I fly for a living and I pay attention to aircraft that actually have to carry people safely through controlled airspace. Over the last two years the market has been awash with headlines about air taxis, production partnerships, and eye-popping order books. That enthusiasm matters because capital funds testing and manufacturing. But pilots measure progress by repeatable, verifiable safety margins, not by press releases or preorders.
Take Archer’s Midnight as an example. Early 2023 brought a high profile manufacturing tie up with Stellantis to help scale Midnight production and even provide capital support. That announcement changed perceptions about the feasibility of mass manufacturing overnight, and it helped spark fresh buying interest in eVTOL equities.
On the engineering front Archer publicly rolled out its first Midnight conforming airframe for company testing in May 2023. That was a meaningful milestone. It does not however substitute for the long, methodical series of piloted, witnessed test points the FAA will require to prove an aircraft is safe enough for carrying paying passengers.
From the cockpit perspective there are several hard safety barriers that will decide whether Midnight, or any eVTOL, can move from demo flights to regular commercial operations. First is the certification maze. Aircraft certification is not a marketing timeline. Archer and other manufacturers have explicitly warned investors that there is no guarantee of timely type certification, and that certification delays could materially affect service launch schedules. Investors who buy on a narrative of ‘fast rollout’ should understand that the companies themselves list certification risk up front.
Second is the regulatory divergence and technical stringency. European regulators have advanced special conditions for VTOLs that in some cases impose extremely low probabilities of catastrophic failure, comparable to large transport category airplanes. Those kinds of requirements drive design choices toward heavier redundancy, more rigorous qualification testing, and complex means of compliance. In short, the rules shape the aircraft more than the marketing copy does.
Third, the battery and energy system challenge is not hypothetical. Lithium based cells give the energy density that makes eVTOLs plausible, but they bring thermal runaway, containment, and certification questions that aviation has wrestled with for years. Designing battery packs with containment, robust battery management systems, redundancy in power and control architecture, and maintenance regimes that prevent cell damage is a non trivial engineering and operational problem. Pilots and operators will need clear procedures for battery health monitoring, emergency response, and recovery. Historical aviation battery incidents taught us that solving one set of problems can reveal another. (Operational lessons from legacy battery events remain instructive.)
Fourth, operational integration is significant. Getting a functioning urban air mobility service requires more than aircraft. You need vertiport infrastructure with charging and firefighting provisions, a mature urban air traffic management stack that can handle low altitude corridors, trained crews and maintainers, and local regulatory buy in. Even companies that have deep order books acknowledge these operational and infrastructure hurdles as potential brakes on commercialization.
That is not to say progress is not real. Joby and others logged production prototype milestones in mid 2023 and regulators have granted flight test approvals that let companies move from bench and prototype testing into more formal production testing. Those are the right kinds of steps. They are also exactly the steps that consume cash and time while exposing engineering risk. Investors focused on near term returns need to accept that the technical program is what ultimately determines safe commercialization.
So what should a practical operator, regulator, or investor take away? If you are an operator or a pilot you should demand evidence: well documented failure modes analysis, redundant safe-flight logic, battery containment testing and a clear maintenance regimen, plus human factors work that shows pilots can manage failures under realistic conditions. If you are an investor you should discount top line preorders and marketing milestones against the likely extended timeline and capital intensity of achieving certification and safe operations. The market has already shown itself willing to bid up eVTOL companies on momentum, but momentum does not equal an airworthiness certificate.
In plain terms, Midnight purchases by strategic partners and equity investors are endorsements of the business case and manufacturing intent. They are not the same as regulatory approval or operational maturity. For someone who flies or manages flight operations the checklist for accepting a new aircraft for revenue service is long and detailed. Until those boxes are checked in public, witnessed certification programs, FOMO driven buys are optimism, not operational readiness.
Finally, treat the next 12 to 36 months as a period of trench work. Expect iterative design tweaks, more conservative scheduling, continued regulatory dialogue, and pilots and maintainers getting up to speed on new failure modes. Celebrate milestones, but let certification, redundancy, containment, and operational integration be the gates that determine when eVTOLs move from investment story to safe everyday transport.