Archer’s Bay flights reveal the real air-taxi race

Midnight’s three-day tour took Archer’s prototype into some of California’s busiest airspace. Joby’s flight record shows the next technical steps; both companies still need to prove a reliable daily service.

AI-generated conceptual illustration of Archer’s Bay Area ambitions, as of October 20, 2026. The solid cyan line schematically represents the demonstrated Oakland Airport–San Francisco Marina overflight and return to Oakland, not a Marina landing or an exact flight track. Dashed gold lines connect the five areas in Archer’s proposed 2024 network: South San Francisco’s Kilroy Oyster Point, Oakland, Napa, Livermore and San Jose. The proposed-location symbols are not evidence of built or approved vertiports or authorized service. Geography is stylized and node positions are approximate.

From the Oakland shoreline, San Francisco looks close enough to touch. By road it is a bridge, a toll plaza and whatever traffic the day brings. That gap is the whole case for the air taxi, and few places make it as vividly as the Bay.

This month Archer flew into it. In an October 19 announcement, the company said its Midnight prototype had covered more than 200 miles over three days, hopping from Salinas through Hollister, San Martin, San Jose, Mountain View and Hayward to Oakland and reaching 131 mph along the way. From Oakland it flew out over the Bay and back. Archer puts the trip to San Francisco's Marina District at about ten minutes.

It was a real step: an experimental electric aircraft, far from its test base, working in the same airspace as airliners. But reaching a city's airspace and setting a passenger down in it are two different feats, and the second decides whether electric flight becomes transport. On that measure Joby Aviation's published record still runs deeper: in piloted transition between vertical and wing-borne flight, in landings at real city heliports, and in measured noise. No single photogenic flight, from either company, settles what a daily service would cost or how reliably it would run.

What flew over the Bay

Archer's uncut 19-minute video tells the story plainly. N703AX rolls down an Oakland runway with its front propellers tipped forward like an airplane's, climbs out over the water and, at the end, takes the tower's clearance to land on Runway 28 Left. It flew like an airplane from start to finish, with no vertical liftoff, no transition and no vertical landing.

The FAA registry lists N703AX as a 2025 Archer M001 with an experimental, research-and-development airworthiness certificate. It is a test aircraft, built to learn from, and worth reading as one.

The calendar shifts on a closer look, too. October 19 was when Archer told the story. FLYING, drawing on FlightAware, puts three Bay sorties of about 20 minutes each on the previous Thursday, October 15, and reports that none landed in the Marina. Archer’s announcement did not include a dated, leg-by-leg log of the full tour, so the fair description is an October campaign anchored by those Bay flights.

Oakland was a demanding place to prove a point. The FAA describes a field with a tower that never closes, several runways, Class C airspace tucked beneath San Francisco's Class B, and traffic of every kind. Archer credits close work with the FAA and state and local partners, though it doesn't name the specific authorization. What Midnight earned there is a credential in coordination: proof that it can work inside a busy system. Open access to city routes is a later prize.

Runway or rooftop

The air taxi's promise rests on a single maneuver: lift straight up from a small pad, tilt into efficient wing-borne cruise, and come straight down at the other end. Midnight uses 12 propellers, six of which tilt forward; Joby's aircraft uses six that tilt. A trip that starts and ends on a runway leaves that promise untested, because a runway is exactly what a downtown landing pad lacks.

Archer has flown the maneuver. In June 2024 it reported Midnight passing from vertical lift into wing-borne flight at more than 100 mph, before piloted testing had begun. By May 2026 it said piloted vertical and conventional flights were happening across its fleet nearly every day. The public reports reviewed for this comparison, through October 20, do not document Midnight completing that full sequence with a pilot aboard.

Joby has. On April 22, 2025, test pilot James "Buddy" Denham took N544JX from a vertical takeoff into wing-borne flight and back down to a vertical landing. Within a week, three different pilots had flown the sequence. The gap between the two companies is less about what each has done than about what each has done together, on one aircraft.

Joby had also reached the Bay first. On March 13, 2026, it reported that Andrea Pingitore had flown N545JX from Oakland toward the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands. In April the same aircraft flew from JFK to three existing Manhattan heliports, adding the step Archer's Bay flight lacked: arriving somewhere. Joby's promise of JFK trips under ten minutes, though, is a forecast for future service, separate from anything timed on those flights.

Reading the numbers

As of October 20, 2026. Each figure comes from a separate test or announcement; neither aircraft has flown one mission at all of these values. And a pilot aboard is a long way from four passengers aboard.

City flying

• Archer Midnight: Bay sorties from Oakland, October 2026; runway takeoffs and landings

• Joby battery-electric aircraft: Bay flights, March 2026; JFK to Manhattan heliports, April 2026

Vertical takeoff to wing-borne flight

• Archer Midnight: Transition before piloted testing, June 2024; piloted vertical flights, 2026; Bay sorties conventional

• Joby battery-electric aircraft: Piloted full transition, April 2025; piloted airport-to-airport flight, vertical at both ends, August 2025

Distance example

• Archer Midnight: About 55 miles in 31 minutes, piloted, runway at both ends, August 2025

• Joby battery-electric aircraft: 154.6 miles on one charge, flown from the ground, vertical at both ends, July 2021

Speed

• Archer Midnight: 131 mph on the three-day tour; nearly 150 mph in separate tests, 2025

• Joby battery-electric aircraft: More than 200 mph in earlier test flying

Flight volume

• Archer Midnight: Nearly every day, often more than once (May 2026)

• Joby battery-electric aircraft: More than 850 flights and 9,000 miles across its fleet in 2025

Noise

• Archer Midnight: About 45 dBA at about 2,000 feet: a design expectation

• Joby battery-electric aircraft: 45.2 dBA at 500 meters in cruise, derived from NASA measurements

Certification

• Archer Midnight: Phase 3 of four closed, April 2026

• Joby battery-electric aircraft: FAA-conforming N547JX in flight testing since March 2026

The distance figures need the most care. Archer's 55-mile flight in August 2025 took 31 minutes at more than 126 mph and used a runway at each end. Joby's 154.6-mile flight in 2021 took off and landed vertically, but it was flown by a pilot on the ground, in an earlier prototype, over eleven laps of a circuit near Big Sur. Neither company published the payload and reserve data a fair range comparison needs.

The same goes for speed. Joby's runs above 200 mph came from earlier test flying: firmer than a brochure figure, but a poor guide to the pace of a crosstown hop. And Joby's own tour page now gives range as up to 100 miles, so the old 150-mile figure is best retired.

Joby's 523-mile hydrogen-electric flight stays out of the comparison: a modified demonstrator with a different energy system answers a different question.

The real test is the turnaround

Perhaps the most telling number Joby has published is five minutes. On a piloted flight between Marina and Monterey airports in August 2025, its aircraft covered 10 nautical miles in about 12 minutes, five of them spent holding at Monterey while controllers sequenced an arriving airliner. The aircraft rose vertically, transitioned, worked through controlled airspace and came down vertically.

It is a small moment with a large lesson. An air taxi can leap the highway queue and still land in an aviation one. A timetable has to absorb that wait while holding enough charge to finish the trip, which is why dividing distance by top speed tells you so little.

Both companies fly a lot. Joby logged more than 850 flights and 9,000 miles across its fleet in 2025, and Archer reports flying nearly every day, often more than once. What neither has yet shown is the thing a service runs on: a loaded aircraft flying the same route over and over, with the time to recharge, inspect and board on the clock.

Chargers are only part of that clock. Joby's annual report describes equipment that charges several battery packs at once, conditions them and downloads flight data, without giving charge times. Archer pitches Midnight for back-to-back short trips with minimal charging in between. To judge either claim, a reader needs the charge on arrival, the charge required to leave, the battery's temperature, the power delivered and the minutes spent on the pad.

Passengers belong in the same test. A five-seat design says nothing about range or speed with five people aboard, and Archer's Bay announcement gives no payload figure. The result worth waiting for combines payload, vertical takeoff and landing, a declared energy reserve and a measured turnaround in one repeatable mission, so readers no longer have to assemble a working air taxi from the best numbers of unrelated tests.

How quiet, and measured how?

Joby holds the stronger public evidence on noise. NASA and Joby measured a remotely piloted pre-production aircraft near its maximum weight, using a 58-microphone array across more than 100 test points; the results were published in 2022. Wing-borne cruise was the quietest phase. Approaches ran consistently louder than departures, and hover levels moved by several decibels within a single run.

The much-quoted 45.2 dBA describes that cruise: the aircraft passing at 100 knots, its sound scaled to a distance of 500 meters. Joby announced the figure after propagating NASA's measurements. It tells you little about the sound at a vertiport fence. Joby also said its takeoffs and landings stayed below 65 dBA at 100 meters from the flight path.

Archer's figure of about 45 dBA, from a 2024 securities filing, is a design expectation for cruise at roughly 2,000 feet. Setting 45 beside 45.2 and calling it a draw would treat a target as a measurement, taken at a different distance. Neighbors will judge these aircraft by approach paths, how often they pass and what they sound like, more than by any single cruise number.

The Bay needs places to land

Archer's tour route and its business plan are different maps. Its June 2024 Bay network named South San Francisco, Oakland, Napa, Livermore and San Jose. An agreement with Kilroy explored a vertiport at Oyster Point and a waterfront "Sea Portal" pairing aircraft with ferries. It remains a proposal.

Even the destinations differ. Oyster Point sits south of the city on the Peninsula's Bay shore; the Marina District lines San Francisco's northern waterfront. Each serves a different trip, and the ground leg decides how much of the flight's speed survives. At Oyster Point, commuters already ride shuttles to Caltrain, BART and the ferry, a reminder of how much of any journey happens on the ground. Archer's ten-minute headline leaves out the transfers, the wait and the boarding. A door-to-door saving can be claimed only once both landing sites, and the traveler's real starting point and destination, are named.

Landing sites need their own approvals and engineering. FAA guidance covers new vertiports and changes to existing airports and heliports, from charging and layout to airspace review, and California also has state permitting requirements. A manufacturer's partnership can start that work. It can't finish it.

Weather gets a vote, too. SFO documents how low visibility constrains its runways. That is a real regional factor, though it says nothing direct about how often Midnight could fly in a year.

From prototype to timetable

Archer says it closed Phase 3 of its four-phase certification process in April, setting the basis, methods and test plans for formal testing. Joby points to hardware. In March it announced that N547JX, its first FAA-conforming aircraft, built to approved designs for Type Inspection Authorization testing, had begun flight testing with Joby pilots. Joby said then that FAA pilots were expected to follow later in the year.

Joby's August shareholder letter counted five aircraft flying and twelve in production, and kept first passengers on the 2026 calendar. Those are milestones in building a fleet. A production line, however busy, is still a step short of certified aircraft ready for a Bay timetable. Archer’s second-quarter filing likewise describes continuing aircraft production and certification work.

The two companies divide certification into differently defined stages, so their progress can't be lined up step for step to crown a winner. What counts is approved compliance work, conforming aircraft, completed tests and, at the end, a type certificate. The FAA's eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, updated October 16, describes phased operations under FAA oversight using aircraft still in active certification. Joining it is a path toward the certificate, not the certificate itself.

Archer's Bay flights moved a real piece of the system forward: an electric aircraft and its crew, working in demanding regional airspace. Joby still sets the higher public bar, with piloted vertical-to-vertical flight between airports and landings at Manhattan heliports. The race will be settled by something less cinematic: a long run of ordinary trips, with real payloads, declared reserves, quick turnarounds and landing sites people can actually reach. That is when a striking flight becomes a way to get around.

Performance figures are as reported by the companies and cited sources; JetsonsAge has not independently tested these aircraft.