Archer Aviation and the eVTOL Certification Race: Two Paths to FAA Type Certification

The Race Nobody Has Finished

As of early 2026, no eVTOL aircraft has received FAA type certification. Every major player in the space — Joby Aviation, Archer Aviation, Lilium’s successor entities, Wisk, Overair’s remnants — is navigating a certification process that the FAA itself is still actively defining. The standards are being written alongside the aircraft. That is not a criticism of the FAA; it is simply the nature of certifying a genuinely new category of aircraft.

Joby has received the most public attention as the certification frontrunner. But Archer Aviation, developing the Midnight air taxi from its San Jose headquarters, is running a credible parallel track. Archer recently reached Stage 3 of the FAA’s type certification process, has secured a commercial launch agreement with United Airlines, and has a manufacturing partnership with Stellantis that is unusual in the eVTOL industry. These are not vaporware milestones. They represent real engineering and regulatory progress on a genuinely hard problem.

Understanding what separates Archer from Joby — and what they share — reveals something important about what eVTOL certification actually demands from systems engineering organizations.

Midnight vs. Joby’s Aircraft: Different Architectures, Different Certification Surface Area

Archer’s Midnight is a twelve-rotor aircraft. Six rotors are dedicated to lift; six handle cruise. This is sometimes called a “lift-plus-cruise” configuration. The rotors do not tilt. At transition from vertical to horizontal flight, the lift rotors slow and the cruise rotors take over. It is mechanically simpler than a tilting-rotor design, and that simplicity has direct implications for certification.

Joby’s aircraft uses six tilting rotor-propellers that transition from pointing up (for vertical flight) to pointing forward (for cruise). This configuration achieves higher cruise efficiency — Joby claims ranges exceeding 150 miles — but the tilting mechanism introduces mechanical complexity, additional failure modes, and more intricate software-hardware coupling during the transition phase.

Neither architecture is obviously superior for certification. They present different challenges. Archer’s lift-plus-cruise design means the FAA must assess two distinct propulsion subsystems and the logic governing transition between them. Joby’s tilting-rotor design concentrates complexity in the rotor mechanism itself and in the flight control software that manages the transition.

What both designs share: a degree of software-hardware integration that has no direct precedent in certificated aircraft. Both aircraft rely on fly-by-wire systems with no mechanical backup for most control surfaces. Both depend on battery management systems with real-time fault detection. Both require flight control software sophisticated enough to manage distributed electric propulsion across multiple independent rotor systems. In both cases, a failure at the software-hardware interface is a potential flight-critical failure.

This is the certification surface area that keeps systems engineers employed — and stressed.

Stage 3 and What It Actually Means

The FAA’s type certification process for novel aircraft types proceeds through several stages. Stage 3 — where Archer currently sits — is where the real documentation burden begins. The applicant must demonstrate to the FAA that they have a credible means of compliance for each applicable certification standard, and begin presenting substantive engineering evidence.

For conventional aircraft, this process is demanding but well-precedented. The standards exist, the means of compliance are understood, and certification engineers can draw on decades of prior applications. For eVTOL aircraft, significant portions of the applicable standards are being developed in real time through the FAA’s Special Conditions process and through standards bodies like ASTM and SAE. Archer, like Joby, is not just complying with standards — it is participating in defining them.

That creates a moving-target problem for requirements management. When a standard is revised or a new Special Condition is issued, every requirement derived from that standard must be re-evaluated. Every piece of compliance evidence linked to that requirement must be reassessed. In a document-based requirements environment — the spreadsheets and Word documents that still characterize many aerospace programs — this kind of change propagation is manual, slow, and error-prone. At eVTOL scale, with thousands of requirements and tight development timelines, it is a genuine program risk.

The Stellantis Partnership: Manufacturing Scale as a Systems Engineering Problem

One of the more strategically interesting aspects of Archer’s position is its manufacturing partnership with Stellantis, the automotive group behind Jeep, Fiat, Peugeot, and others. The partnership is intended to bring automotive manufacturing discipline — high-volume, tightly controlled production processes — to the Midnight assembly line. Stellantis has committed capital and manufacturing expertise; Archer provides the aircraft design and certification strategy.

On paper, this is a significant advantage. Automotive manufacturers have solved production-at-scale problems that aerospace startups typically have not. Stellantis knows how to manage complex supply chains, implement statistical process control, and maintain manufacturing consistency across high volumes.

In practice, it introduces a systems engineering challenge that Archer will need to manage carefully: the interface between an FAA-certificated design and a manufacturing partner with automotive rather than aerospace cultural instincts. FAA production approval — the Production Approval Holder certificate that must accompany type certification for commercial operations — requires that manufacturing processes be documented, controlled, and traceable to the certificated design. Every deviation from the approved design must be formally assessed. The configuration management discipline required is closer to aerospace than to automotive norms.

This is not a criticism of Stellantis. It is a structural challenge that Archer’s systems engineering organization must bridge. The question is whether Archer has built the engineering processes — requirements traceability, configuration management, change control — that can absorb a high-volume manufacturing partner without losing the audit trail that the FAA requires.

Joby, by contrast, has kept manufacturing in-house, accepting slower production ramp in exchange for tighter control over the design-manufacturing interface. Neither approach is clearly correct. They represent different bets on where the harder problem lies.

United Airlines and the Commercial Pressure

Archer’s agreement with United Airlines for commercial launch operations adds another layer of complexity. United has committed to purchase Midnight aircraft subject to certification and commercial viability milestones. That commitment is valuable — it validates the commercial case and provides a credible launch customer. It also creates schedule pressure that can distort engineering decision-making.

Certification-driven programs sometimes face a specific failure mode: the deadline becomes the real requirement, and compliance evidence is assembled to meet the deadline rather than to genuinely resolve safety questions. The FAA’s certification process is designed to resist this — it proceeds at the pace of substantive evidence, not the pace of commercial commitments. But the pressure exists, and engineering organizations that have not built mature requirements and change management processes are more vulnerable to it.

Archer’s leadership has been careful in public statements to characterize certification timelines as estimates subject to FAA process, not commitments. That is the appropriate posture. Whether the organizational processes match the public posture is something only Archer’s engineers and the FAA reviewers know directly.

What Both Companies Are Teaching the Industry

Joby and Archer are, despite their competition, collectively doing something important for the eVTOL industry: they are building the certification precedents that everyone else will follow. The Special Conditions the FAA is developing for these programs, the means of compliance that get accepted, the systems safety methodologies that prove sufficient — these will become the template for every subsequent eVTOL certification.

From a systems engineering perspective, both programs are stress tests for requirements management at a scale and novelty that few aerospace programs have faced. The intersection of DO-178C (software), DO-254 (hardware), ARP4754A (systems), and novel eVTOL-specific Special Conditions creates a requirements landscape with significant interdependence and real-time change. Managing that landscape with traditional document-based tools is technically possible but organizationally painful.

Some eVTOL programs — and programs in adjacent domains like autonomous systems and advanced defense platforms — are beginning to adopt graph-based requirements models, where requirements, design artifacts, test evidence, and compliance records exist as connected nodes rather than entries in separate documents. Tools like Flow Engineering represent this architectural approach: requirements are not rows in a spreadsheet but entities in a model, with explicit relationships to the standards they derive from and the evidence that satisfies them. When a standard changes, the impact propagates through the model rather than being manually hunted through documents.

Archer is not a known user of such tools. Their specific toolchain is not public. The broader point stands: the certification challenge Archer and Joby face is precisely the type of challenge that reveals the limits of legacy requirements management approaches and creates demand for more connected, traceable, change-resilient systems.

Honest Assessment

Archer is a serious company doing serious engineering work. The Midnight aircraft has flown. Stage 3 certification progress is real. The Stellantis partnership and United Airlines agreement represent genuine external validation.

The risks are equally real. Type certification for a novel aircraft category has never been fast, and the FAA has structural reasons — congressional mandate, public safety responsibility — to move at its own pace. The Stellantis manufacturing interface introduces configuration and change management complexity that will require careful engineering governance. Commercial timeline pressure from the United agreement is a variable that engineering organizations have historically struggled to manage without compromising process discipline.

Joby remains ahead on the certification path by most public measures — further along in FAA interactions, with a more mature flight test record. But certification is not purely a race. A well-substantiated Archer certification package could proceed faster than a poorly substantiated Joby one, even from behind. The engineering organization that can produce clean, traceable, rapidly-updated compliance evidence when the FAA asks for it will win the relevant timeline, regardless of who started earlier.

The eVTOL certification race will be decided in engineering review rooms as much as in the sky. What Archer and Joby are both discovering — and what the rest of the industry is watching — is that the systems engineering infrastructure behind the aircraft matters as much as the aircraft itself.