about 50%, 50% kind of at the start, but how does that kind of play out over a longer period of time?
Sure. We look at the Archer Direct or the OEM business as a complementary or a build for the UAM business because while we're gonna deploy these in networks that are, we think are high demand and ability to pay, such as those trunk routes that I was talking about, they're still gonna take some time to build those out. To help fund that and build those out, we believe selling aircraft to operators will provide some working capital to do that. You know, loosely, if that's $4 million-$5 million an aircraft, we think that that's probably a 2 - 2.5... less than a 2 year payback for an operator for us, clearly.
The cost for this industry, and we've talked about having like a $2 million-$2.5 million cost to manufacture these. You can see for, I mean, for us, that's a 1-2 year payback, depending on the ASP. Pivoting to the UAM side, that is a longer-term sort of service that we'll be operating, depending on the market. We think it's, you know, it's $3 or $6 a seat mile. If I can get the $6 a seat mile for a trunk route here in Manhattan to Newark or to JFK, LaGuardia, that's a operating 25 trips per day, 365 days a year, assuming like a three passenger.
I don't wanna assume four passenger capacity, conservatively it's like three passenger, that's about $3.4 million. That's, you know, that's a year and a half to 2 year payback as well. If the demand's there and we're operating these, it's a fairly, you know, it's a fairly early payback.
Yeah. Maybe that kind of leads to, I guess, Prime Radiant, because this will be probably what you use to inform maybe, you know, not only your network, maybe also United, but, you know, one of the key things is utilization. If you have one passenger, you're losing money, presumably two, maybe break even, who knows, three.
That's right.
It's better. Four obviously is the best. How is that gonna be deployed, you know, practically and, you know, I guess even thinking about it from a city level, how are you gonna make decisions on this, the cities, maybe whether it's yourself or your network or maybe United?
Yeah, that's a really good question. The demand profiles for the cities aren't random for us. We've taken a very data-driven approach to sizing markets. Actually, when I say markets, I don't mean just the city, I mean the specific routes within cities. We had a gentleman, his name's Dr. Jon Petersen, he came from Uber Pool, and he was one of the first employees within Archer. He and his data science team have developed an application called Prime Radiant. What Prime Radiant does is it monitors cell phone data throughout the day and models how people move through the city.
We can be very specific if we wanna look at a you know, metropolitan area like a Miami, New York, Chicago, L.A., we can get very specific on using that data and how people move within the city. We know in every city, Prime Radiant shows us that one of the big traffic patterns is from center city to an airport. That's a really good starting point for us for a trunk route. Again, I've said a couple times, ability to pay and demand. We would start there. Then from there, Prime Radiant shows us what the next big routes are. You know, we could go and we could look at Manhattan and/or the greater metropolitan New York area and say, okay, what would...
If I wanted to deploy 75 planes there, what would a network look like? Prime Radiant will take all of that data and model out the number of nodes, could be eight to 10 to 15 nodes, the number of aircraft per node, and what we think that the volume is going to be or the throughput over that route is. We use that. I mean, clearly it's directional data, and we won't know until we get on the ground and start operating. What that does is it takes the randomness away. It's not like, hey, we think this is gonna be a good route. This looks cool from, you know, Parsippany to Manhattan. It's like, this thing tells us, yeah, if you do this is what the ASPs you're gonna be able to garner.
This is what, the number of flights per day you're gonna get. This is the number of aircraft to be deployed. It's a really good demand, indicator for us that we're using to model out how we're going to market.
Just pause here and see if anybody has any questions before moving on. Okay. Wait for the microphone, please. Yes. Is the fuselage made out of aluminum?
No, this is all carbon. fuselage, tail, wings, it's all carbon fiber.
How much does weight are? Repeat the question.
Yeah, sorry. The question was, two questions. One was, is the fuselage aluminum? No, it's carbon fiber. The follow-on question was, how much are we saving relative to aluminum? I'll be honest with you, I don't know that answer, but we could follow up on that.
I think the important thing is when you know, you have to talk about a 1,000-lb payload, if aluminum weighs more, that takes away from range. It, you know, it adds different, you know, certification changes, right.
Yeah. I mean, we do. I mean, we're like, we debate and we scramble for grams, right? I mean, because that's how important payload, just as an aside, payload finds you don't find a payload. Like, every design decision you make across the aircraft, if you choose to go with a Rolls-Royce engine, if you choose to use aluminum, if you choose a certain avionics system, every gram matters. You'll hear our teams in our sit-in meetings where we're debating on whether to use this part or that part so we can save, you know, grams. Happy to follow up and I just don't know relative to aluminum how much we're saving.
Before we went out, I just want to see if there are any questions from the audience. Okay, maybe sticking on this, on the bill of materials, right? I mean, in addition to weight, you obviously have to have performance, but you've talked about 80% of the BOM settled upon. You know, are these fixed prices? I mean, what are the opportunities to drive down BOM or maybe more importantly, just meet the target cost structure that can give you know, the margins you discussed in the presentation?
That's a good question. I mean, cost reduction is something that's near and dear to my heart. I came from clean tech. I mean, daily, we were trying to how much cost can we take out of the product. We generally we are getting fixed, you know, fixed volume and price contracts with our suppliers that, one, secure supply, but also you know, reduces any commodity risk, et cetera, going forward. We look at the cost not only for the BOM itself, but other areas to operate these. We know what the pilot costs are, as I said. We know what the costs for maintenance, for batteries, et cetera.
The opportunities for reducing costs are not only within the BOM, which we'll go out and get. I'd look at those as sort of standard. We'll go negotiate. Once we get start seeing volumes, we'll go back to our supply base and start negotiating some incremental costs out of there. We also, from the network standpoint, we can get more efficient with how we're operating. We can look at what the repair maintenance costs are. Batteries are an area that initially they're consumable for us. They're gonna be replaced roughly probably once per year on these aircraft. You know, getting longer life on batteries, things like that will help us reduce. We've got a number of vectors for cost reduction that are fairly modest to get to our targets, honestly.
I'm hoping, I'm hopeful that we have even some more upside on that.
It's an interesting thing too. A lot of the airframe guys, a lot of their key cash flow is related to aftermarket. What kind of opportunities do you see there? You mentioned maybe potentially battery replacement. How do you think about aftermarket opportunities over time?
Yeah, I mean, typical for aviation, there is an opportunity to offer the repair and overhaul of, that's what it's called, R&O, repair and overhaul opportunities. That is a clear and present opportunity for us. Batteries have a second life. I mean, our batteries, in order to get to that fast charge, high cycle time, if we pull them out after a year, there is a second life for those that could be used at the local vertiports, potentially to even operate and charge the aircraft at the vertiport. There's a number of use cases for those. Tom Anderson, who's our head of airline operations, and I spend a lot of time discussing what does the R&O framework look like.
My past lives, R&O is a profit center that actually helped companies through downturns. We think there's a significant opportunity for R&O here, which is consistent with sort of typical aviation R&O, where you're offering not only the service of the aircraft, but also, you know, the parts and materials that potentially have to be replaced.
See if there's any questions before moving. Final couple questions. One here, please.
I have a question. I presume it floats. This will float, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are specific FAA requirements around sort of like if you have to ditch the plane. This actually is required to have reserve battery power to get to the next vertiport. We've got actually 30% of reserve power. It's fixed wing, it also has a glide path. If, you know, I think up to 2-3 of these propellers could fail or the battery pack themselves could fail, this could still operate on its own power with the remaining propellers. Second, it can glide. This thing will, you know, can glide to a conventional landing.
While this is a vertical takeoff, this has wheels on the ground works. You've got the ability to glide it for a conventional takeoff and landing as well. We hope we never have to float, but it's carbon. It'll float.
Final question. you know, use of cash, obviously, you know, revenue's not until 2025 if things go well, presumably. What is your run rate? you know, when we think about your next big CapEx related to Georgia, Is there any way we can think about cost-sharing, you know, the capital requirements for you and your partner, Stellantis?
Yeah, we think we're and we've publicly said we believe we're gonna displace, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars with the partnership with Stellantis. There's clearly a daily cash burn, what we see with Stellantis is we're gonna be able to bring in a number of experts that are gonna help us design our process steps, the CapEx which we would deploy there. Eventually, the goal is for them to become our contract manufacturer. Under the assumption they become our contract manufacturer, you know, they would clearly be buying the capital equipment to scale the business and, you know, I'm sure in our piece price, we would have to pay for them over time. From a cash flow standpoint, that really frees up hundreds of millions of dollars for us.
It's a really good relationship with them.
Unfortunately, out of time, Mark, thanks a lot for the presentation and the question and answer session. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you. Thanks again for having us.