This Stealth Air Taxi Startup Is Driving Up the
Cost of UAM Engineers
Archer Aviation, a stealth
air taxi startup based in Santa Clara, California, is driving up the cost of
UAM engineers and poaching talent from established players.
A stealth-mode startup working on electric
aircraft is luring engineering talent away from other urban air mobility (UAM)
companies with higher salaries, sources within the industry told Avionics International.
Santa Clara-based Archer Aviation, founded by Adam
Goldstein and Brett Adcock, are driving up the price of experienced urban air
mobility engineers across the region, sources told Avionics. Archer Aviation’s team is believed to be around 20 individuals —
“probably enough to do trade studies and build a subscale model,” one source
told me.
Archer Aviation has poached key talent from Larry Page-backed Kitty Hawk, developer of the Cora and Heaviside electric
VTOL aircraft. The company also hired many former members of Airbus’ Vahana
demonstrator team, led by Zach Lovering, which completed its flight testing in
December 2019. Lovering is now CEO and founder of Aera Aircraft, a fixed-wing
aircraft project launched by portions of the former Vahana team.
“There certainly was a lot of interest in the
Vahana team’s future in the second half of 2019,” one industry source told me.
“Archer got there first.”
In 2013, Goldstein and Adcock co-founded Vettery,
a marketing software-as-a-service company, which the two sold to
Switzerland-based staffing firm Adecco Group in 2018 for $100 million, the
likely source for Archer Aviation’s funding.
“They probably have a team in place that they
finance personally but with quite a high cash burn rate,” another source told
me. “Either they raised a round already, or they need to worry about it in the
next year or so, which does not sound very good right now,” the source added,
referring to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which has effectively halted
commercial aviation globally and slowed fundraising activity.
Goldstein and Adcock, who worked in banking,
financial analysis and private equity prior to building Vettery, are not known
to have significant aviation experience, leading many in the urban air mobility
industry to view their venture with great skepticism. The founders of
Germany-based Lilium, which recently raised $240 million to
continue development of its
air taxi, also entered the space with little aviation experience, after
graduating from the Technical University of Munich (TUM).
Archer Aviation does have a registered aircraft,
assigned N213A-001 on July 10, 2019. It is described by the Federal Aviation
Administration’s aircraft registry as an ‘unknown’ type aircraft with
electric-type engine(s) and a Mode S squawk code assigned, which suggests it
has flown. Records on aviationdb.com add that the mystery aircraft has 16 engines and
weighs 12,500 lbs or less. One source told Avionics that the aircraft is a lift-plus-cruise concept.
Registration records also list the aircraft’s
manufacturer as University of Florida’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Research
Program lab, a multidisciplinary team of researchers working on small UAS for
various research and monitoring purposes since the early aughts. Adcock and
Goldstein are both alumni of University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business.
Current employees of UF UASRP did not respond to
requests for clarification of the link between the lab and Archer Aviation,
though one former employee who left in 2018 said they were not aware of the
company or any aircraft project that fit the description.
“Until your email, I was not aware of a company
named 'Archer Aviation,' nor an aircraft manufactured by the UFUASRP with 16
engines, the former employee told Avionics. “If this did come out of the UFUASRP, its design and construction
would have had to occur after my departure.”
Goldstein declined to comment on his company’s
activities for this article. “At this time, we're not going to be commenting on
what Brett and I are working on at Archer,” he told me via LinkedIn. “We'll
reach out to you when the time is right to dive into the details and the vision
for our company.”
The best available description of Archer
Aviation’s mission at the moment comes from a February 3 listing on
StateAviationJournal.com, announcing the company as a new
member of standards organization RTCA.
“Archer’s mission is to accelerate the benefits of
sustainable air mobility,” the website states. “The company is currently developing
an electric aircraft.”
Right now, the company’s biggest impact is on the
price and availability of urban air mobility engineering talent.
One source with knowledge of industry-wide hiring
trends said they believe Archer Aviation’s impact on salaries will be
short-lived, and the cost to acquire talent will normalize this year — “back to
pre-Archer levels.”
This article
has been updated to accurately reflect background of the founders of Lilium.
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