The eVTOL race reorders

The number sounds like a finish line: the FAA has accepted 100% of Archer's Means of Compliance for its Midnight air taxi — all 797 documents agreeing how the company will prove each safety claim, from its dozen propellers' engine-out redundancy to keeping lithium batteries from going into thermal runaway. No electric air taxi had ever closed out the full set before.

Reaching 100% is agreement on how you'll prove the plane is safe — not proof that it is.

It is closer to a starting gun. The Means of Compliance settle the method — the agreed test you'll sit, not a passing grade. Archer has only now finished negotiating how it will demonstrate safety; the demonstrations themselves, the formal flight testing the FAA calls the hardest stretch, lie entirely ahead, with the first such flights targeted for as soon as this year.

What makes it news is the reordering. Joby Aviation was the presumed front-runner of the eVTOL field, yet it has sat at 97% acceptance since 2023, hung up on a single human-factors detail — how the pilot is shown battery charge. Archer's leap to 100% first flips the standings in a race the public still can't board: the company has roughly $2 billion in the bank, almost no revenue, and burns hundreds of millions a year while it waits to fly a paying passenger.