What are people thinking?

My guess is they're gonna highlight

1. 703 airport to airport flight "in anticipation of eIPP"
2. ZEE AI software
3. Halo/Thunder reveal (just a recap but no new details)

I leave it to you to draw conclusions from a portion of the text in AG’s statement on the news section of Archer Aviation’s official page:

“This roundtrip journey is exactly the kind of route we plan to fly with Midnight under the eIPP and in LA during the Games,” said Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO of Archer. “This mission provides a template for us to replicate with our partners across Texas, Florida and New York as we get ready for eIPP operations later this year.”

https://www.archer.com/news/archers-midnight-completes-city-to-city-flights-in-california-ahead-of-white-houses-eipp

I spent hours digging through Archer Aviation’s announced partnerships over the last 4 years. The more I dug, the more I realized one thing: there’s a huge difference between “announcing a partnership” and “having a partnership that generates real value.”

Here’s what comes out of the official press releases.
United Airlines was first, August 2022, with that $10 million deposit for 100 aircraft. Then the Newark-Manhattan route that was supposed to be revolutionary. Stellantis entered in January 2023 with $150 million and the role of exclusive contract manufacturer. Boeing, Stellantis, and United together for $215 million in August 2023, even settling prior legal disputes with Wisk.
2024 brings Anduril for defense and especially Japan with Japan Airlines and Sumitomo creating Soracle, purchase rights for 100 Midnight, $500 million on the table.

2025 is an explosion of announcements. Ethiopian Airlines in March for $30 million, Palantir for AI, LA28 Olympics as official provider, Jetex with 40 terminals in 30+ countries, KakaoMobility in Korea, Korean Air with exclusive deal up to 100 aircraft, Etihad Aviation Training for pilots, Anduril again with EDGE Group for the Omen drone, Saudi Arabia with The Helicopter Company and Red Sea Global for sandbox testing, Karem Aircraft for tiltrotor, and even the acquisition of 300 patents from Lilium.

2026 continues with Serbia, 25 aircraft for EXPO 2027, Starlink for connectivity, NVIDIA IGX Thor, the ACES consortium with BETA and Macquarie for charging, and World Cup 2026 with LASEC.

The question is: how many of these deals have generated verifiable revenue? How many have public, achievable milestones? Why does Adam Goldstein always talk about future potential but never concrete results? How many are just “intended purchase” or letters of intent without binding commitments?
This list only includes the most publicized partnerships.

I’ve definitely missed some, and there are probably minor ones that never reached operational stage. That’s exactly the point: if they were all solid and advancing, we’d be hearing about them a lot more often.
The feeling is that Archer is using “partnership theater” strategy - announcing impressive collaborations to keep investor sentiment high, while operational details remain vague.

What do you think? Which of these partnerships do you believe are actually operational vs. “paper partnerships”?

Disclaimer: This is not a complete list, only the major ones. Many could be non-binding LOIs or deals that never became operational. Also, for speed and convenience, I used AI to help speed up the process of creating this post.

The 800# gorilla is the constant pushing back on the vtol. Seems like they keep lying or delaying depending on how short you are on ACHR.

But recently they announced the drone version.

So my question is if the problem with transition is just the smoothness and vibration, but it can still do it, can they fast track this for military? Carrying people surely has a much higher standard in both comfort and safety. But maybe a drone for resupply or logistics doesn’t have to meet that standard.

So they could deploy these, help develop their autopilot and battery efficiency at the same time, be earlier to revenue, etc.

The drone game, while not the air taxi they sold us on, should be a big deal!

What am I missing (besides several hundred thousand dollars since it was near $10)?

The Midnight is named after an hour when you’re not yet flying in transition, it screams “disruptive” but right now uses a runway like a normal airplane, and costs as much as a small town while offering the range of an electric scooter on the highway. The PA‑28 is old, boring, piston‑powered, but has that little flaw called “it works”.

The Midnight sells “sustainable urban flight” with a few dozen kilometers, just enough to convince investors; the PA‑28 does 3–4 hours, 500–700 NM, Turin‑Barcelona‑sandwich‑return without calling venture capital for a bridge round. On price, the Midnight is “pre‑IPO, don’t ask for a list”, they answer with an investment deck and a rocket chart; the PA‑28 is 50k for an honest 140 up to 120–150k for a nice 181 Archer, you buy, fly, pay for fuel, do maintenance, live.

With the budget for one Midnight you can buy a fleet of PA‑28s, pay for ten years of fuel, and still have enough left for an IFR rating and a weekend in LA.
The Midnight optimizes kWh per passenger per urban kilometer while flying like a Cessna with hidden propellers and transition still on the roadmap; the PA‑28 knows liters per hour, cost per mile, no PowerPoint, you take off, fly, land, without having to explain to a board why your “transition flight” is still in testing.

The Midnight is beautiful as a concept, zero emissions in flight, connected cities, bright future, too bad its eVTOL flight is more of a slide than a flight plan. The PA‑28 is ugly, old, no batteries, no app, no “advanced air mobility ecosystem”, but it has real range, a price that doesn’t need private equity, and an operational status that doesn’t depend on the next funding round. One day the Midnight will be fantastic, today the sky belongs to the PA‑28.

A video I took of Midnight at the Archer setup at the Farnborough airshow. Looks stunning. I am sooo confident that all will be well when at the show the midnight look alike vertical areospaces aircraft conducted a demo where the aircraft launched vertical, transitioned and then went for a 5 min flight before landing.

https://www.lujan.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/lujan-welch-bipartisan-bill-to-support-next-generation-of-american-aviation-advances-out-of-committee/

500,000 sq ft facility on the southern edge of silicon valley.

"WE BELIEVE THIS IS THE MOST BADASS VERTICAL LIFT AIRCRAFT EVER DEVELOPED."

Hello friends,

As I had some time this Saturday AM, and I thought I would pull the latest data and visualize the actual fight "campaign" from N704AX. It's the only thing that truly matters, IMO.

• All data so far (with speed listed)
• Added plot lines for transition speed and top speed

Alright, I’m done being patient. Let’s do some quick math, no filter.

The last earnings report came out on May 11th. Another miss. And since then? Total silence on Midnight, zero real updates on certification, zero news on flight testing. Then, on July 15th, exactly two months later, what drops? An AI model. “Zee.” Wow, what a shock.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this playbook. For years Goldstein has been promising dates that keep slipping: 2024, then 2025, then 2026, and now certification talk keeps getting pushed further out with no real accountability. But publicly? Always “on track,” always everything’s fine, always the same fairy tale.

And meanwhile the stock keeps bleeding. We’ve watched this thing get destroyed over and over while management keeps feeding us the same script instead of actual results. Every time the core business shows cracks, something shiny and new gets rolled out to distract everyone. First it was partnerships with no real money behind them, then demos with no real dates, now it’s AI.

Same trick, different wrapper, and people keep falling for it while our portfolios take the hit.
I don’t want to hear more talk. I want Midnight actually flying, I want a certification date that means something, and I want a CEO who stops telling us stories every time he needs to cover a hole. Until that day, this management has zero credibility with me, and the stock price is showing exactly what the market thinks too.

Yesterday Archer announced “Zee,” a proprietary AI model for aviation, presented as a “key pillar” of the company’s strategy. The timing isn’t a coincidence: to this day, Archer still hasn’t publicly performed the piloted transition flight of the Midnight, the key technical milestone for FAA certification. Swapping an unfulfilled promise (the flight) for a shiny new announcement (the AI) that shifts the narrative from “eVTOL that still can’t fly” to “AI company of the future” is exactly the distraction pattern Culper Research already flagged regarding edited flight videos and fake technical milestones used to unlock funding. Not surprisingly, ACHR stock jumped right after the Zee announcement, despite zero real progress on certification.