Archer Aviation Inc. (ACHR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the first day of the JPMorgan Industrials Conference. My name is Bill Peterson, U.S. Clean Tech analyst. Really pleased to have Archer, one of the emerging leaders here at eVTOL. We have Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer. He's going to make a brief presentation. And then I've got a bunch of questions. We can also turn it over to the audience for some questions as well. Thanks for supporting the conference and over to you.

Absolutely. Glad to be here, Bill. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining. My name is Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer here at Archer. So zooming out a bit, Archer's about urban air mobility, but really, we're a company that's built around cities. How do we make cities smarter, better, more efficient places to live? Today, about half of the world's population lives in cities. By 2050, that number will be 2-thirds. So that's about 6 billion people living in urban cores. And one of the things, when I was working at Uber that we really zoned in on was even though cities are getting more populated, they're getting more dense transportation is not really getting much better. It's getting more polluted, more congested, more time-consuming, more less affordable, more pollutant. And so we started looking at cities like New York, and we said, look, everyone today lives in 3 dimensions. We work in 3 dimensions, but we don't travel within our cities in 3 dimensions. And why is that? Why can't we go from Manhattan to Newark, that's a trip that I'm actually above to do right after this, it will take about an hour. That's a trip that could take just 5 minutes by air. Why is that not possible? And one of the first things that we looked at was helicopters. Helicopters have been around for a long time. If you're in the helicopter, it's pretty phenomenal experience. You can get from A to B in minutes. You can live that life. But it's not great for cities. And there are 3 big issues with helicopters as [indiscernible] Uber and as most of you probably know. One is helicopters are very, very loud. The technology that keeps helicopters flying is also quite noisy. And as a result, most cities in the world have effectively banned helicopters for civilian and commercial use. New York and Sao Paulo are basically the only 2 exceptions to that. 2 is they're tremendously unsafe. And more importantly, they're perceived as very unsafe. They've got hundreds of what are called single fault parts, where if any of those parts were to fail during flight, the flight would be catastrophic. And then third, the maintenance required to keep those helicopters safe is very expensive. And the end result is that helicopters are very expensive and they're exorbitant and they're just not accessible to the average passenger no matter what you do on the utilization or the load factor front. And so this is an eVTOL. This is Archer's eVTOL. eVTOL stands for electric vertical take-off and landing vehicle and this is our Midnight aircraft that we plan to commercialize with the goal of entering into service by the end of next year. So this is Archer's Midnight. It's got 12 propellers on it, 6 in the back, 6 on the front. The 6 in the back are used for lift. So those are primarily powered during takeoff and landing. The 6 in the front after takeoff, tilt forward so that the aircraft can take off like a helicopter and fly like an airplane. It's 100% all electric. So that means zero local emissions. It's about 100x quieter than helicopter and nearly silent when it's flying overhead and cruise, and then it's fully redundant because of those 12 propellers that I mentioned earlier. This specific aircraft that we plan to commercialize next year can carry about 1,000 pounds. So it's 4 passengers plus a pilot with some room for luggage, travels at about 150 miles an hour with a maximum range of about 100 miles. So the strategy that we embarked on, we think, was differentiated across the industry and carries several key advantages. The first was to work with the key aerospace suppliers across the industry, those that have incredible decades of certification heritage, including Garmin, Honeywell, Safran and a number of others. What that has resulted in is 80% of the subsystems and components within that Midnight aircraft have none or low certification risk. They're either already FAA certified or they are a variant of something that is FAA certified, which allows us to have a much lower volatility experience dealing with the FAA. The second is we put a lot of work in volume manufacturing, specifically with our partner, Stellantis. So we're building our facility in Georgia, I'll tell you more about that in a minute. That facility, the first phase is ready to be complete this year, such that we can start producing aircraft out of it. Sorry, we've got some technical difficulties. It's working on my laptop, but [Technical Difficulty]. No worries. So I'll move on here. So the team is really one of the most special parts about Archer. Our Chief Operating Officer, Tom Muniz, originally built one of the first eVTOL in the world with Larry Page, the Co-Founder of Google. And then our Chief Engineer, Geoff Bower, was the Chief Engineer of Airbus' Vahana project. The 2 of them have cumulatively built nearly a dozen eVTOL aircraft to-date. And so they've seen all of the things that can go right and all of the things that can go wrong. They're really considered experts of the industry, and they both jointly designed the Midnight aircraft. We're also very lucky to almost a year ago, have Billy Nolan joined the team. Billy Nolan prior to Archer was the Acting Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. So as you can imagine, having him on the team, not only helped signal credibility to the rest of the industry, but it's also been incredibly helpful as we think about regulation and certification and beyond. So the management team at Archer, I think, has been really special and helped drive a lot of the work that you've seen here today. One in particular that I want to highlight is the Powertrain team. The Powertrain team is led by a gentleman and Dr. Michael Schwekutsch. Dr. Schwekutsch originally led the Powertrain team at Tesla. He then led the Powertrain team at Apple Special Projects Group, and he now leads powertrain for us. And that's really important because I spoke earlier about the fact that we have worked with suppliers for most of the pieces within the aircraft, the powertrain and the battery packs are something that we're developing in-house. The reason is that's really the core of Midnight [indiscernible]. There are 3 pieces that are really critical to that. The first was recharging. So the battery pack is optimized to be able to recharge quickly and efficiently. Most of our trips can recharge in about 8 minutes that the aircraft is on the ground anyways for the ingress and egress of new passengers. The second is high specific power density and that specific power density will only continue to get better year-after-year. And then third is safety. So the battery pack is built to be extremely safe. If there is an incident with the battery or with the aircraft, it's built to prevent what's called thermal runaway so that the passengers can still disembark safely. We listed on the NYSE in 2021. Since that date, we've raised about $1.2 billion cumulatively from a number of backers, Ken Moelis and Moelis & Company took us public. There were other prominent investors as part of that round, including Mubadala and others. United Airlines was also a large partner to us when we went public. So United Airlines has placed an order for aircraft valued at up to $1.5 billion. So 200 aircraft with an option to purchase 100 more. Working with Michael Leskinen and the team has really been a pleasure over the last couple of years. You heard him speak this morning. And then Stellantis has been a large, not only equity investor in the company, but a partner. So Stellantis is really important, as I mentioned earlier, to helping us manufacture the aircraft. We have dozens of Stellantis engineers at Archer currently helping us build our scale manufacturing facility in coming to Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. That facility will be capable of producing in its first phase, which is due to be complete this year, about 650 aircraft per year. And when it's fully complete, it will be capable of producing 2,000 plus aircraft per year. Speaking of manufacturing, we recently announced that we currently have 3 conforming aircraft in construction in parallel. It's really important for a few reasons. One is it signals the confidence we have in our design such that the key parts and subsystems within this aircraft will conform to the FAA type design that they've defined. And then second is these aircraft once they're manufactured, can ultimately be used in what's called for-credit testing with the FAA, which is what's really critical on path to get us Type Certified such that we can enter into service as soon as next year. On the flight test piece, our internal goal here really is to have 500 flight tests this year, and we think that's an ambitious target. We're really excited about the progress we're making. And then our newest partner here is Boeing. We announced Boeing as a partner last year. We're not only an equity investor in the company, but they're working with us on a number of technologies that are really critical to Midnight and future versions of Midnight as well. Finally, we announced a partnership with the Department of Defense. The DoD has been an incredible partner. The partnership we announced, we believe, is the largest amount in the eVTOL sector of $142 million maximum contract value. It's been really exciting working with the U.S. Air Force on use cases such as personnel movements and VIP movements, and we expect to be able to share more about that partnership later this year. As I said, our goal is to be FAA certified and enter into service by the end of next year. The partnership with the FAA has been incredibly fruitful. We're excited to have the Administrator, Mike Whitaker, who comes from this industry and has been really excited about making eVTOL and urban air mobility a priority within the industry. And our goal is to do it affordably. At the outset, we expect to be a fraction of the cost of the helicopter on par with, say, an Uber Black price here in New York. Over time, with scaled utilization and load factors, that goal would be to drive it down to the cost of roughly UberX. And then over time, especially as we can introduce scale manufacturing and autonomy, the goal would to be one day compete with car ownership and get that price point down to where it's really, really affordable to be able to fly in and around cities. As I mentioned earlier, with Stellantis, our goal is to be complete with our -- with the first phase of our volume manufacturing facility this year. And then also, we're working on some really forward-thinking projects like next-generation aviation infrastructure. We'll start with existing infrastructure, existing helipads and airports in and around cities. And then over time, we'll build bespoke infrastructure as well such that we can start to build really phenomenal customer experiences, thinking about things like security, biometric identification and more. We've also announced a partnership with Atlantic Aviation. Atlantic is really important to what we're building here. It's one of the leading FBO providers in the world. It's prominent at key airports such as San Jose, Santa Monica, Miami, New York City, and we're working hand-in-hand with Atlantic to electrify facilities at these airports. And ultimately bring what we're doing here at Archer bring it all over the world. As I mentioned, we're working with a number of key partners and suppliers across that mission, and we were excited to recently announce an [ indicator ] order book of about $3.5 billion. That's led by United, as I mentioned, as well as InterGlobe, which is a key partner for us in India, which I personally believe will be one of the world's largest eVTOL markets globally and in addition to Air Chateau, one of the UAE's leading helicopter operators. Our goal, as I mentioned, is we think, in New York and around the world, we have an opportunity to be live as soon as next year. We recently were in the UAE as one example, where in November, we were lucky to be blessed by His Highness and work hand-in-hand with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office to announce a preliminary deal where we'll be placing our UAE headquarters in Abu Dhabi to launch in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi as soon as next year. We also announced the deal with InterGlobe. InterGlobe is the parent company of Indigo Airlines, the sixth largest airline in the world. They have about 63% market share in India. And we announced the plan for that JV to acquire about 200 aircraft worth a maximum of up to $1 billion and then deploy in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore again in the next couple of years. We also have been very lucky to get a lot of attention from [ name-brand ] celebrities. This is a spot we did with Usher immediately after the half time show at the Super Bowl. What's been really great is we've been able to do these sort of partnerships with almost no sort of capital contribution from Archer. It's really been more of a pull from celebrities and personalities that really want to be a part of building what they referred to as the flying car future. So that's been exciting for us, and we're excited to bring flying cars to the world as soon as next year. I will take questions.

Yes. No. Thanks for that. Again, I'll kick this off with a few, but if anyone has a question, please raise your hand. We are webcasting, so we'll prefer to use a microphone. Let's start off high level. So as Chief Commercial Officer, what are some of your key priorities ahead of a commercial launch, again, hopefully, within '25 or end of next year, end of '25? What are your key priorities ahead of launch?

Yes. I mean, look, number one, obviously, is to continue flying the aircraft as many times as we can in the quest for FAA certification. And so we expect pretty soon here to be flying 10 to 15 times a day, and that's really important, where when we bring investors and partners and employees to our facility, they can see the aircraft flying just about every day. That obviously is on path to FAA testing for credit. So that's goal number one. Goal number 2 is to be ready from a manufacturing perspective. It's not enough just to get these aircraft Type Certified. You've got to be able to put in place the facilities to be able to manufacture these at scale, and that's where the partnership with Stellantis has been absolutely critical in making sure to do that. As far as I know, we've got not only the largest eVTOL facility in the world, but one of the most capital efficient. And so that's been just a really incredible collaboration with Stellantis. And then the third has been thinking about how do we commercialize in cities. So we've already made announcements with the UAE, with India. We've done a lot of work all over the country here in the United States, and you're going to continue to see more of those pieces fall into place.

Compared to, I guess, when the companies became public, including Archer, there's some pretty aggressive ramps that were pointed out, and I think there's even some goals to maybe even be flying commercially even within 2023. So that's pushed out a little bit. But I guess how do you see the market scaling up between 2025 initial launch and, let's call it, the end of the decade? How does that path look like?

Yes. So our goal would be to enter into service as soon as next year. The market in the United States that we've had our eyes on for a while is New York. The reason we think New York is primed to be the first launch market here in the U.S. is because you've already got existing infrastructure. You've got 3 pretty large heliports on the Island of Manhattan. You've got 3 large airports, all of which are [ a pain ] to get to and offer massive time savings, if you can do them by air. So we think New York is a really great launch market. We see big opportunities internationally, especially in places where we have confidence we can certify sooner rather than later. And so I expect towards the end of next year, our goal would be to certifying a couple of cities and launch in a couple of cities, small numbers of aircraft, probably a dozen or less. And then in 2026, continue scaling that throughout the rest of the decade.

So you talked about having maybe the largest manufacturing footprint. How do you expect -- is this going to be supply limited or how do you match supply with the demand profile that you just described?

Well, that's a lot of the work we're doing over the next 18 months. I personally spend and my team spends a lot of our time, not just in the United States, but all over the world both trying to assess regulatory openness. So from a political perspective and from a civil aviation association perspective, is their actual appetite to bring aircraft to market. And most of the time, the answer is yes. Number 2 is, is infrastructure ready? Again, most of the time, the answer is yes. They're either existing Heliport Helipad infrastructure or there's a lot of real estate and sort of obvious need from a market perspective to build infrastructure there. And so both of those things have been really positive so far. I think over the next year, we'll continue to understand and assess the demand. The beautiful thing about the factory we're building is it's got a lot of capacity, but we've built it and are building in a way that allows us maximum flexibility to sort of invest in tooling as we go once we get more clear demand signals.

There's been a lot of different numbers tossed out for TAM size. We had our own triple-digit type of billions potentially. But I guess more of a near-term volume might be the helicopter market. How do you see that market or when do you achieve the size of that market? And how really big can this market be, let's say over the next few decades?

Yes. Look, the helicopter market already today is massive. There's something like 30,000 civilian helicopters in service today. I don't know the military number off the top of my head, but I suspect it's larger. And so even purely as a helicopter replacement, the aircraft that we are bringing into market can replace the vast majority of those helicopter use cases, particularly in the civil market. And so even if you just look at that, that's a pretty large TAM. But that's without the pieces I mentioned earlier. The fact that we're 100x quieter, the fact that we have no single fault parts, the fact that we're fully redundant and the fact that we'll be more affordable than helicopters. All of those give me a lot of excitement and give Archer a lot of confidence that our market will be quite a bit larger than what helicopters are today.

Certification is kind of the long pole. I mean, that's really the key thing to achieve here before commercial launch at least in the U.S. So you talked about the flight test program for for-credit testing. Where is Archer today in the certification process? And what needs to be accomplished primarily, I guess, in '24 ahead of certification hopefully in '25?

Yes. So our Chief Operating Officer, Tom Muniz, just announced in the latest earnings call that we've entered into what we're calling the final phase of FAA certification. Now it's the last phase. It's also probably the hardest. And so this is a phase at which we began what we call implementation. So effectively, taking the tests and the plans that we've agreed on with the FAA and starting to actually begin what's called for-credit testing with the FAA, which is exactly what it sounds like, beginning to do ground testing and then ultimately air testing that get us credit against the requirements that are set forth by the FAA to get our Type Certification. So we expect to make substantial progress on that this year. Building those 3 conforming aircraft are a big step towards that because once we have those 3 aircraft, each of them can ultimately participate in that for-credit testing. And so our goal is to get those aircraft up and ready to begin flying them and testing them for-credit and then ultimately continue doing that as we build additional conforming aircraft and continue on the path to enter into service by the end of next year.

I want to stop and pause to see if there's any questions before moving on. Do you have a microphone? Just one second. Okay.

Just in terms of the asset itself, how should investors think about it from a financing perspective? Like we have helicopters as a comp as you just mentioned, but how do we think about it in terms of useful life and valuations? And are there appraisers out there that are looking at this asset and putting a value to this?

Yes, it's a great question. So I'll take both of them. So on the former, we've been modeling this out is roughly about 14 years useful life. I think a lot of that is to be seen. And so we're going to have to test and learn and make sure that the performance sort of matches up to expectations, but we're building these to be durable. I mean the fact that they're all electric. They have relatively far fewer moving parts than helicopters. And so they're far easier to maintain, and we think having a much longer useful life. It's about 12 to 14 years is what we're pegging it at. As far as your latter question, the answer is yes. You can imagine sort of everybody that's in the traditional aircraft finance business has been very, very interested in thinking about eVTOL. So we've been engaged with a number of them. And nothing more to sort of comment yet, but you can expect to see more of those traditional financiers coming into the business over the coming years.

Yes. The launch part as you described U.S., which I think probably New York, maybe Chicago, you guys have talked about, then you have UAE and India. Why those markets first? What other potential markets are you looking at? And I guess if certification does get delayed in the U.S., do you see a potential to even launch in some of these other regions sooner?

Yes. So I'll talk about I'll talk about the U.S. first. So in the U.S., United, they're a big partner. And so generally, we've prioritized the hubs in which they have passengers, namely because United has signed up to ensure we can provide a pretty seamless customer experience. You can imagine if you're flying United, perhaps you're global services or a loyal customer or a business class customer flying internationally, you could have an airport transfer to and from the airport, potentially included or discounted as part of your ticket. And we think that offers people substantial benefits and a really tremendous customer experience. So as a result, we've prioritized a bunch of their hubs. New York and Chicago are 2 that we've announced. L.A. and San Francisco, obviously, are really big markets, not just for United, but for all of aviation. So really excited about both of those as well. And our team is doing a lot of work in all 4 of those markets in the country. Internationally, we've talked about UAE. The reason UAE is so exciting is probably twofold. One is they have been very forthcoming and saying, look, we'd like you to build and launch here, and we'd like to incentivize that and make sure that we can pull you here and help you accelerate that in any way possible. They've been really, really inviting and we see really big markets in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi. So last year, we announced our plans to headquarter our UAE presence in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE. Just yesterday, we launched -- we announced a partnership with Falcon Aviation. Sort of the next step of that, Falcon Aviation is the leading helicopter operator in the UAE. And what we announced with them was flagship hubs in both Abu Dhabi and Dubai that we plan on electrifying and launching as soon as next year. Abu Dhabi, Dubai is one of the most prominent commute corridors in the world. And so we see a big opportunity there to take what could be today, 1.5 hour, 2-hour drive and turn that into substantial time savings. So the UAE is really big. Moving on to India; India, we announced a partnership with InterGlobe. InterGlobe is the holding company of Indigo Airlines. It's one of the world leaders in aviation, and it's led by an incredible gentleman named Rahul Bhatia. Rahul founded InterGlobe many years ago and since then he's built it into an international juggernaut. It's in over 200 cities in India, a 63% market share. And so we're going to partner with him to launch Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and others. I personally expect and a lot of this is coming from sort of what I saw at Uber. I expect India will probably be the world's largest international eVTOL market. So we're really excited about being able to leapfrog the infrastructure that exists there and build out urban air mobility there. The rest of the world, I think there's a bunch of exciting places. You'll probably hear more from us on that front later. To answer your other question on certification, we are getting increasing confidence that there are multiple places in the world that are excited to certify sooner rather than later.

Okay. Speaking of the business model, and we can get [ into unit ] economics and infrastructure and other things here in a second. But everyone talked about the network and aircraft sales. A few companies are really prioritizing sales first and then network. I guess how do you see that evolving? Is it going to be several years of sales and then evolve the network or is it going to be some kind of hybrid where somebody else will own the assets but you'll operate? How does that look from the business model perspective?

So I can only speak to us. We're doing both in parallel. As you've seen, we have an indicative order book of $3.5 billion that we've announced. We have seen customers all over the world get really excited about what we're building. And the partnerships we formed I think are pretty unique. With United, not only have they offered -- not only have they agreed to a maximum order of $1.5 billion, they've already put down deposits against that order. I don't think we've seen that from any major airline in the world ever for an eVTOL order. Similarly, we've seen the leading operator in India, the leading operator in UAE do similar deals where they've said, look, we're really deeply committed to this. And so on the sales front, that's been really productive. I don't love the word sales because it's really more than that. It's not only purchasing the asset, but then it's also partnering with figuring how to deploy it. So with United, for example, we have teams working on things like customer integration, loyalty integration, security, airport infrastructure, right? Ultimately, the goal of being able to land secure site at the airport and go directly to the United Club or to your plane. We're working with them on things like pilot training. They just announced their Aviate Academy last year that we think is going to be a really powerful asset to help us think about how to recruit and train pilots. And so it's really much more than a sale. The sale is where it starts. But then ultimately, we think about how to go deploy together, which, to your second point, Bill, is something we're doing a lot of in parallel. We're thinking about infrastructure, we're thinking about community acceptance, thinking about what the business model will look like because we do plan to launch the UAM business in parallel. And that's a really important part of what Archer is doing as well.

Okay. So in parallel. You spoke about unit economics earlier and just think about this market here in New York, in particular, going from Newark here to downtown, I don't know, what, 15, 20 miles, you're probably actually with Uber Black, maybe double-digit dollars per mile these days. And certainly, even regular Uber is probably mid to high dollars per mile. So how do you see this starting off for your business? And how do you see that evolving? I mean, you had some sort of graphic, but do you get to the sort of closer to $3 sort of target that was in your presentation from years back? Like how does that evolve?

Well, we certainly still believe so. At least we have no indication otherwise. The goal ultimately is to that riding in an electric eVTOL on to the airport is as comparable to taking a taxi there. And the way that we think about that is from a CapEx perspective alone, we're able to, over time, drive the [indiscernible] of the aircraft and the labor cost of the aircraft down. These are carbon composite aircraft and Stellantis is one of the best of the world and taking essentially a series of parts and assembling them and driving that for lower manufacturing costs over time. So that's one piece of it. We think that we can work with folks like United to understand how do you recruit and train pilots at scale. And so we think we can get the pilots in a reasonable cost as well. We believe that maintenance on these aircraft will be far lower than traditional aircraft, primarily because they're all electric. And I think we've seen similar trends in the automotive industry. As you put all that together with some of the other associated costs, and we think that at the outset, the price per trip will be roughly $5 to $6 per passenger mile. But once you can really hone in utilization and load factor, you can get to roughly half that so about $3 to $4 per passenger mile mark.

You discussed in the presentation you're just now about partnerships. So what is the role -- more drill down Stellantis role, Stellantis -- role of United Airlines and how that's going to help with like maybe maintenance programs or pilots. If you can maybe get a layer deeper, but how does that compare to others that have announced partnerships?

Yes. Well, Stellantis for us has been an incredible partner. As I said earlier, we've got dozens of Stellantis engineers within Archer that are working to go build out our Covington, Georgia facility, which we believe is one of the largest in the world and one of the most capital efficient. And so that's been really important to us. I can't comment on exactly what's happening with others. But for us, what's been really exciting is the sort of global perspective they bring with all of their brands. I mean Stellantis is third largest automaker in the world by revenue. It's home to brands like [ Jeep ], RAM, Maserati, Peugeot and a number of others. So working closely with Carlos Tavares, with John Elkann the Chairman and a number of others has been really rewarding in that aspect. We also talked in our earnings call about the ultimate goal of potentially some form of a contract manufacturing relationship where ultimately, Stellantis can begin to absorb some of the CapEx that will be associated with manufacturing these aircraft, which we think from a cash flow perspective is also really interesting.

Mentioned with the DoD earlier. How do you see that evolving? I mean what -- how do you see the market opportunity there? And what is their interest in working with Archer?

Yes. Well, you've seen a number of players strike deals with the DoD. We believe ours is the largest in the industry. And that's really because the conversations we've been having, particularly with the Air Force, have been very, very interesting. Today, the Air Force will use larger, more expensive helicopters for just about all of their missions where they need to transport somebody by air. And sometimes those use cases can look like transporting 2 soldiers or 2 VIPs, 20 miles, and they may spend tens of thousands of dollars per flight hour doing it. And so we saw an opportunity to partner together and say, hey, there's probably a set of missions, whether it's transporting people or cargo where you don't need to take an expensive Huey from A to B, but instead you could take an Archer. And so we've sort of started to identify what those use cases can be. We've got a series of technical milestones that we've defined with the DoD and with AFWERX, and we're starting to build out on those. So you'll see more details on sort of how that's playing out this year. Ultimately, assuming success there, I see an opportunity not just to expand the partnership with the Air Force, but we see an opportunity to go take that same utility to other parts of the armed services, whether it's the Army or the Navy and beyond. And we also see an opportunity to potentially take that to our allies as well.

Want to stop and see if there's any questions before moving on. So why don't I talk about infrastructure, it feels like -- and you mentioned earlier that you talked about Atlantic and maybe you sense that you already have existing sites. But on the other hand, to really expand this market, there's going to have to be a lot more sites in infrastructure. So I guess first of all, how do you see the infrastructure evolving and you mentioned Atlantic, who's going to be taking on what roles between Archer and maybe somebody like an Atlantic? And how do you get [ buy-in ] from the public in terms of putting these in there. Certainly, they're less noise and less polluting. But I mean, presumably, there's always NIMBYism so how do you overcome that?

Yes, great question. So the way that we think about infrastructure is, at the outset, a lot of the work to be done will be done with airports and existing infrastructure. So on the airport side, at this point, our team is engaged with just about every major airport in the country, and most of them are quite excited as a way to not only build additional infrastructure but potentially revitalize infrastructure that formerly existed or does exist for helicopters, but it's become anemic. And so we're working with a lot of those whether upcoming terminal designs or existing terminal designs to think about how eVTOL can fit into the framework of airports that exist today. We're also looking really closely at a lot of the urban area heliports that exist. Even if you look at the 3 heliports in Manhattan or you look at places like Vertiports in Chicago or Dallas, this infrastructure today is very, very scarcely used compared to what the capacity is. And so we're looking at things like how do we ensure there's really good passenger experience for ingress and egress, how do we ensure that there's the right amount of electricity and the right charging infrastructure built in. And the chargers are another place where we're putting a lot of emphasis. So we announced the partnership with BETA recently, which is really exciting, where we sort of announced the CCS charging standard, not only is something that both BETA and Archer are using, but nearly all of the industry has signed on to. So this is something we work very closely with GAMA on the General Aviation Manufacturers Association to really ensure that we could ensure the interoperability of the different chargers or the different aircraft for the same unified charger. So we see that as a big success for the industry, and that allows us or BETA or other manufacturers to now go to heliports or potential infrastructure sites and say, hey, we want to go put an eVTOL charger here and that charger will be interoperable with other manufacturers [indiscernible] here as well.

So just spot out of time, but the last question. So aftermarket is obviously sort of a key component for aircraft OEMs. And now you have the Part 145 [ Enhance ]. So how do you see the service, maintenance operations roll out? And how should investors think about the aftermarket business, whether it'd be in terms of margins or otherwise?

Yes. Look, it's a good question. It's not somewhere we spent a ton of time yet. This is an example where United and InterGlobe, 2 of our key partners has spent a ton of time and there are a bunch of experts within both of those airlines that have spent a lot of time and gained a lot of expertise on how to do that well. So it's somewhere where we will probably work closely with United, with InterGlobe and others to flesh that out.

Okay. Well, with that, we're out of time. Nikhil, thanks for the presentation and supporting the investors conference. Appreciate it.

Thank you.