Tag: Archer Aviation

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Why NYC Could Become the World’s eVTOL Air Taxi Capital

Ask anyone who flies through New York regularly and they will tell you the same thing: the flight is the easy part. The hard part is the dozen miles between Manhattan and the airport. On a good morning, it is half an hour. On a bad evening, with a jammed tunnel and a downpour, it can swallow two hours and your whole mood. H.H. Dr. Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe thinks the answer is already overhead.

He is talking about electric air taxis, the small vertical-takeoff aircraft known as eVTOLs that lift straight off a city heliport, cross the skyline in near silence, and set down near the terminal in minutes. For the Prince, this is not a gadget fantasy. It is the next chapter for a city that has always sold time, access, and arrival better than anywhere else on earth.

The idea has already left the drawing board. In April 2026, Joby Aviation flew New York City’s first point-to-point eVTOL demonstration flights, working through the city’s existing heliport network with support from regional partners including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The demos ran between Manhattan heliports, including Downtown Skyport, West 30th Street, and East 34th Street, plus airport connections such as JFK. Reuters reported that the flights included runs from JFK Airport into Manhattan, presented as a step toward commercial operations and a real-world test of noise and performance in one of the most complex aviation environments on the planet.

The machines are small by design. Joby’s aircraft carries a pilot and four passengers, flies at up to 200 miles per hour, and can cover up to 100 miles, although commercial service still depends on certification and regulatory approvals. Archer Aviation, working with United Airlines, laid out its own New York vision in a 2025 announcement: a network aimed at cutting Manhattan-to-airport trips to roughly 5 to 15 minutes with its Midnight aircraft, against ground journeys that swing wildly with traffic.

That unpredictability is exactly what the Prince keeps coming back to. Anyone who has watched a departure time creep closer while stuck before a tunnel, or landed after midnight facing a long ride into the city, understands the problem without needing a sales pitch. An electric air taxi does not just save minutes; it removes the guesswork. For airlines, hotels, and concierges, that reliability changes how service gets designed. For passengers, it brings something rarer: calm.

Still, the direction is hard to argue with. JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark sit close to Manhattan on a map and far from it in traffic. Electric air taxis could finally bring those distances into alignment, adding a new layer to a city built on layered systems: subways, ferries, bridges, tunnels, and now the quiet route across the sky.

Originally published on Times Square Chronicles.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Archer’s Electric Air Taxi Just Flew Past Highway Traffic

The most persuasive argument for the flying taxi isn’t a rendering or a stock price. It’s a clock. On September 4, Archer Aviation’s Midnight aircraft flew a piloted roundtrip between Salinas Municipal Airport and Hollister Municipal Airport: 40 miles, cruise speeds of 125 mph, at 3,550 feet. Each leg took about 12 minutes. The same trip by car takes more than 40.

That’s the whole pitch, demonstrated in the sky instead of a slide deck. An hour-plus ground commute becomes a 10-to-20-minute hop. No emissions from the aircraft itself. A noise profile far below a helicopter’s. And a route that simply ignores the highway below.

This past weekend, September 26 and 27, Archer put that aircraft in front of the public at the California International Air Show in Salinas, flying both days alongside the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds and classic warbirds. For the second year running, an electric air taxi shared the flight line with the loudest machines in aviation, and the contrast was the point.

The No Roads tour

The air show appearance is part of Archer’s broader “No Roads” flight tour, launched September 3 with a multi-state demonstration of the Midnight aircraft. The tour started with city-to-city flights in Northern California, coordinated with the FAA, and is set to expand to Los Angeles, Texas, and Florida, building toward the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, where Archer aims to be part of the transportation story.

The tour follows an intense August of testing in which Archer completed more than 70 test flights. Salinas has been the company’s primary flight test facility since 2021, so the air show was something of a hometown appearance, with hundreds of engineering, operations, and flight test personnel on hand alongside the public.

The strategy behind the tour is straightforward: let people see and hear the aircraft. Skepticism about air taxis is largely about imagination. Most people have never stood near an eVTOL in flight. Watching one lift off quietly, cruise past, and land is worth more than any marketing campaign.

Where certification stands

The honest context: no eVTOL passenger service has been approved yet in the United States. Archer says it is the first to close phase three of the FAA’s four-phase type certification process. Joby Aviation, its chief rival, has reached stage four of the FAA’s five-stage process and begun flying its first production-conforming aircraft.

Meanwhile the federal government is generating real-world data through the Advanced Air Mobility Integration Pilot Program. Texas launched its demonstrations on September 10 with Joby and BETA Technologies flying around Dallas-Fort Worth, including operations at DFW International Airport. North Carolina followed on September 23, with Joby’s remotely piloted aircraft flying from Dare County Regional Airport to Raleigh-Durham International and BETA’s ALIA aircraft running test flights between regional airports.

The message from regulators is consistent: the hardware is ahead of the rulebook, and the pilot programs exist to close that gap with operational data. Certification remains the pacing factor for the entire industry. Nobody serious pretends otherwise.

The manufacturing race

Certification gets the headlines, but manufacturing decides the business. Archer opened the conversation this year around scaling production of Midnight, and the tour doubles as proof that the aircraft coming off the line can fly real missions.

Across the Atlantic, the competitive picture keeps shifting. Vertical Aerospace opened a dedicated £1.5 million assembly center at Cotswold Airport on September 25 for its Valo eVTOL, targeting UK certification in 2029, while also announcing a strategic review with Jefferies advising. The field is sorting itself into companies that can build at volume and those still searching for a path.

Archer’s bet is that demonstrating the aircraft publicly, repeatedly, in front of regulators and crowds, builds the confidence that certification and commercial deals require. A 40-mile roundtrip at 125 mph is a small thing in aviation history. As a piece of evidence in a certification file and a sales deck, it’s substantial.

What it means

For travelers, the timeline is still measured in years, not months. But the shape of the service is getting clearer: short hops between airports and city centers, priced initially for premium travelers, expanding as costs fall. The Salinas-Hollister flight is the template. A 40-minute drive that becomes 12 minutes in the air is the kind of time savings people pay for.

For cities, the infrastructure question is arriving now. Vertiports, charging, air traffic integration, community noise standards: the cities that start planning while the aircraft are still in testing will be the ones with service first. Los Angeles, with the 2028 Olympics as a forcing function, is the case study to watch.

For investors, the eVTOL sector is splitting into two stories. One is the certification grind, slow and expensive, where Joby and Archer lead. The other is the demonstration phase, where public flights build the political and commercial support that makes the grind worthwhile. Archer is playing both at once, and the No Roads tour is the visible half.

Stand on a highway at rush hour and look up. The airspace above the traffic jam is empty, quiet, and waiting. This weekend in Salinas, something electric flew through it while the crowd watched. The future of the short hop isn’t a faster car. It’s skipping the road entirely.

For more on the future of flight, see our Breaking News coverage, including Waymo’s robotaxi fleet surging 49 percent in Texas and Aurora’s plan for 30,000 driverless trucks by 2030.